Death Valley Experiment

The Forces of Nature by Kelland Terry, Ph.D.
My wife and I drove to Death Valley on our way to Southern Utah. I thought it was a great trip, especially in Death Valley because she consented to do the driving while I examined the colorful, bare hillsides. Perhaps you have to grow up in the desert to appreciate the layering and flow of colored rock originally deposited along our ocean shores millions of years ago, then thrust up by shifting plates.
Our big dog, Rocko, sat in the back of our SUV and enjoyed the drive because there had been a storm the day before, and the weather was actually cool even in Death Valley. In fact it was about the same temperature wherever I tested ball curvature.
I had with us a robot called Robo-Pong that ejects table tennis balls so that people can practice playing Ping-Pong. This little machine imparts either clockwise or counterclockwise spin when it ejects the ball into space depending how you set it. This means you can cause the ball to curve either left or right. I had already used it to measure the curvature of table tennis balls in Carson City, which is approximately 4750 feet above sea level.
Eventually, I also measured how much the balls curved inside our motel room in Death Valley (20 feet above sea level), in Rockville (3700 feet above sea level), and in a friend’s cabin in the mountains of Southern Utah at 8400 feet above sea level.
Now for the results of this little study: I found that balls curve more than expected at higher altitudes. Air concentration dropped faster than curvature. It appeared the ball would curve even in a vacuum. Conclusions: The results suggest that in addition to air molecules, some other component of the space around us aids in the deflection of spinning Ping-Pong balls. Was this something gravitons, the invisible strings that pull two objects together? The results of this study encouraged me to continue on. What I needed was a better way of testing this hypothesis. What I needed was a large vacuum chamber to determine whether a spinning table tennis ball will curve in a vacuum. The results took several months of hard work and the aid of my friend, Ben McCulley. Till then, be safe and in good health. Kelland—www.vestheory.com