Yesterday we challenged the veracity of all blanket statements.
Today, we’re going to dismiss gravity.
An article in the New York Times describes the fulminations of a physicist named Erik Verlinde, who has denounced gravity and wants to remove it from its exalted position as one of the four fundamental forces governing all objects, giving it a reduced role as a mere sidekick to the laws of thermodynamics.
Holy demotion, Batman!
First Pluto was diminished from planet status to the lesser realm of large speeding chunks. Now gravity is at risk of being dropped from the four-headed pantheon of fundamentals, leaving only the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force and electromagnetism as the invisible sheriffs in our universal town.
The article quotes Dr. Verlinde in a talk given “to a bunch of physicists,” in which he likens “the unfolding story of gravity” to the tale about the emperor’s new clothes.
“We’ve known for a long time gravity doesn’t exist,” Dr. Verlinde said, “It’s time to yell it.”
Verlinde’s comments about gravity are hailed as genius by people who admit they don’t understand what he’s saying. This reminds me of the way art mavens enthuse over the latest unexplainable painting because the work is ground breaking and the artist is brilliant, even though they have no idea what any of it is about.
That’s me. I’m completely with Dr. Verlinde on this gravity thing, even though he baffles me. Why would I get on board with such a wild idea? I can only describe it in a short, sing-songy, completely weightless poem.
What goes up must come down.
So we thought for all.
But if we want to fly around,
Gravity must fall.Beat it up and take its lunch
Kick sand in its face.
Drop it with a sucker punch.
And leave it in disgrace.Gravity, your song is sung.
You’re finished as a force.
And once you have dropped down a rung
We’ll conquer you, of course.
George Jetson, here we come!
Once gravity is thoroughly humiliated, how might things change?
Trail Baboon 
well, i am glad gravity has been debunked. to celebrate i think i’ll climb up to the pole barn roof. if i slide off, no worry! no broken hip – just a gentle float around the meadow? thanks for clearing that up, Dale!
Good morning, All.
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shouldn’t have to climb. just bounce on up there.
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Good Morning as We Ponder the Fundemental Laws:
I don’t know what to say about the reduced status of gravity. My understanding of topics in the area of physics is very low. So now gravity takes the back seat to 3 other forces that are more fundemental? I guess I am lacking a fundemental understanding of the forces that govern everything. That is no suprise to me.
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everything you say is true again today jim
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Tim, now that it is clear that I lack a fundemental understanding of the governing forces, I’m not sure I really know what is true.
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i beleive it was jailbird by kurt vonnegut where random gravity plays a role, there were low gravity days and high gravity days. on the low gravity days you would get out of bed bouncing like the guys on the moon and on high gravity days there was a huge effort required to get out of bed and most people pulled themselves along the floor like sled dogs pulling a full load. the changing of the gravity made a big difference in how we went through our day. i hope your guy doesn’t say we have that to look forward to that.
i like getting up and knowing
my feet will end op on the floor
but now with this ruling on gravity
i’m just not so sure any more
will i wake and step up to the ceiling
and have to pull down to get sox
from the dresser drawer nailed to the bed stand
next to my bed thats been weighted with rocks?
we take gravity all too for granted
its a friend we can count on thats true
a friend who always consistent
and that helps us do what we do
if i have to start factoring weightlessness in now
its going to get tricky for me
how to tie down a load in the car
and how to put the tea bag in my tea.
please tell me its all a mistake please
i don’t want this change in my life
please leave me alone with my belly hanging down
with my dogs and my kids and my wife
we all want to go for walks daily
have all our feet on the floor
if we can’t count on that i’m not sure i can stay
no i just cant cant go on any more
dr verlinde made me happy
that things are the way that they were
and that gravity’s not like the gulf coast
with oil balls stuck in my fur
i can get up and put my feet firmly
on the floor and step left after right
and it won’t require thought or discussion
to keep from going off into flight
i like life the way that it is thanks
not perfect but pretty darn good
while there are things that i’d change if i could i admit
i’d leave gravity alone if i could
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how do you just toss these off, Tim? great. thanks!
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Beautifully written, Tim.
But what would you say? Is the repeal of gravity the scariest thing you can imagine? Every now and then I remember Einstein’s theory that if space starts contracting, time will begin going backwards. We would then, like Benjamin Button, die and then go into a reverse aging process until we would be squawling infants pooping our diapers just before disappearing. I find that theory uncomfortable, although there is a famous George Carlin quote that makes it sound fun. I probably shouldn’t quote it here but you can easily Google to it.
