Friday, January 27, 2006


MODERN GRAVITY


In case you haven't heard, there's a whole new theory of gravity, which I have to tell you is a great relief to me because it dispenses with dark matter, that amorphous stuff that gets under your eyes and slowly replaces money, among other things the scientists never mention. Theoretically, it puts the big pull on everything and has certainly been a drag on me now and then. You know those kinds of days - today is a good example - when you feel a lot heavier than usual, slower, less quick of mind and so forth, well until the scientists just now got their gravity act together, all that drag was due to dark matter (in my case compounded by toddling-twin granddaughters). Not any more. Things will be lighter now.

Actually, scientists were never really happy with dark matter anyway, they didn't understand it very well and it wouldn't fit their theories (isn't that just like dark matter?), so they’ve made up some new theories to explain what they're seeing far out there in the galaxy (when there's so much more gravity to see right here!).

One of the new theories holds that there are two types of gravity, which I definitely go along with, from personal experience. This theory holds that above a certain acceleration, called a0, objects move according to the conventional form of gravity, whose effects weaken as two bodies move further apart in proportion to the square of distance, as after a divorce for example. But below a0, which is where I am on days like today, objects like myself are controlled by another type of gravity that fades more slowly, decreasing linearly with distance, though my a0 - which I call negative a0 - increases with distance, making each step heavier, each task more difficult than the previous one. The scientists will have to deal with negative a0 at some point, when one of them has twin granddaughters.

Another type of gravity currently competing for reality has the nickname STVG. The nice thing about STVG is that it allows for a hypothetical particle called a graviton, which seems in the actual world to concentrate around bathroom scales, so now that it has a name we can maybe expect a graviton remover somewhere down the line and get some realistic numbers going. Science has many benefits. I can feel the new gravity already.

3 comments:

Mary Lou said...

OOPS!! Put on a few lbs over the holidays did ya?

Anonymous said...

Because my mind does not seem to be affected by any kind of gravity, and wanders such great distances, I have been grateful to gravity that at least my feet are anchored to something, else I might not be able to find my way back home. After reading about graviton, I now understand why the rest of my body is following my feet.

Robert Brady said...

Actually, thanks to the new gravity I've lost about 5 pounds. Of course that could be from chasing grandchildren..