Perspective, Gravity, and Some Duct Tape on a Ceiling

Hello Humans! Physics. I hated it my Senior year of High School, and after my first week of it at the University, I couldn’t keep it out of my head. Looking back on this, it’s really funny because my attitude about Physics, reflects how we learn about Physics. It’s all about perspective. One Physics topic that is almost hardly touched on anymore, because it has a sense of “no-duh” on the surface is Gravity. We all know that gravity is the thing that keeps us from floating out into space, but changes when we go to the moon. Why the heck does gravity change from planet to planet? Well, most of us probably hardly think about this and just accept it as a fact of life, but I am not most of us. Luckily neither was Galileo, Newton, or Einstein. It turns out that Gravity is very much affected by this thing called Mass, or really anything that has an atom in it. And like my perspective of Physics changed, Gravity changes due to your perspective of a mass. Gravity at its basic fundamentals is a force that pulls two masses together. The reason why the Moon has less gravity than the Earth is because the Moon has less mass than the Earth. It may also be the reason why you bump into people when you walk by them, or I'm just trying to project my clumsiness onto something scientific. But you heard me right. We, as objects with mass, have our own gravitational force. It’s just so weak that we can’t feel it or draw objects to us by will power alone. So, the next time you bump into someone and they call you clumsy, you can just tell them it was their gravitational force dragging you to them. It’s both an insult and a compliment, depending on your perspective.

Pictured above is some dark-green duct tape that was left on the ceiling of my favorite room in the Science Building of Southern Utah University. It may still be there today. It was left there for the whole Spring Semester. While I was sitting in my normal back corner seat of a Physics lecture, our Professor, whom I called Wiggins because he didn’t want us to call him Professor (His argument was that he was practically the same age as us, which was true) rolled in this cart with a bunch of black posters duct-taped together with some white ping-pong ball and a strobe light. He gets up on the desk in front and nearly fell off while trying to tape his black posters up onto the ceiling. Then, he gave the strobe light to a student in the front row, turns the lights off, and again nearly died while trying to get back up onto the front desk with no way to see where he was going. He said, “Please tell my wife and children that I love them, and here is my life insurance card.” I was dying of laughter. Then, once he finally gets up onto the desk, with a bucket of ping pong balls, he starts dropping them in front of the poster boards, with the strobe light on. He then tells us that he is demonstrating gravity and the class laughs for almost 10 minutes straight. So the next time you see duct tape, especially on the ceiling, think of gravity. Stay wild, flower child.