Sometimes it can take a while to see the big picture. We understand things by increments. We learn something and it seems as if we’ve gained some perspective, but then we learn that we actually have learned only a little bit and there’s a lot more to the picture. We learn something and then we build on what we’ve learned. Sometimes the big picture is so big that we never do get to see it all. What we end up with is often a little knowledge, and a little knowledge is a dangerous thing
I’m not sure when I first learned about gravity; I mean about the force we call gravity. I already knew about it empirically: If you drop something it lands on the floor. If you fall off your bike, you crash on the road and so does your bike. You get scraped and bruised and your bike gets dinged up. What goes up must come down, but that there was a reason for what went up coming down never occurred to me. That there was a reason for anything never occurred to me. It was just the way it was. You know that there is day and there is night.You don’t question what you know because there is no reason to. Things are the way they are because that’s the way things are. You see the picture but you don’t know that there is more to the picture.
Somewhere along the line, maybe third or fourth grade, we learned in school what it was that made things that went up come down: the Law of Gravity. Things don’t fall to the ground just because that’s the way things are. Things fall to the ground because of the law of gravity. Gravity is the force that makes things fall, that keeps our desks and chairs on the floor. We learned that it was discovered by a man named Isaac Newton.
Being not necessarily studious, but contemplative, I contemplated gravity while the rest of the class went on to spelling or arithmetic or whatever was next. “Gravity, huh?” I thought. “That means there’s a reason why things fall down. I wouldn’t have thought that there was a reason for it. Are there reasons for other things? Does this mean that there’s a reason for everything?” I was being introduced to a bigger picture.
I thought first of all how great it would be if there were no gravity. And I thought how cool life must have been back in the days before there was any gravity. I said that to Mr, Esposito a few days later on a rainy afternoon when we couldn’t go out for recess. “Before there was any gravity?” he said. “What do you mean?” “Well, before Isaac Newton invented gravity.” Mr Esposito laughed. ”Oh. I see what you mean, but you’re not quite right. He didn’t invent it, he discovered it. There was always gravity, it’s just that Isaac Newton was the first one to, well.. ” and he told us the story about Newton and the apple. “ He observed the falling apple and concluded that there must be a force that made that happen.” And then he asked me what I thought life would be like without gravity.
“Well, I think it would be pretty cool. No gravity would make it easy to hit a home run or throw a touchdown pass. You’d hit the ball and it would sail way way over the fence”. You could stand at your own one yard line and throw a pass to your receiver all the way down in the other end zone. Or I could just jump over the woods to school instead of having to walk through the path.” Mr. Esposito corrected me. “That sounds really great, doesn’t it? You’re thinking that if you hit a ball it would go a long, long way before it came down, right?” “Right.” “But you’re not seeing the big picture. Think about it a little more. Why would it come down?”
I had been thinking that of course the ball would come down because everything has to come down sometime. But of course, in my gravity-less world, it wouldn’t. Mr. Esposito enlarged the picture. He said “Your home run ball would never come down because there would be nothing to make it come down. Your touchdown pass wouldn’t be a touchdown because it wouldn’t come down into the other person’s hands, it would keep going forever. And if the other person jumped to up to catch the ball, what would happen to him? Or what would happen to you if you tried to jump over the woods?”
I could see that what would happen would be that he’d keep going forever. If he managed to catch the ball, they’d sail away forever together and if he missed it, he and the ball would go their separate ways forever. If I tried to jump to school instead of walking, I would just keep going up forever. I would disappear into space. I was seeing a larger picture, and the picture I saw was of everyone on earth keeping perfectly still because if they weren’t careful they might send themselves sailing off into space.
But then I suddenly had the solution. Nothing to keep you on the surface of the earth? Easy. We all wear very heavy shoes. Mr. Esposito laughed and said there would be no such thing as very heavy shoes. All shoes would weigh the same, meaning that they wouldn’t weigh anything. Everything would be weightless. with no gravity.
Ok, then we make metal sidewalks everywhere we need to walk and we wear shoes with magnets in them. What keeps the sidewalk on the ground? Spikes, like railroad tracks. What keeps the spikes in the ground? For that matter, what keeps the ground on the ground?
Well, now he was going too far. What keeps the ground on the ground? The ground doesn’t need anything to keep it on the ground, The ground stays on the ground because it’s the ground and that’s where it belongs. “Oh, no,” he said. “Not so. It’s gravity that keeps the ground on the ground. The earth is a huge sphere, and it’s gravity that holds it all together. Without gravity, no ground, no earth. Or how about this, he said: no gravity, no air. It’s gravity that keeps the earth’s atmosphere in place. You wouldn’t be able to breathe.”
No gravity, no baseball. No football, no sidewalks, no roads, no ground, no moon, no air, no earth, no Vermont, no you, no me. No nothing. But wait. If nothing is all there is, isn’t nothing something? And is gravity the only reason there’s everything, or anything? Or that there isn’t nothing? See what I mean? What’s the big picture? I still can’t see it.
Well, getting back down to earth a little bit, Mr. Esposito easily convinced me that it wouldn’t be great at all if there were no gravity. Although, when I’m looking at my face as I’m shaving in the morning and I see the effect gravity has had on it over the years, I can’t help thinking that it wouldn’t be so bad if maybe there were just a little less gravity.