I know a place where things seem to roll uphill. How does it work?

Answer 1

assuming the object is not self powered or already in motion from somebody's pushing or wind power - then it is an optical illussion

Answer 2

Very odd. A very powerful magnetic field? That, or you need to check your experimental procedure. First, get a compass and see if it does anything odd in the immediate area.

Acquire a very long straight stick and hang two plum bobs from it spaced far apart. Curvature of local spacetime would cause the different plumbobs to precieve "down" as slightly different because they are in slightly different locations. Or at least that's the simplest experiment I can devise. A system with laser leveling devices would work better. I cannot devise a rational scenario that would cause local curvature variations like this without invoking a black hole or something, so I doubt you will find anything.

Beware that it is easy to trick the brain's sense of down with an oddly tilted area. I once saw a documentary about a tourist trap out west where they built a barn to take maximum effect of this illusion. If neither the compass or the plum-bobs do anything odd, the location you have found can only be assumed to be such an optical illusion.

Answer 3

I wish I could draw you a diagram. It works like this: the object rolling 'uphill' is not perfectly round; it is tapered toward the ends. This means that it is thicker in the middle.

The hill it is rolling 'up' has a wedge-shaped trench dug into the side of it. The narrow end of the wedge points downhill (real downhill.) The wide end points uphill.

The roller is placed so that the center (the thickest part) is at the narrowest part of the trench (the downhill end.) When the roller is released, its CENTER OF GRAVITY and CENTER OF MASS want to move toward the center of the earth. The roller moves so that they do move toward the center of the earth, being attracted by gravity, but due to the fact that the ends of the roller are tapered, it looks like it is moving uphill.

If you look at it very carefully from the end (the axis of rotation) you will see that the axis gets closer to the surface of the ground (the edges of the trench.)

I hope this is clear enough for you to be able to picture it in your mind.

19 NOV 06, 0013 hrs, GMT.

Answer 4

I know a place where heat flows from a cold reservoir to a hot one, and another place where money grows on trees.
see the link.

Answer 5

It's an otical illusion. Is it caused by rock strata?