Category: Gravity

Turtles All The Way Down

April 18, 2024 By arne hendriks Off

There exists an inescapable logic in the relationship between that which supports and what is being supported. The support should be strong enough to carry what is on top of it. In the logic of “Turtles all the way down” which states that the planet…

Gravity is a Harsh Mistress

March 30, 2024 By arne hendriks Off

The Looney Tunes character Wile E. Coyote is based on Mark Twain’s description of a coyote as “a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry.” Twain then continues to make an unsavoury comparison between coyotes and native Americans. But this doesn’t take away…

GHRE: Gravitropism

March 29, 2022 By arne hendriks Off

The word growth is rooted in the proto-Germanic word GHRE. It refers to early spring when the first signs of green emerge as young leaves and grasses start to sprout. The GHRE-series investigates if and how our generally positive understanding of growth was influenced by its specific seasonal…

Neglecting Gravity

April 17, 2018 By arne hendriks Off

As Stephen Jay Gould writes in “Size and Shape” we are prisoners of the perceptions of our size, and rarely recognize how different the world must appear to the very small. Since our relative surface area is so small at our large size, we are…