Questioning Gravity

Via Chris Mooney I see that the people who miss the dark ages are at it again.

WICHITA – Propelled by a polished strategy crafted by activists on America's political right, a battle is intensifying across the nation over how students are taught about the origins of life. Policymakers in 19 states are weighing proposals that question the science of evolution.

The article goes on to say that :

Polls show that a large majority of Americans believe God alone created man or had a guiding hand. Advocates invoke the First Amendment and say the current campaigns are partly about respect for those beliefs.

"It's an academic freedom proposal. What we would like to foment is a civil discussion about science. That falls right down the middle of the fairway of American pluralism," said the Discovery Institute's Stephen C. Meyer, who believes evolution alone cannot explain life's unfurling. "We are interested in seeing that spread state by state across the country."

So basically policy makers in 19 states are working to undermine the teaching of the theory of evolution in high schools out of respect for academic freedom and the right to free speech.

It's about time.

Oddly enough, policy makers in exactly zero states are weighing proposals that question the science of gravity. It is this lack of resolve to question a theory like gravity that is really troubling to us here at Grinding Metal Labs. If we think back, what most of us remember about our high school physics class is a year spent trying to protect our delicate preconceived notions from a barrage of Newtonian madness. A year where our only hope of survival lie in the scribbling of bizarre alchemical formulas across every piece of paper put in front of as we repeatedly promised the hearts of your future offspring to the dark gods of "partial credit".

Yes it was that bad and it always started with gravity; intractable word problems about falling weights and cannonballs and other such crap. But is there a significant value-add to be found in the so called scientific theory of gravity? Do high school students really need to learn all that math and all the mumbo jumbo about gravitational constants and mass just to remember that things fall down? Do they find any of it compelling? Is there a simpler theory of gravity that can serve us as well? Maybe something like :

God put things where he wants them.

Lets take a look at a typical word problem found in a typical high school physics textbook and use it to compare these two competing theories of gravity:

John is sitting in a tree with a his bowling ball reading his bible. Frank is under the tree reading Darwin's "The Origin of Species". If John is 5 meters above Frank what is the velocity of John's bowling ball when it strikes Frank's head?

If you want to be all rational about it and use the scientific theory of gravity you would have to do a lot of math:

Lets see, we can get time from the distance formula which is : distance = .5gt^2
where : distance = 5m and g = 9.8m/s^2
so : t = sqrt(5m/(.5 * 9.8m/s^2))
Doing a little math you get : t = 1.01 s
But we need velocity and thats given by : v = tg
Where : T = 1.01s and g = 9.8m/s^2
So : v = 1.01s * 9.8m/s^2
We find that the bowling ball strikes the unfortunate Darwinist's head at around 9.90 m/s.

That's a lot more math than your average Darwin averse policymakers or high school physics victim is going to be comfortable with. It also gives the answer in meters per second instead of a more Jesus friendly measure of velocity like "cubits per angle breath".

Now let's use our simplified theory of gravity to solve the same problem. It's simple:

John's richeous bowling ball strike the filthy Darwinist's head with the speed of nonbeliever head smiteingness regardless of the hight from which the bowling ball was dropped.

Much simpler. But are the results accurate?
In a word "Yes". Both theories accurately describe outcome of our little experiment :

Frank's head is mulch

Therefor there is no reason not to choose the simpler of the two theories.
Now I am sure that there is some jerk out there who will want to counter with something along the lines of

This is preposterous! You couldn't put a man on the moon using a "God puts things where he wants them" in place of the theory of gravity!

But that my friends is what we in the blogging biz call a "straw man". Putting a man on the moon is "rocket science" and we are not talking about "rocket science" here. We are talking about high school physics and there are no rockets in high school physics; just ball bearings, ramps, pulleys, and the occasional mouse-trap strapped to a skateboard.

Policy makers is 19 states are in the process of taking a bold step. They are committed to moving us away from a cold, calculating culture of reality and towards a warm, happy, culture of ignorance. They should be applauded for this but, at the same time, they should be chastised. Ignorance is not something you do half assed. No one wants their children to be half ignorant but, that is exactly the path we are on! Eliminating the teaching of the theory of evolution while continuing to allow teaching of theories like gravity will leave our children in a dangerous state of partial ignorance, unable to compete in the emerging market of global stupidity!

That is why we at Grinding Metal Labs are demanding the establishment of a Federal Stupidity Test for all state and local policy makers. We go out of our way to elect the truly stupid to important positions on our school boards and in our state legislatures so that they can destroy our children's future but, even with the help of hardworking engines of ignorance like the Discovery Institute our public policy makers are moving too slow. This is because years of freely available public school education has produced a generation of relatively unignorant adults poorly suited to guide us back to the comfortable darkness of the middle ages. For the sake of our children we need a federally mandated program to identify the truly ignorant among us and put them in charge of all policy making.