Louis Joseph Rancourt
Louis Joseph Rancourt | |
|---|---|
| Residence | Sudbury, Ontario, Canada |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Alma mater | Université d'Ottawa |
| Known for | Experiments on the effect of light on gravitational attraction |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Physics |
Louis Joseph Rancourt is a Canadian science teacher and independent researcher based in Sudbury, Ontario. Over a career spanning some fifty years he taught physics at levels ranging from grades 7 to 12 through to university and college, including the University of Ottawa and Collège Boréal in Sudbury. He is best known for a series of experiments through which he reports that a beam of light can influence the force of gravity between masses. This work lies outside the mainstream of contemporary physics.
Biography
Rancourt earned a Bachelor of Arts from the Université d'Ottawa. He worked as a science and physics teacher for approximately fifty years, teaching all grades from 7 to 12 as well as at the university and college levels. He later taught at Collège Boréal in Sudbury, Ontario, within the School of Trades and Applied Technology, and describes himself as a retired physics professor.
Scientific contributions
Rancourt's research concerns the relationship between light and gravitation. He reports that in torsion-pendulum experiments a beam of light directed near suspended masses alters the gravitational attraction between them. In one described experiment, when a 1.5-watt red laser beam is passed at an angle of about 30 degrees between a fixed mass and a freely suspended mass on a torsion pendulum, he observed an increase in the attraction between the two masses; in another, a light beam passed close to a single suspended mass caused the mass to move toward the beam.
From these observations Rancourt proposed that light exerts a screening or shielding effect on gravity, and he interpreted his results as support for the view that gravity behaves as a pushing force rather than a purely attractive one. In later work he extended these experiments to reports of weight changes in objects placed under intense light and to attempts at optical levitation of small masses.
These conclusions are not accepted within mainstream physics, where gravity is described by general relativity and is not understood to be affected by light in the manner Rancourt describes. His experiments and interpretations have been presented primarily through independent and alternative-science venues rather than through the established physics literature.
Works
- Rancourt, Louis. "Effect of light on gravitational attraction." Physics Essays, Vol. 24, No. 4 (December 2011), pp. 557–561.
- Rancourt, Louis, and Philip J. Tattersall. "Further Experiments Demonstrating the Effect of Light on Gravitation." Applied Physics Research, Vol. 7, No. 4 (2015).
- Rancourt, Louis. "Simple experiment to demonstrate that light acts on gravity." (2021)
- Rancourt, Louis. "Weight changes at night." (2022)
- Rancourt, Louis. "Gravity explained logically, finally." (2023); French version: "La gravité expliquée logiquement, enfin!" (2023)
- Rancourt, Louis. "Measuring negative gravity." (2024)