Gravity and the Myth of 0mph

It’s long been an axiom of physics that everything is constantly in motion, due to the cosmic background stretching of the Universe. At least that’s what Brian Greene tells us, and in this case I’m inclined to believe him. No matter that everything he concludes from this fact is not even false.

Yet, al a cartes Thomas Kuhn, we know that old washed up ideas die hard. This is the case with a little gem I was taught in high school physics concerning an object falling toward the Earth, after been thrown away from it. Specifically, if you throw an object straight up, gravity will cause its acceleration/speed to decrease until reaching 0mph, at which point it will begin increasing its acceleration/speed in the opposite vector. Your immediate reaction should be that the phrase “at which point” is inherently ambiguous. Yes it is, and that’s half the problem. Let’s look at a chart provided by a propaganda website.

According to this diagram, an object will be basically at rest right where you see the a= 0 m/s2. Of course, none of these wizards can tell us how long the object will be at rest. That’s because it’s impossible to tell. Why is it impossible to tell? Despite the fantasies of William Tells, the object is never at rest. We know from contemporary science that nothing is ever at rest! Well then, to paraphrase Hume, whence the cognitive dissonance? Basically people have a hard time conceptualizing an instant change in vector – it makes them nervous. As Kant described, the human mind has to impose mental structures on physical perception in order to make sense of it. Well, in the case of “in between time” (the real culprit here), the structure happens to be irrational. It’s what gives us Zeno’s Paradox – the idea that you must be able to always divide time/distance sequences. This idea turns out to be false, as proclaimed loudly and clearly by Bertrand Russell. Well, it’s also false in the case of allegedly negated vectors. There doesn’t have to be a “zero” in between positive and negative opposite vectors. Hard to rap your mind around, but take a look at this adjusted diagram, which should help (although we can’t ever fully understand physical reality, since we play too many language games).

Alright. The concept of “0mph” can now be put to rest. No matter what science fiction authors say. Very simply, when you throw up an object into the air, it never stops moving. After all, if it did stop moving, how would it ever get back to you, without something to force it back down? Few people think of the most obvious dilemmas in their allegedly scientific reasoning.

Go ahead and try this one out on your physics friends. Have them tell you how long an object supposedly stays at rest for, at the peak of the falling down curve. They won’t be able to. If pressed, they will tell you that it is an infinitely short moment. And by now my readers can’t fall prey to those shenanigans.

9/11 Conspiracy and the War on Christmas

Some people don’t like Christmas. Twice. Or Chanukah.

But some people, who are (if you can believe it) even more shameless, have decided to capitalize on Christmas by opening the old wounds of terrorism. Here is the proof. Can you believe it? As if insulting science wasn’t enough, these people now want to insult Christmas! Well, some of us wish to keep our real science, and our real holidays.

       

The scientific pitfalls of this 9/11 conspiracy stuff are too numerous to count. There are more holes in 9/11 conspiracies than there are in the fossil record! Many people have pointed them out, including the international press. Like Dark Matter, 9/11 conspiracy theories get much of their impetus from works of fiction. It should be no wonder, then, that the vast overwhelming majority of academics in the movement are poets and Mormons. Imagine that! Scholars with the gall to tell us that Reformed Egyptian is a language have now decided that gravity proves conspiracies! Sure, and Jesus was a Native American. Anyway, let’s quickly go through some of the main claims of the 9/11 Truth Movement.

1) Buildings don’t obey gravity when they are hit by airplanes

This claim should make you queasy right off the bat. To base a broad overarching theory on something as shaky as gravity, which no one understands, is ludicrous. And in any case, consider the false dichotomy presented by “Jonathan” and the other conspiracy theorists: it was either airplanes, or it was the government. But surely any five year old can think of other alternatives, e.g., the buildings happened to fall down that day. Stranger things have happened. Why rule out this coincidence? Furthermore, perhaps Al Quaeda itself did a controlled demolition. That none of the conspiracy theorists have thought of this is incredible! Good one guys.

2) Science proves that 9/11 was a conspiracy

None of the theorists have the authority to say this. For one thing, the movement consists mainly of middle schoolers who don’t know how to express themselves. Honestly, is Dylan Avery still in diapers?

3) Dick Cheney planned 9/11 from a bunker. We know this from documents.

Nope. Go ahead, check for yourself.
So those are three of the major claims. They are incredibly easy to refute, as you can see, since I just refuted them. This won’t even be my longest blog post. Besides, several other commentators, including psychopaths, have refuted 9/11 conspiracy. That’s embarrassing for the movement.

And natural scientist Noam Chomsky has very, very succinctly refuted the basic premises of the movement. He has done this multiple times.

Anyhow, this Christmas, don’t get distracted by the war profiteers pushing 9/11 conspiracy. Dylan Avery, Jonathan Leland, Korey Rowe, the Mormon Church, and Jason Bermes, think they can make money of the birth of Jesus. I think that there’s enough profiteering during the holiday season. We don’t need it tarnished even more by the crazies.

The bowling ball illustration of gravity

When we were all small children, our teachers tried to deceive us into thinking that gravity was just like when you put a bowling ball on a mattress. If you doubt that this pedagogical disaster is mainstream, then take a look here, here, here, and here. The explanation goes something like this:

“Teacher, why do heavy objects emit more suction power than lighter ones?”
“Well, you know how when you put a bowling ball on a mattress, things will roll towards it?”
“Yes?”
“Well it’s just like that! The bowling ball is a heavy object, the things rolling toward it are lighter objects, and the mattress is the fabric of space!”

Can you believe that? That’s called bullshit. The only reason why the things roll toward the bowling ball in the first place is because of gravity, which is the very thing we are trying to understand! All science teachers who have ever used that illustration should be subject to intellectual denazification.