Comment on "Measurements of Newton's gravitational constant and the length of day"

Abstract

There have been recent claims (Anderson et al., EPL, 110, 10002) of a 5.9 year periodicity in measurements of Newton's gravitational constant, $G$, which show a very strong correlation with observed periodic variations in the length of the day. I have used Bayesian model comparison to test this claim compared to other hypotheses that could explain the variation in the $G$ measurements. I have used the data from the initial claim, and from an updated set of compiled $G$ measurements that more accurately reflect the experimental dates, and find that a model containing an additional unknown Gaussian noise component is hugely favoured, by factors of $\gtrsim e^{30}$, over two models allowing for a sinusoidal component.

To be published in EPL. This is an abridged version of the original document to conform the the journal's "Comment" page limit, therefore further figures, tables and explanation of the analysis can be found in v1 arXiv:1505.06725v1. This also contains a response to the comment arXiv:1508.00532. The analysis code and figures can be found at https://github.com/mattpitkin/periodicG

References in corpus (3)

• Precision Measurement of the Newtonian Gravitational Constant Using Cold Atoms
• Measurements of Newton's gravitational constant and the length of day
• Recent measurements of the gravitational constant as a function of time

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• Search for variability in Newton's constant using local gravitational acceleration measurements