As a kid, gravity made sense. It was what kept me from falling up when I looked at the sky, upside-down, from the school play bars. Yet what perplexed me was what I read about it in textbooks. I wondered: why did I find this concept so un-attractive? It seemed like there was a ‘gravity’ that we felt and then a ‘Gravity’ that we studied. And so my curiosity was seeded.
Mathematically, ‘Gravity’ is the force between two objects, measured by ‘G,’ the universal gravitational constant, multiplied by the mass of the two objects, and divided by the square of the separating distance.
But where do I fit? Am I lodged in between ‘G’ (gravitational force) and ‘R’ (distance)? Or perhaps, am I some product of the two? Perhaps I’m object 1 or 2, then. But how can I tell? And which one? At this problem, I felt the dizzying need to consult a physicist to prescribe a formula for my existential-physical crisis.
These ideas plagued me. Intuitively, they felt limited, but any freshmen ‘physician’ would tell me that I’m crazy to distrust the Gravity formula: I mean, something keeps me on the ground, right?
However, it all made sense when I read Merleau-Ponty’s, Eye and Mind. Sure, he admits, science is “admirably active, ingenious, and bold” but, it also “manipulates things and gives up living in them”. Was he implying that scientific language, while useful, might actually obscure what I immediately see and feel? Might not be my personal language for understanding my everydayness, my world?
I realized that I am more than what a scientist tells me; I have and am a physical body, but I also experience this body, and my experience and what it tells me are my own.
Still, the answer left me wanting. What about the growing distance - and diminishing gravity - between scientific descriptions and my felt experience? Maybe it wasn’t that one framework was right and the other was wrong; perhaps something else was happening here. Another thinker, Hannah Arendt, helped me work through some of these complex feelings. In her view, science’s complex language prevails for its utility and universality, for being useful and applicable to many spaces in the world (This same language that vaulted us into outer space and endowed us with the super human power to annihilate ourselves irrevocably). Scientists created these symbols (like G (gravity) and R(distance)) to ease the process of speaking with one another about complex concepts, and while it originated in ordinary language, it have since departed from it, along with the resemblance it once had to individual experience. This explains what I was feeling as a child.
So, how do we reconcile the gravity-defying, skyscraper-building capacity of science with the hollow feel of its calculations? How can we meet science’s cumbersome language with our everyday? My answer: we can’t. They’re speaking different languages in different frequencies, like Chinese and English, and it’s not that one is right and the other is wrong: they just both have their purposes, each of which is necessary to fashion our shared, human world. Moreover, we couldn’t bear to lose either, so we have to compromise in mindfulness of when to use the one language and when to use the other. Like being in San Francisco or Beijing.
In this way, I’d like to think (perhaps self-satisfyingly) that my childhood intuitions weren’t wrong after all: ‘gravity’ is not ‘Gravity’. But, lemme tell ya, none of this made that fall from the school ground playbars any softer when I hit the ground.
Thanks gravity. And science.
References
1. Tipler, Paul A. 1995. Physics For Scientists and Engineers. Worth Publishers. 3rd ed.
2. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, “Eye and Mind.” The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie, trans. Carleton Dallery, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Pg.1,2 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, “Eye and Mind.” The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie, trans. Carleton Dallery, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Pg.1,2
3. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pg. 4
