Gravity Works

The invocation "gravity works" is a shorthand I came up with years ago.

It means: A thing that is, just is. You can't explain it away. You can't argue that it violates some theory. You can't condemn it as heresy and disappear it.

Gravity doesn't care what you think of it. It doesn't care whether you think of it. It doesn't care if you disagree with it. It doesn't care whether you know about it. Ignorance and opinion hold no sway. It is impartial and unforgiving.

It is also shorthand for "what you think doesn't change what is."

It is shorter than invoking the laws of thermodynamics, or mass-energy conservation, and it scans better.

-- GarryHamilton

Pithy Quotes (with apologies to Voltaire)

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." -- PhilDick (see also BeliefsCreateReality)

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." -- RichardFeynman

"Gravity. Cheap and Dependable." -- WilliamEdwardsDeming

"How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg." --AbrahamLincoln (attributed)

"Gravity is a harsh mistress." -- TheTick

"I was faced by the task of inventing America. The obtaining of such local ingredients as would allow me to inject a modicum of average 'reality' (one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes) into the brew of individual fancy." -- VladimirNabokov "On A Book Entitled Lolita"

It's also used in the 1992 animated film FernGully? by RobinWilliamsTheActor's character, Batty, an ex-lab bat that's escaped and is not entirely normal (see "litotes"). Batty lands on a tree branch and then slowly falls off backwards. As he goes he is heard to say "Gravity works!"

Actually, it's from Robin Williams's stage act. IIRC, he's describing the morning after a bender, when you get out of bed, stand up, and then remember "Oh, no. Gravity works!" and fall to the floor.

Sounds like it's a good line from his stage act that got inserted into the film.

Also used, IIRC, in DirkGentlysHolisticDetectiveAgency.

I've also seen this as "Gravity always wins" in engineering circles - reality is inevitable.

I kind of like the observation, "There's no such thing as Gravity - The earth sucks."

For that to work, the earth would have to suck more than space, which is impossible. Space is a vacuum, and vacuums really suck.

In a sense earth does "suck" if you think of what happens in a straw, pressure on h2o molecules exert excess force on the liquid compared to the semi vacuum inside resulting in the liquid being pushed up. In quantum theories of fields including gravitational, gauge particles mediate force - repulsive forces can be thought of as two particles being pushed apart by them like two skaters throwing a ball between them. Attractive forces like gravity are analogous to the skaters exchanging a boomerang and being pushed together. Earth emits gravitons which in a sense sucks objects in it's vicinity.

... which is impossible.

Ah, but you're missing the first (?) law of engineering, and a major point of this page:

If I see it happen, it's not impossible.

I see small hobby rockets shoot up, full of hope, but inevitably are sucked back to the ground, their hopes (and the rockets themselves) dashed to pieces. By observation, Earth does suck more than space.

(EditHint: make this funnier).

I think "Gravity always wins" is a slightly more scientific-sounding version of the karmic "Que Sera, Sera" (what will be, will be - regardless of whether you like it, believe it, or not ... regardless being the key word here). No amount of faking it, or paying someone off, is going to help.

Kevin Tiller

Gravity is relative. It can be viewed as acceleration in warped space in the space-time continuum. There is no detectable difference between gravity and acceleration.