In a few short hours, parts of the Earth will experience a rare and wonderful sight: a full solar eclipse. The moon will squeeze between us and the sun so that Spain, in particular, will, for a few minutes, fall into almost total darkness. What won’t happen is that humans and other stationary objects not bolted to the ground will float up into the air. Gravity won’t disappear.
But that’s not the full story.
Listen, I ended up diving down a rabbit hole this morning, a journey triggered by one Weather Channel post on Threads:
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“You all know we’re not actually going to lose gravity for 7 seconds today right? It’s important to me that you know that.”
Turns out that there is a wild conspiracy theory going around that the eclipse will somehow trigger a gravity disruption, basically canceling it for 7 seconds.
The rumor was apparently set off, in part, by a TikTok claiming NASA had something called “Project Anchor” addressing the phenomenon.
NASA quickly quashed the rumor, telling Snopes:
“The Earth will not lose gravity on Aug. 12, 2026. Earth’s gravity, or total gravitational force, is determined by its mass. The only way for the Earth to lose gravity would be for the Earth system, the combined mass of its core, mantle, crust, ocean, terrestrial water, and atmosphere, to lose mass. A total solar eclipse has no unusual impact on Earth’s gravity. The gravitational attraction of the Sun and Moon on the Earth, which doesn’t impact Earth’s total gravity, but does impact tidal forces, is well understood and is predictable decades in advance.”
So………. What time are we supposed to lose gravity for 7 secs @NASA ?August 12, 2026
Let’s talk about the pendulum anomoly
So that settles it, and I think we can all rest easy that our feet will be firmly planted on the ground today, tomorrow, and beyond.
On the other hand, the concept of a solar eclipse having some nominal effects on gravity or the movement of objects affected by gravity is not totally out of the question, and the existence of such anomalies may explain why some people have extrapolated a wildly exaggerated solar eclipse gravitational impact.
There have been various reports over the decades of eclipses impacting, for instance, the swing of pendulums (according to New Scientist, the anomaly was first spotted in 1954). In fact, there have been some scholarly studies going back at least 25 years on the phenomenon.
In 1999, Chris P. Duif, then a physicist with the Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, produced a scholarly paper examining, among other things, why certain pendulums reportedly altered their swings during a pair of solar eclipses.
Duif’s paper notes that there were “weak conventional explanations” but added that the anomalies could still be “assigned to mundane causes such as temperature changes. “
In the end, though, Duif’s research did not confirm the impact; equally, he seemed unable to rule it out. As he told New Scientist in 2009, “I’m not really convinced the anomaly exists, but it would be revolutionary if it turned out to be true.”
In the paper, Duif appeared to hope for more study, writing, “If an anomalous eclipse effect does exist, a clever combination of experiments and input from theoretical models will be necessary to reveal its existence.” One has to wonder if AI could assist in this pursuit. After all, it is quite good at finding meaning in the vast amounts of data typically found in such models.
The point is that there’s this persistent idea that solar eclipses can affect gravity and that, it seems, has perpetuated and ballooned, with the help of conspiracy theorists, into this wild idea of a total gravitational pause. But, as The Weather Channel and NASA will quickly remind you, that’s simply not the case.
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lance.ulanoff@futurenet.com (Lance Ulanoff)
