Gravity Has No Weight

A very non-intuitive characteristic of gravity is that everything falls at exactly the same rate regardless of mass. Drop a BB and a canon-ball from the same height at the same time they will both hit the earth at the same time; weight is irrelevant. This is significant.

What is happening is that the force required to move some object dissipates until it reaches zero. At that instant the object has no weight. At this point,with the force completely spent, there is nothing left to keep it aloft. It isn't a force pulling the object toward earth bit rather the lack of any force holding it up.

Since everything falls at the same rate (32fps²) regardless of weight, it becomes obvious that it is the complete absence of force that's responsible for the illusion of a force of gravity. The only force is that required to raise an object in the first place. The formula, f=ma, doesn't really apply to raising an object since acceleration is immaterial. Once an object begins falling, the acceleration is always the same: 32fps²) A force of gravity is an unnecessary complication.

The same applies to notions of weight since all we really know is how much effort it takes to move something. Nothing has weight until we try to move it and the movement appears to be a force. Plain old inertia is all we really have to understand to account for all the attributes of a force of gravity.

Most of the time the force necessary to move an object from the surface of the earth will launch the object in a parabolic arc. The object ascends until the force that launched it dissipates to zero. At the apogee of this arc, for just an instant, the object is weightless. Just after that, the absence of any force holding the object up causes the object to mirror the force that sent it aloft in the first place.

This is interesting because, regardless of the force launching an object, it falls at the same rate. This must mean that only the minimum force required is preserved, any beyond that is lost at the apogee of the arc the object follows. This means that neither the launching force nor the mass of the object launched are relevant. The only measure left is 32fps²) that is all there is to know about gravity.

This invites the retort, "Jump off a building and see if you fall" which is evidence of the power of a popular delusion. If you stand atop a high building, it's the building holding you up. Whether you climbed the stairs or took elevator is immaterial so f=ma likewise has no relevance. All that matters is that stepping off the building results in "force" of 32fps²) No matter how you got to the top of the building, regardless of any effort it took, you will return to earth at exactly the same rate.

We could explain all this as states of energy: at the top of the building you have acquired potential energy but this energy only exists when it's expended. Again this energy is fictitious since regardless of what we may think it is, it is manifested in the same old rate of falling: 32fps²) The forces and energies believed to exist are just different instances of the same phenomenon.

Our Friend the Electron

The electron is an odd little thing. We are told that it is the basis of all things electronic, computers, TVs, DVDs, etc. yet no one really knows just what an electron is.

While there are elaborate and outrageously detailed descriptions of what it does, there is no cogent and convincing description of what it is. The electron is a genuine mystery. It's not even possible to know where one is and where it is going at the same time. It's just a little fuzz ball of probability, areas where it is likely to be and places it might be going.

Even so, the world of Man has become totally dependent on the insubstantial little electron. There is a considerable body of evidence emerging that the devices that employ the electron are really just channels through which we invoke the quantum powers underlying the universe itself.

The conventional descriptions given to the lay public and taught in the classrooms are merely a pedagogical convenience, a means of communicating information about processes that don't really exist.

These methods rely on the fact that humans prefer linear logic where information is wholly sequential and predictable. The illusion of linearity is cultivated because textbooks are required to have a ordered structure: Table of Contents, Bibliographies, Foot Notes, Appendices and Indexes, chapters, page numbers and so on.

The truth is much less malleable than our representation of it. The universe conceals far more than our discoveries reveal and certainly more than our hubris admits to. Mysteries exist because their resolution have unwelcome consequences and persist because we deny their existence.

To satisfy this requirement, knowledge is packaged in tidy units as if the universe the text "explains" is likewise a hierarchical structure, neatly ordered for our convenience.

One such mystery is the electron. This little packet of stuff is not real, it doesn't actually occupy space or time, it is a mathematical entity, a thing that exists because theory requires it.

Before they were posited, there were no such things and the universe got along just fine anyway. Because the electron exists only to satisfy a particular view of the nature of the universe , it depends entirely on the strength of those beliefs for its power.

There was a time, long before men thought themselves omniscient, when people knew a universe of "powers" and "forces" and "entities", a place where intelligence and purpose inhabited every little corner and niche. It was believed that everything either possessed in itself or was connected to one of these powers.

One gaining mastery over one of the powers could cause events to occur that would not otherwise and stop events that were destined to occur in the absence of their intervention. There were several ways these people went about doing this.

There was an incantation where one called out the power using special words spoken a special way. There was the combining of various odds and ends that would enable changes of various kinds and there was ritual that would obligate a power to do this or that.

Continued on page A26