Gravity February 8, 2014

Gravity has been on my mind lately.  This all started when I read Brilliant Blunders for our genetics book club, and one section happened to be on Einstein’s “blunder” of introducing a cosmological constant into his relativity theories.  This got me to reading another short book on Einstein, called Einstein’s Universe, which the science writer George Johnson claims steered him into science writing initially.  One of Einstein’s many mind-blowing insights was that gravity – the stuff of Newton and the apple – isn’t really a primary force at all, but rather a manifestation of disruption in the space-time continuum of the universe.  Now, I don’t profess to understand this, but the notion certainly has gotten under my skin.

Then there is Gravity, the movie, in which Sandra Bullock and George Clooney are marooned in outer space, far enough away from earth, presumably, to be unresponsive to its perturbation of the space-time continuum.  I have to say, if I ever had any thoughts of traveling to outer space – and I haven’t – this movie would have quickly ended them! 

And then, in the meantime, I heard from an old high school classmate, one year ahead of me, whom I haven’t seen since his graduation, and he commented that as a student, I generated my own gravity.  I decided to take this as a compliment, and I really like his image, that each of us, in fact is generating our own gravity, or shall we say, each of us is creating a disturbance in the space-time continuum of beings and non-beings. 

Where am I going with all this?  Well, I don’t know, but I have been thinking about how I need to rein in my disparate interests – my little moons and satellites, if you will, of singing, art, writing, reading, hiking – and see if I can re-create a center of gravity, similar to that center which I had when I was still working as a professor.   I think I can, and when I do, perhaps I’ll be sucking you, too, into my orbit.