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Clever, tim. Fred Astaire would apporve.
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Fabulous (and it got me wondering what my hound would look like in Zero G, confused basset face, floppy ears for steering, and oy, the drool – what would happen to that?…)
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Anna, you are reminding me of one of my favorite sci-fi things-the images of aliens on planets of differing gravity. I think in time, your basset would become a greyhound.
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Once Barney (my hound) got over having long legs, I bet he’d like the view. 🙂
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Rise and Storm Babooners:
Wow. Another fundamental of life goes down. Seems to be that time of life–I’ve had a few other cornerstones wander off lately. And now gravity! Physics is generally not my thing, so it will take a while to think about the consequences of bouncing around without a tether to Earth. Perhaps travel will become less expensive.
Maybe this one will come to me in a limerick.
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My first thought was to celebrate. Gravity’s dead? I could throw out the bathroom scale and start having ice cream three times a day like I’ve always wanted to to do. But that, I fear, wouldn’t work. It isn’t really gravity that is unhealthy for us if we over-eat, is it?
I read this article in the New York Times and was puzzled. I would have been more impressed if Dr. Verlinde had leaped from an airplane without a parachute and delivered this talk on his way down. We need to be careful with our thinking here. Pluto’s demotion didn’t make it go away; it just assigned Pluto to a less impressive category. Demoting gravity won’t make us all light to fly; it just alters our view of gravity as a force (in ways even dreamy airhead physicists don’t understand).
Nope. That’s not for me. I will continue to say “sir” when I talk to gravity, and I won’t make fun of his or her clothes. I’ll treat gravity with utmost respect, for I’m pretty sure that gravity will get the last laugh on us all.
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Steve, I think you are right. Gravity is still with us. It just is no longer one of the most fundemental forces, according to Dr. Verlinde. Well, what does that mean? What is the truth about gravity? How did it fall from being one of the most fundemental forces?
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Very exciting-I can go off my diet. Without gravity weight is an irrelevant measure. Heath Bar Blizzard here I come!
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Yeah, I must weigh way less than I thought!
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Gravity still fully applies in Mankato or I would not have had two flats in two days.
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Man, that’s not just gravity — that’s like — bad karma, my friend. I hope this week goes much better for you.
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Off topic , from yesterday’s latest posts… Tim, that fondu sounds fantistic… could you type it up recipe style for the Kitchen Congress?
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you mean you have to do it in a style?
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I hope not, I don’t cook that way.
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Maybe not! See if Dale puts it in as written.
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Good one Mike!
Playing a song about “the gravity of the situation.”
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OK, I read as much as I could of the article… Gravity is an illusion in the same way that time is an illusion, and space. So we won’t really get to understand this till we’re dead, is how I see it.
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sounds like you will see it a little better a little later
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Good gravy! Without gravity as a major force, how can we discuss the gravity of a situation? And what of gravitas – is that gone, too? Can I no longer blame the gravitational pull of chocolate ice cream for my consumption of it?…oh dear oh dear oh dear…
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Well my friends, I have to say I am completely unfussed on this one. I am reminded of the comment Galileo is supposed to have muttered after having recanted his statement that the Earth moved. “It moves nonetheless”. As both Steve and Jim have pointed out, our feet were on the ground both before and after gravity was discovered and now discredited.
Nice of the physicists to throw out the one fundamental force we can all understand and leave us mostly with the ones that we have to take their word for it. It’s only a matter of time before electromagnetism bites the dust.
In case you are wondering about the other forces, it is all very neatly laid out here: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/forces/funfor.html
see, it’s just that simple.
As the mother of a future physicist and niece of a semi-retired one, I can tell you that we should not take them too seriously. It is just their way of having fun, like perfecting a limerick, fine-tuning the seasoning of a recipe, or, in my case, unsnarling a mistake in some lace-knitting.
I’m in heavy philosophical mood today (excess mental gravity), so I will stop now.
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Okay, so now gravity, time, and space are illusions. I grew up in the 50s when we were taught to believe in simple truths and when gravity, time, and space were never considered to be illusions. I don’t want to go back to the simple ways of the 50s, but how do I move forward into a world where these things that seemed to be fundemental to every thing are now illusions. Well at least I hope I have managed to move away from some of the simple approaches of the 50s.
