Leaping into the void: On apples, frogs and rockets

A new essay is out at TheScian.com. It is about why apples fall downwards, why frogs leap and why we fly rockets. In other words, it is about the force of gravity. It's written by a non-scientist, so there are no discussions about strings tangled in eleven dimensions, tensor calculus or fluxions that made Newton's mama proud.

In some ways, this essay started two years ago while I lived in Atlanta. I was wondering about how easy it is to move horizontally but not vertically (prompted by what JRD Tata had said). Since then it has slowly grown, shed words, morphed, evolved and finally has seen the light of your computer screen today. This is the first essay I have published that may be considered as 'somewhat in a serious tone on science'. I do not know what effect that tone would have on you, but it made me drink ten cups of coffee in three hours and then had me rowing in a boat towards the moon with a paddle in one hand and a ladder in the other.

From the essay

In his essay 'Frogs on the Moon', Primo Levi writes about his childhood fascination with the eggs of frogs. He collects the eggs and places them in a basin where they start hatching: "I realized that the walls of the basin were too steep for the pollywogs [tadpoles] to climb, as they obviously wanted to, and I put two or three small inclined wooden boards in the water.

The idea was correct and some pollywogs took advantage of it: but was it still right to call them pollywogs? No longer; they were no longer larvae, they were brown frogs, as large as a fava bean, but frogs, people like us, with two hands and two legs, who swam 'the breast stroke' with effort but perfect style. And they no longer ate each other, and by now we had a different feeling about them, maternal and paternal: in some way they were our children, even if in the molting stage we had given them more trouble than help. I would put one of them on the palm of my hand; it had a muzzle, a face, it looked at me blinking its eyes, then suddenly snapped its mouth wide open. Was it gasping for air, or did it want to say something? At other times it took off decisively along one finger as it on a springboard, and immediately made a crazy leap into the void."

Leaping into the void! How well Levi puts it! Newton would have reveled in Levi's language. In an innocent frog's crazy leap is contained our whole human aspiration!

Far away and yet so close, the moon has watched over life's crazy leaps and struggles for millions of years. Captivated by our boundless oceans and tangled banks, it has stopped turning its face away and now gives its undivided attention, day after day. In return, we adore it. Its mountains and craters nourish our imagination; they evoke the most wonderful myths from our young innocent minds. On lonely nights, the moon's barren terrain makes us desperately want to reach it, makes us want to find solace in shared desolation. We look up, and in our minds we cannot but leap across the void.

The audio of the essay is published as well (read by me). You can drop the RSS feed into iTunes or any podcast reader to get the audio or simply download the audio from the page. You can also play it online (you'll need flash plugin in your browser). The background music is Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata - appropriate, given how emotional I've gotten about the moon in the essay. I am glad that I could use this particular music (and introduce it to you if you haven't heard it before). My thanks to Professor Michael Fowler, Physics Dept., U.Va, for kindly permitting us to use a animated version of Newton's cannon on a mountain from his lectures.

Corrections, thoughtful criticism and notes of interest on the essay are very welcome. Errors corrected will be acknowledged at the end of the essay. Hop over and enjoy. Email it to friends, print it and give it to your grandma, etc.