Lay Scientist Picks
Gravity and Other Facts on Earth
Your long-off ancestor could catch a dropped stone before it hit the cave floor. What’s dropped falls. Cave dwellers knew this long generations before physicists could wrap gravity in numbers. An unknown amount of physical laws (presumably huge) has impacted every strand of DNA on earth. Yours, a shrimp’s, a pear tree’s.
The way a tree releases an orange from a branch precisely factors in earth’s gravity. The way a bee scrapes pollen off its legs. The reason a rhinoceros doesn’t attempt to walk up to a juicy tidbit seven feet above the savannah.
A method of adapting the being to gravity is knit into every earth-life instruction kit.
If evolution occurred on Mars life’s instructions would have adapted to Martian facts of life.
My fascination is seeing how each of the physical dimensions affects living beings in characteristic ways.
A musk ox understands how gravity works and spends no precious calories attempting to move its bulk to treetops with their special leaves. Gravity forbids.
Humans are among the many living beings on Earth. Our DNA and a grasshopper’s have been attuned to the gravity of our native realms.
We experience time as linear — yesterday, today, after Friday.