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I had a wonderful professor in graduate school who gave me the concept of the “operable illusion”. The things you need to just accept and believe in to get through your day. The example he used was, “you have no proof that your apartment is not at this moment on fire. You have to assume that it is not, or you would not be able to sit here listening to a lecture.” Of course, I spent the rest of the lecture wondering if my cat got out ok, but that is me.
He further explained that the day might come when your illusion proved to be false, at which point you fell into “chaos” and had no illusions left. Human beings cannot live for a prolonged period of time in chaos, so we slowly start building a new “operable illusion” so we can be functional.
Whether you believe in a geocentric, heliocentric or black-hole-o-centric universe, you still see the sun come up in the east and set in the west, the laundry still needs to be done, and eating too much fondue is probably not a good long-term strategy.
I do think this is why fundamentalism of all varieties is gaining in popularity right now. We live in uncertain times, it’s hard to let go of the blankie (especially if the blankie confers automatic superiority to the holder).
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E.M. Forster, one of my favorite smart guys, said:
“The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society were eternal. Both assumptions are false; both of them must be accepted as true if we are to go on eating and working and loving and are to keep a few breathing holes open for the human spirit.”
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Let’s tie this back to the airplane issue of the other day. Now there’s no challenge for them to work on and we won’t have to worry about the flying fields and methane plants. But I have questions; would the rain still fall? What would tree’s look like? How would houseflies behave? What if our knee’s bent the other direction? What would chairs look like then?
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i like your brain ben
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Greetings! Well, the bigger they are the harder they fall (is that a blanket statement?) — pun intended. I’m with Barbara in Robbinsdale, it’s all an illusion. A darn good one at that because it all seems so solid and real. While time and space are constructs of the mind, gravity is pretty all encompassing and undeniable, so it’s hard to see that one demoted to a secondary level.
But if we just believe and keep gravity in our minds and hearts it will live on forever — like Tinkerbell. So if you believe in gravity with all your heart; please, please … clap. Right now, just clap your hands. That’s right, keep going. Faster now! Yeah, now we’ve got it! CLAP-CLAP-CLAP-CLAP-CLAP-CLAP! See, now doesn’t that feel better. All is back to normal and Dr. What’s-His-Face is just a poopy head.
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On the other hand, it is theoretically possible (although highly improbable_ that all your molecules could line up just right and fit between the spaces between the molecules of a wall, adn you could walk right through. The drawback is, you could also line up just right and fall through the floor (or float through the ceiling, depending on your belief system).
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..but with more work in the molecular realm, we could finally get around to Beaming, right? I want beaming.
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Today what I miss out of the past–gas stations with air at them, and free at that. Walked my bike by five gas stations , only the last one, a throwback with a mehcanic, had air, gave it to me reluctantly. But steve, it had a bell that rang when each car pulled in.
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thats wrong…except the bell
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Goodmorning! I don’t think that physicist is treating gravity with the weight it deserves. I think this is a fairytale from a physicsit’s point of view, as madislandgirl suggests. Speaking of fairytales, author George MacDonald (1824-1905) is considerd by many to be the father of fantasy: “Known particularly for his poignant fairy tales and fantasy novels, George MacDonald inspired many authors, such as W. H. Auden, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, E. Nesbit and Madeleine L’Engle.” Wikipedia. MacDonald wrote a slim-volume fairytale called “The Light Princess” which deals with the ups and downs – mostly ups- of a princess who was born free of the pull of gravity. It is de-light-ful; uplifting, one might say. Might have to try to find it among the books at home; I’m sure it is floating around somehwere.
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book club book club book club
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uplifting de light ful floating around… i get it
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The gravitry version of Flatland, whic is about life in a two-dimensional world.
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Once gravity is thoroughly humiliated, how might things change? Flying cars and jetpacks at last!
Why exactly do we need to ‘yell’ at gravity. I yell at gravity and/or its byproducts every time I slip and fall or drop something on my foot. I think we already yell at gravity more than sufficiently. Are we expecting that gravity will yell back at us if we demean it enough? Is this guy from Minnesota? How passive-aggressive can you get? What next? Are we just going to get mad at thermodynamics and just resent it bitterly?
