Image: Sir Isaac Newton, in a pensive mood.
To be perfectly honest, I’ve rarely had any issues with gravity. Most of my experiences have been overwhelmingly positive.
I can give a few examples.
When I lie down to go to sleep at night, gravity gently pulls me into contact with my mattress and keeps my blanket (and my own body) from floating up to the ceiling.
When I take a nap in the afternoon, same thing.
When I wake up in the morning and hit the snooze button on my alarm, gravity continues to keep me in contact with my mattress. Ten minutes later when the alarm rings again, and I reluctantly swing my legs off the mattress, I note that gravity has been keeping my slippers securely attached to the bedroom floor, exactly where I left them the previous evening.
Basically, gravity makes sleeping a pleasant experience, and for that, I am and will remain eternally grateful. Gravity has been, to me, a good friend.
Have some experiences been less than pleasant? Of course. Accidentally dropping my phone in the swimming pool, for example. Hail storms. Doing push-ups.
Like any friend, gravity sometimes lets me down. Hard.
A few years ago, I wrote a column about Sir Isaac Newton, and how he proposed the Law of Gravity in 1687 and published the Law in a book, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. As you might guess from the title, his book was written in Latin, but he also described the Law with a mathematical equation.
This formula doesn’t look like a “Law”, per se, but that’s what Sir Isaac called it, so I’m going to take his word for it. If I were a mathematician or a physicist, I would be able to explain what those different letters mean. But I’m just a columnist, and I assume they mean, basically, “What goes up must come down.” Or alternately, “Earth’s gravity keeps me attached to my mattress while I sleep.”
In my previous 2021 column — “Sir Isaac Newton Ruined My Life” — I did some whining about the disadvantages of gravity, and about Sir Isaac’s apparent arrogance in making it into a Law. For that, I can now apologize. I guess I was just in a bad mood that day. My advice is, don’t write humor columns when you’re in a bad mood. It’s easy to complain about stuff, but who wants to hear it?
Physicists, who also have moods, were mostly perfectly happy with Sir Isaac’s law, but during the 20th century, they noticed that very small invisible particles like electrons and neutrons were not obeying the law. This piqued their curiosity, and they set about trying to understand how these very tiny invisible particles could ignore the rules that everyone has found perfectly satisfactory since 1687.
During their research, they discovered that Sir Isaac had described the Law of Gravity but never told us how it works, exactly. We know how (and why) men are attracted to women, for example, and how (and why) cats are attracted to the butter dish if you leave it uncovered.
But how (and why) do my slippers remain fastened to the floor next to my bed? No one has ever been able to fully explain it, in terms of quantum physics. And the problem only got worse when the scientists noticed that ‘quantum’ particles were ignoring what seemed like a perfectly good Law.
Scientists started wondering if gravity itself was a ‘quantum’ effect.
Is gravity a ‘quantum’ particle? Or a ‘quantum’ wave?
Naturally, certain scientists have begun proposing experiments to find out.
When we consider that, in order to find just one quantum level particle — the Higgs boson — it took a team of 6,000 scientists 14 years and cost $7 billion, we might find it more sensible to just stick with Sir Isaac’s Law and let the quantum particles violate it, if they really want to.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all. You can read more stories on his Substack account.