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The Illusion of Gravity

Gravity is an illusion, says the Scientific American
in its issue of November 2005.

Well, then how come that I cannot fly like a bird?

Oh no, smiles Professor Juan Maldacena.
Gravity, he explains, is one of the dimensions of space,
and it might be a holographic phenomenon
caused by the interactions of quantum particles
and fields in a lower-dimensional domain.

It sounds good, professor, but are we closer now to
the understanding of reality than we were last October?
As you know, Newton thought that gravitation
was the attractive force between masses of matter
but Einstein concluded that it resulted from
the warping of space and time by objects that follow
the geometrical curvature of the cosmos.

Now let us change a bit the topic and talk about
evidence. We still do not have the evidence that the sun
will rise tomorrow. Yes, the probability for it is high.
But science is an evidence-based enterprise and we just
don’t have the evidence for tomorrow’s sunrise, have we?
Mind you, chaos, chance or quantum entanglement show
that nature does not care much about laws of causality.

Hi, a bunch of atoms just defied gravity in my room
and jumped to the moon.

Well, class starts at 8: 00 in New York but now
it is already 8: 13, so I am late. Did time cause me being
late? Or maybe it was the traffic. Or perhaps I was late
because I misplaced my briefcase. No problem,
gravity is just an illusion, let us hop to San Francisco,
and I am early.

And now, if you don’t mind,
I have a question: Does your mind create
holographic phenomena? And can we comprehend
the concrete universe through the abstract metaphors
of matter, energy, space, time and gravity?

poem by Paul Hartal
Added by Poetry Lover
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