And don’t even get me started on those art crtiquers that sound so haughty, saying, “Oh…OH yes…it’s so…so…visceral…so human…so existentialist…oh yes…” These people drive me bananas. You walk up to them and say, “So, what does this art mean? What is it actually saying?” And they roll their eyes and look at you as if you were a plebian simpleton. It seems, ~seems,~ as if ‘art’ today is required to be something that communicates nothing and is indefinable. It seems that if someone can actually decipher what an artist is trying to communicate, then it’s no longer ‘art,’ it’s something else. What that ‘else’ is, no one really says. And when did it become unacceptable to have humor in ‘art.’ I tend to shoot photos that have some tongue-in-cheek humor to them. And, geez, nothing gets the ‘art conoisseurs’ around here to dismiss your work faster than any kind of levity. I don’t know…maybe it’s because I don’t have an MFA (thank you, U of M for being so snotty about your MFA program that you won’t offer any kind of continuing ed or night classes for adult students). Maybe I have no idea what I’m talking about. Maybe my photo work really is lousy. Is it all just me?
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TGiTH – we’re not snooty at MCAD (well at least most of us aren’t). I’m all about looking for humor and absurdity in art. Art Is For Everyone, even for those of us who can’t draw our way out of a Pictionary game. (There’s my pitch for my workplace which is usually pretty cool.)
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MCAD is cool. Do you guys offer an MFA in photography? I know several of the comic prof’s. Some of them for several years. When I was looking at MFA’s, I didn’t come across MCAD. Hm….may have to look into that.
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I don’t think it is the MFA so much as the pretention of the community.
I’ve got an MFA, although I still think I got in spite of, not because of, liking the part about the duckie in any given play-being totally incapbale of spouting on about the Hegelian implications of the plot line. I was a pre-med amongst the cognizenti, a clueless wonder-but boy could I sew!
I think the physicists are ditching gravity because it really gets in the way of forming a unified theory of everything (the Holy Grail of Physics, as I understand it). I’m not sure I want the universe that tidied up. Besides, I think disproving the existence of gravity to get there is cheating. Like proving that a test is invalid because you failed it.
People yell at gravity for the same reason they yell at their computer, and it does about as much good.
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Or bike inner tubes.
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Or cats.
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I can see that and I do agree that it is predominantly the community. Last time I ran into that attitude was at a gallery showing at IFP in St. Paul. There were a bunch of folks there from Mpls. Photo Ctr. that were just too stylish and too ‘artspeaky’ for me to handle for more than 45 min. Of course, I heard some of that ‘artspeak’ come out of my fellow artists too. Hard to tell if who was the chicken and who was the egg. After about an hour, I just left.
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Okay, I understand the frustration understanding some of the art produced today. Still, I think at least some of this art that looks perplexing and is hard to understand might be very good art. If you are trying to produce art, you want to produce something that is new and more advanced. New advanced forms of art are often not at first accepted or widely understood, but with time may be recognized as great art or at least art that is very good. I know this is true for jazz because “new wave” jazz artists, like Ornette Coleman, were considered to be bad musicans by many when their music was first heard, but Ornette and others like him are now recognized as great artists. However, this doesn’t mean that there is any reason for any one to turn their back on art work that is more easily understood.
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I think the thing that frustrates me is not so much the new stuff that seems pointless to me, it is the highbrow, “I am too sophistocated to even consider Renoir to be anything worth looking at and if you like it, well, I guess we know all about your taste” that makes me just tired.
That, and the poor, misunderstood artist who has created something completely self-indulgent (nothing wrong with that), but then feels that it is everyone else’s fault that he/she cannot make the rent.
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Selling art is more smoke and mirrors than art. What’s the song “Art Isn’t Easy” from Sunday in the Park with George. Never seen the musical but love the painting, spent hours in front of it. For years right next to it at the Chi Art Inst. was Picasso’s Blue Guitarist, maybe still is, a wonderful confluence of art. All of the French impressionism and the Blue Guitarist, and the glass paperweights, and the old altar pieces–ah the Chi Art Inst. My wife has spent hours in front of the Monet’s haystacks. I do not know how to judge art, but I know there is a universe of difference between them and me.
Hey want to discover a poorly know world of art–try Russian Impressions. I know I keep saying that.
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was it all from the khrushchev period from after stalin or is it broader than that?
