In which I learn that the acquisition of knowledge does not necessarily supplant earlier misconceptions.
We've started watching Farscape, or "Barfscape" as Oz has nicknamed it. We're getting the DVDs in dribs and drabs through Netflix. The latest disk arrived on Friday. Oz said, "And it's the only video we have right now. And these are bad. And there's only two episodes! That last Buffy disk? They have four episodes, so if one sucks, then you still have three others that are okay. But these stupid Barfscape disks have only two!" So that's the verdict: bad and not enough of it. Oz says that they need more space-babes too.
While we were watching the insufficient number of bad episodes on this disk, I was thinking about acceleration and gravity, and how would forces act on people in a large spaceship making sudden changes of direction. This is my continuing fallout from watching the first twenty minutes of the last Star Wars movie in which gravity plays a far greater role than it should. We must have really annoyed all the people near us in the theater with all our little coughs and giggles at the blatant disregard for basic laws of physics.
Then the action of the story moved beyond the ship. The characters were down on a planet and, in response to a suggestion to hold off on some operation till night, one of them said, "We don't know if this planet even has rotation!"
I thought, "Well, you're not floating off the surface, so that should be a clue—Oh! I took physics. Inverse square law! Gravity is massive bodies acting on each other, it doesn't matter if they're spinning." So that stupid "if the earth stopped spinning, gravity would disappear and we (and the atmosphere) would float off into space" factoid that I picked up as a child is totally, completely false and not fact-like at all. Somehow I've managed to learn lots and lots of science without doing any mental housecleaning to pitch out all the misconceptions I've accumulated over the years.
Oz and I then had a mildly informed conversation about angular momentum, why they put launch pads as close to the equator as possible, and whether you might feel lighter at the equator than at the poles.
383 words | August 28, 2005 07:49 PM | Wired