An ode to Newton

My computer seems to believe that today is may 17th. Can that be right?

Rhetorical questions like these always set you up for realizations of a more grand scale. Thoughts like "Another fast week bites the dust!" leads to "Next week will eventually be gone too" and "A collection of weeks that you have lived is sometimes referred to as 'a lifetime'. So I suppose all this is just to say something you already know, you are a vapor. Perhaps this is just a considerately placed escape clause; is reading this stupid post really worth your time? Weigh your options, reader. You are about to spend what could be hundreds or thousands of years in a small box under a piece of marble and you have stuff that probably needs your attention before then.

That I think is why I love this, this so called "exhibitionist practice of letting people read my journal" (of course, that is by no means what it is to me, but that's another argument for another time). This morning, I spent a couple of minutes sitting out on a dock in Northern Wisconsin this morning, freezing my ass off. The whole time I could hear what I have come to think of as the very voice of God telling me, "Hey, you! There is *good* out there and people need to hear about it! And here you are freezing on a dock, doing nothing, thinking that you're immortal or something!" So here I am now, and if I do nothing else today, I still have this small accomplishment that I did not fail to recognize that God should be getting my praise and yours in the time that it took me to write this post from scratch (well, okay, obviously not completely from scratch if you want to be like that again with the philosophy of externality).

Because let's face it, that's a major struggle of mine and probably yours as well: seeing a universe that is so packed full of cruelty and injustice and evil and admitting that there could possibly be a benevolent and all-powerful force behind it all. Sometimes the blackness seems to be the backdrop, and from our perspective there are just little pieces of something of any value at all shining through. Funny thing though, the shiny buggers that seem to be holes in the black fabric of the cosmos are actually multi-million-mile-wide balls of fusing gas atoms and the space around them is really nothing at all. This reminds me how much I love gravity. Seriously! That's all that really stands between us and a lifeless universe with a much more even distribution of matter. Just imagine what that would look like in the hypothetical absurdity where our own solar system is exactly as it is now, but the rest of the universe wasn't subject to gravity. No stars would ever take or hold shape, as there is there's really no other force that could possibly bring enough hydrogen atoms together to get the fusion process off the ground. We'd look up at the sky at night and see emptiness. The matter that comprises the stars we see now would still be there, floating around in space, but there would be no light generated for it to reflect, thereby alerting us of its existence. Praise God for classical Newtonian gravity.

Praise God for things to keep it in check, too. In the absence of other forces everything ever made that has mass and occupies space would eventually collide at the universe's center of mass. In the absence of other forces, your liver would, purely through gravitational attraction, pluck a leaf off of a tree in Japan and pull it straight through the earth so that your liver and the leaf could be as close to each other as possible. Dumb! Of course, since there are other forces like electromagnetism out there, we don't have to worry about that ever happening. But that still doesn't take away from the very real attraction that your liver and that leaf have. Gravity is thus undeniable proof of our connectedness. Any two people, even the most bitter and hateful people out there, are at the very minimum attracted to each other with a force equal to the product of their masses times the gravitational constant G, divided by the square of the distance between them. Think about it.

I suppose I've kind of detracted from the thrust of this post by waxing physical. So let me just reiterate. Find something good, and go tell someone about it, because someday you will meet your maker.