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The link to the MFA here (thanks TGITH and Catherine!) might be the key to understanding it all. MFA stands for “Master of Fashionable Artspeak,” which means you get the MFA when you have acquired a certain vocabulary for describing visual art and a certain hubris that allows you to pretend you know what you are talking about. If you don’t have a MFA your Campbell’s soup can is just a soup can; with a MFA you can put that soup can on a wall and declare it to be art, and it will be art because you said so and the opinions of all the rabble who lack an MFA don’t count nohow.
So it isn’t the world itself that changes but our way of talking about it. And here again, the link to the world of fashion is instructive. There are people who can, with a straight face, tell you, “Puce is the new black.” Unhappily, their saying it makes it so. Dr. Verlinde tells us that gravity is dead, so up is the new down, and who are we to dispute him? So gravity is dead. Gravity is probably playing poker in some celestial basement room with God, the Streetcar, Liberalism and History (all of which have been pronounced dead years ago by cultural mavens). And maybe that makes us ask, “So, what is NOT dead then?” And the answer is really depressing: “Lite beer, greed, corporate takeovers and the Tea Party.” Given the choice, I’ll gently ask the Streetcar if he could move over a bit and let me join THAT game. “Deal me in, boys, and I hope to God that Jacks and the Joker are not wild in this game.”
Abe Lincoln famously asked “if you count a sheep’s tail as a leg, how many legs does a sheep have?” Alas, in our brave new world, the right answer is “five.”
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not to worry, Steve. Death is but an illusion-just because something has been declared dead does not make it so. Stick around, soon it will be “retro”
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I have a master in literature. I know how to talk about the aspects and components of literature, and can teach the same. I love having students talk about how it impacted them, how it made them think, see or feel differently about what. I think I have pretty good analysis skills, but I have little idea how to discuss an evaluation of literature or if my judgments are sound. “Do you like it?’ is a yes or no question and it pretty much ends there. I never asked it and students seldom raised the issue in my classroom discussions, which were true discussions. (Few teachers know how to lead a disucssion.) I do bad closet art, closet because that is where it ends up. I often wonder, why not just paint or draw and then destoy it rather than leave it for my children to dispose of when I am dead. I have avoided the artspeak aspects of both. I have never taken an art lesson. I wonder how anyone teaches anyone else how to paint without making them images of themselves or someone else. I still think art is the disguising of art. I have several judgments there I will not share, about a few famous actors.
Summary: The joy of the arts is all this mystery, which is seldom celebrated; the frustration of art is what the culture and academics like me will sometimes do to art. Critics: those who could do; those who couldn’t judge those who can or at least try.”
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Nice, steve.
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excellent analysis steve. i have a buddy who is an art guru who does talk the talk and i love listening to him. but give me a stack of chips and let me into that card game. it sounds like a good one.
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A quikry piece of carftoon trivia for you: there are only 24 episodes of the riginal Jetsons. Maybe Hanna and Barbera floated off into etherspace.
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I had no idea there were only 24 episodes.
But most of them started like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yjy-fnsmWR4
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Thanks, Dale. I do pulpit supply in a church west of here that has furniture in the front, baptismal font etc., that looks like the furniture in the Jetsons.
My two favorite old cartoons, Jetsons and Rocky/Bullwinkle. H-B surely made more profit from the Jetsons than about any other cartoon series.
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And long before MTV, that show also gave us
(I hope we don’t regret you teaching us how to do this, Dale).
Clyde, I always thought the Jetsons were Lutheran, thanks for confirming that.
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I think of the Jetsons as Calvinists. Lots of fatalism in there with the boss, what was his name? George is sort of predestined to have trouble with the boss. Just thought of this, and I am thinking too much today, how dated it is for him to work for a sprocket company now but it sounded futuristic then.
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Do Calvinists permit dancing?
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Depends on your Calvinist. Never did when I was young, or card playing, or make-up, or you know. Of course, they did not call themselves Calvinists.
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Cosmo G. Spacely
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Hey, people, JASPER just told us to keep on the sunny side of life.
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I’m kind of late doing this, but I want to say a little more in defense of new art. I think that there is plenty of new art that is very good or great art even if it is hard to understand or perplexing in some way. I am not all that well informed about art, but I have been exposure to the work of a number of young artist and I can see that they have produced some outstanding work that might seem perplexing when first viewed.
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So I have a really busy day at work and tune out of THE BLOG. Then when I get home in the evening I pull it up and baboons have gone from physics to MFA to the Jetsons to new art. Baboons are ON THE LOOSE.
