How can science fall if there is no gravity?

23 October 2016 - 02:00 By Sue De Groot

Fall is what they call autumn in North America. The opposite season is of course spring, when everything leaps up instead of falling down. It should be spring in these parts, but it's hard to hear the rustle of rising sap above the thud of falling spirits.Not all falling things are cause for heavy hearts, however. So much good is falling. Rain, finally. Fees, hopefully. Wickets, if you're Tabraiz Shamsi. Apples, if you let Tabraiz Shamsi loose with a leather ball in a fruit shop.I confess to being a bit puzzled about the call for science to fall.story_article_left1The student who lambasted universities for swallowing Isaac Newton's applet may not literally have meant for us to go on an anti-gravity campaign (onwards and upwards?) but the social media sky still fell on her head as a result of her pronouncements. "How can science fall if there is no gravity?" tweeted many a wagtail.Newton might have come up with a theory to explain why falling down is easier than leaping up, but he did not coin the word "gravity". The English word came into use more than a century before Isaac's equation for downward acceleration."Gravity" comes from the 13th-century French gravité (seriousness), which derives from the Latin gravitas (heaviness).In English, "gravitas" describes a person who has dignity. This is Newton's fault - before he ruined gravity for us all it used to serve exactly this function.The opposite of gravity is levity, from the Latin levitatem, which contained both the literal meaning of lightness (without weight) and the metaphorical sense of frivolity (without seriousness).Some people feel as strongly about levity as anti-Newtonites do about gravity, but I would hate to see a call for levity to fall. We need frivolity, laughter, buoyancy and all things light to lift us from the grim solemnity that brings its crushing weight to bear on every Important Issue.Life is hopeless but not serious, goes an old saying. Into each life a little rain must fall, goes another. A little more rain would make us all a lot happier. So would a little less seriousness.It is possible for gravity and levity to share the same space. I don't have just an equation for a model of an abstract of a theory to prove this; I can offer evidence.In another lifetime, I lived in that place where the sea is as blue as the election posters and the blue language of the itinerant community is a source of exquisite linguistic oddities.I had not been in Cape Town for more than a week when I encountered a person who looked to have no fixed address. He was standing outside a bottle store and staring at the pavement in shock because the bottle he had been carrying had just slipped from his grasp and shattered on the concrete.When I stopped to commiserate he looked up, shook his head sadly, lifted his shoulders in a philosophical shrug and said: "Gravity, man."And that, ladies and gentlemen, is 43% proof of the power of levity...

There’s never been a more important time to support independent media.

From World War 1 to present-day cosmopolitan South Africa and beyond, the Sunday Times has been a pillar in covering the stories that matter to you.

For just R80 you can become a premium member (digital access) and support a publication that has played an important political and social role in South Africa for over a century of Sundays. You can cancel anytime.

Already subscribed? Sign in below.



Questions or problems? Email helpdesk@timeslive.co.za or call 0860 52 52 00.