The Space Between

I'll get to writing about two pieces of writing in just a moment. First a physics lesson: The Space Between.

The last time I posted I had decided that inertia was physics' sole poetic saving grace. I've changed my mind. Physics is very poetical - perhaps purely so. (Speak what you think today in words as hard as cannonballs, tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks, in hard words again, athough it contradict everything you said today. To be great is to be misunderstood. - R.W.E.)

Physics takes things we think of as practical and predictable (and things we rarely think of at all) and completely warps all perception of reality, ala "There is no spoon." The book doesn't just sit on the table, the table pushes up on the book. Your weight decreases the further you move from the earth's center of gravity, so the higher you get the easier it is to just float away. And the gravity between two people increases the closer they are to eachother. This last postulate I will demonstrate below. (Ever the disgustingly hopeless romantic: some people think in terms of the bottom line, I think in terms of "When Harry Met Sally.")

The gravity between two objects (people) with masses separated by some distance can be measured as:

Force = [(6.673*10^-11) * (mass1) * (mass2)]/Distance^2

So for two people, let's say masses 60 and 75 kilos respecitvely, who are standing 0.5 meters apart, the gravitational force between them is:

Force = [(6.673*10^-11) * (60kg) * (75kg)]/(0.5m)^2 = 1.2 micro Newtons (for comparison the weight of a mosquito is approximately 2 micro Newtons.)

Small, you say? Yes. But insignificant? Ho no! (Never mind what the physics textbook has to say) Watch what happens as we decrease the distance between the two people say to 1/10 of a centimeter: the gravitational force between them becomes: 0.3 Newtons

As two people become infinitely closer to each other the gravitational force between them increases exponentially . . . approaching forces of 3*10^78 Newtons (that's the biggest number my calculator can spit out.)

So there's the scientific explanation for why its hard to leave someone you're close to. It also partly explains my clumsy knack of always running into people. And it may offer scientific (if not romantic) rationale for giving in to our gluttonous desires: the more we weigh the more people will be gravitationally attracted to us

I guess that's college, huh? Tossing out everything we ever thought we knew about the world and rebuilding it on a new set of laws.

Everthing has a law, and each college or major gets a different set of them. For example, the biology major type gets: 1) Form equals Function, 2) Evolutuion through Natural Selection, and 3) The Entropy of the Universe increases. (Four years and $100,000 for that?)

Maybe physics isn't as irrelevant as I'd like to think it is?

(I wrote this last Tuesday; I've since dropped physics and decided to add an intro to cognitive studies class. "The mind is a place of its own" . . .)