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Perhaps this is what happens to Baboons without gravity to weigh us down?…
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I was faked out by Monday’s post on soccer. I figured I could coast for a few days, ignore the blog, and then scoot in on about Thursday, when the topic would have turned to the Monkees, or something else about which I could try to be wittily nostalgic.
Instead, dang it, there were two days of philosophy, and I missed them! Tautologies, and then theoretical physics!
I want to come out here in defense of hard ideas, implausible ideas, expressed in hard, incomprehensible ways. We as a culture tend to be rather hard on our intellectuals, and rather huffy when confronted with the impenetrable.
How about approaching them instead as a kid would–with insistent curiosity, wonder, questions, crazy speculations of your own?
What if we thought of the elimination of gravity more along the lines of the elimination of, say, paper and metal money? It’s not hard to imagine someone ten or thirty years hence saying “we’re going to get rid of paper money. We don’t need it to do the work we do any more.” I see the move to eliminate gravity in a similar way. Experientially, phenomenologically, we may all choose to go about our business, treating Mr. G with deference and respect. But likely, over time, even our ordinary ways of explaining apples falling to earth will change. (Okay, over a LOT of time. It turns out that, when it comes to things like centripetal motion, most of us, in our common sense behavior, aren’t even Newtonian; we’re ARISTOTELIAN. Newtonianism would be an advance.)
BTW, the subject of time came up a few times today. The June issue of SCIENCE magazine has an absolutely fascinating article about the elimination of time. “Now the rift between the time of physics and the time of experience is reaching its logical conclusion, for many in theoretical physics have come to believe that time fundamentally does not even exist.”
Now you can all breathe a sigh of relief that I was otherwise occupied and didn’t post earlier.
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I am not a very good theoretician , but I remember the line…”To a theoretical physicist the hole is as real as the doughnut.” I don’t understand…Where does that leave the jelly?
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Safely in the hands of a philosopher, or perhaps an Artist (and no where near the physicist).
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Wow, I love this place.
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Allow me to preface this comment by stating that my mother emailed me the content of this blog post (& comments) this evening after raving about the blog in general this weekend, after raising me on The Morning Show for more than 18 years, including my fair share of birthday dedications of My Little Potato”. At some point in my youth, I apparently informed her that the show had ‘ruined’ my taste in music (as compared to my peers). For this, I thank you, Dale.
Accolades (?) aside, as someone with 2/3rds of a degree in physics (most of the knowledge is there, but my mind and University policy don’t often agree), I’m here to assure you that, should you slip on the ice during the inevitable bitter cold this winter (which some may view with nostalgia after this past impressively oppressively hot & sticky day), you won’t suddenly fall upwards; and it will still hurt when you land. All this talk about gravity (possibly) not really being a fundamental force means that, from the perspective of a theoretical physicist, ‘gravity,’ as a an force, may not carry the gravitas it currently enjoys. However, from the perspective of someone who bicycles year round, ice still sucks. (To Clyde: a quick aside, invest in some good Schwalbe tires with flat protection, they’re totally worth it! I’ve been commuting on some for 5+ years and never had a puncture.) Also, that same theoretical physicist will still trip on the stairs and spill his coffee, regardless of his views (I’ve seen it happen).
What the gentleman featured in the NYT article is ultimately suggesting is that gravity, much like lightning, the sky being blue, and gnomes who steal socks from the dryer, isn’t some fundamental ‘truth’ of the universe, but, rather, derives from some other even more fundamental ‘truth’ of the universe (though, to be honest, I’ve yet to find a suitable physical explanation for the disappearance of socks). In this case, Dr. Verlinde is suggesting that gravity, as we know it, may be caused by the tendency of things to break when you drop them (though, to the layperson, it may seem that the tendency of things to break when you drop them is indeed caused by gravity, but I digress). Or, more generally, gravity may simply be the result of the Universe’s preference for chaos. Incidentally, that same preference for chaos (or, more specifically, entropy), is what makes the bitter cold of winter seem so bitterly cold.
All that said, don’t expect flying cars to suddenly appear in the near future, with some exceptions. ‘Gravity’ as we know it, whatever that may mean to a theoretical physicist, isn’t going anywhere. As Prof. James Kakalios pointed out at CONvergence this year: jet packs, flying cars and Ironman suits are all dependent on a revolution in energy, which hasn’t happened. Instead, we’ve had a revolution in information, which has resulted in Dick Tracy’s watch.
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