Zero Gravity

“Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.”

- Gregory Benford’s law of controversy (an adage from his 1980 novel Timescape).

My mother used to tell me to “stand up straight.”

It was one of her favorite things to say: “Stand up straight!”

Many other people, I have discovered, also grew up hearing that phrase. It’s nearly universal. As if mothers were programmed to say it. In fact, I believe mothers have been telling their children to “stand up straight” longer than we realize. Perhaps even to pre-human days.

What if that were the driving force behind the evolutionary trend to walk erect?

Mothers nagging their children up the evolutionary ladder:

“Stand up straight!
“Don’t drag your knuckles when you walk!
“What’re ya born in a tree?
“You want the other families to think we’re not evolving?”

“No, mom…”

Then: “How many times do I have to tell you?”

And, therein lies the origin of mathematics:

“How many times?…well, if I put the three here and carry the one….”

I noticed a long time ago, whenever my mother would lose weight, my father would gain weight. And when my father lost weight, my mother gained weight.

It was like the Conservation of Mass, within our family.

Being the young scientist that I was, I developed a theory to explain the facts: You see, you never actually lose weight….you just give it to somebody else.

Fat can be neither created nor destroyed. It’s one of the basic laws of the universe. You need to know the laws if you’re gonna live here.

In the normal course of my web browsing, I stumbled upon the home page of Stephen E. Schwartz, an atmospheric scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory and chief scientist of the Department of Energy’s Atmospheric Science Program.

The page gets pretty technical for those of us who are not atmospheric scientists, but near the bottom of the page he mentions “the batting average paradox” - which contains a surprising bit of math that any of us can appreciate…

“The batting average paradox. Able has a higher batting average than Baker in the first half of the season and also in the second half. You might think that that means that Able has a higher average for the season. But you would be wrong. Click here to see why averaging ratios can be misleading.”