Sit down in your spot again, a quiet little clearing with just a few laid back trees. Perhaps the sound of the occasional bird, the rustle of a rodent here and there under the fallen debris. Sometimes it’s good to get some peace and quiet at the weekend.

Resting your back on a tree trunk, you look up to an outstretched branch of a nearby maple tree. Slowly, a single helicopter seed gently comes loose and silently whirls down to rest on the ground. Something between a featherweight seed and an entire planet just did that.

This something was given the name “gravity”, from the Latin word “gravitas” which can be translated as “heaviness”. What “heaviness” essentially does, is pull. Things with “heaviness”[1] pull each other closer, the “heavier” the objects the stronger they pull, and the “heaviest” object wins![2] But as forces go, the pull is so gentle you barely feel it. With a little stretch of our imaginations, lets really go into it.

Reach into your pockets and[3] take out a toy Thomas the Tank Engine train, with magnetic buffers, and a magnet. Placing them both on a flat surface, you hold down the magnet and watch Thomas gradually wheel along toward it. Almost with the same gentle pace as the falling seed, Thomas was pulled to the magnet.

We naturally perceive the falling seed to be nothing like Thomas moving to the magnet. They are different forces of course. But Thomas stuck to the magnet is akin to you sitting on the ground.

When you try to pull Thomas away from the magnet, you feel some resistance, the magnet is pulling him back. Trying to pick up a nice big stone, you feel some resistance. The stone feels heavy to you, but the Earth is much “heavier”, and its “heaviness” pulls the stone’s. It also pulls fluids in your inner ear[4], where nerves send impulses along to the brain to give you the feeling that “where-most-heavy-things-are-being-pulled-to” is “down”.

Jump “up”! You just as soon feel gravity pull you right back to the ground. Remember trying to fly as a child? That always happened didn’t it? Annoying! Pull Thomas and the magnet slightly apart and they snap right back together again when you let them go. The difference is, Thomas and the magnet are about the same size. The fact that you can jump at all on a 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg object tells you just how gentle gravity is. What if Earth’s gravity was as strong as the magnetic force? We just can’t comprehend such intensity, being thoroughly immobilised then completely flattened against the ground doesn’t even come close. Lets not go there! Luckily with both forces, the further away the objects get, the exponentially weaker the forces become. If you held up Thomas and the magnet and gradually pulled them apart, at first the pull-back would be strong but as you moved them further away from each other it would lessen and lessen until you didn’t feel it at all.

Now look up to the sky, and be grateful you can! Still holding the stone, you start to levitate, because why not. As you start to rise above the ground, you can still feel the Earth’s gravity pulling the stone “down”. As you move far away from Earth, this feeling lessens[5]. Well, now the feeling of the pull “down” is getting so small that holding the stone feels like holding a beach ball. Then eventually, you don’t even feel which way is up or down.

Stop here for a minute. You’re just still[6]. You let go of the stone and it just sort of stays there. The “heaviness” of you and the stone is actually pulling you towards each other, but so gently that it might as well not be happening at all. You’re both just not “heavy” enough.

Before you set off again, lets just move the Earth, because we can. Move it directly “above” you so that you don’t have to change direction. As you start to move again (don’t forget the stone!) eventually you start to feel a tiny bit like you’re upside down. The stone starts to move “up” like a helium balloon now, keep hold of it! As you get closer and closer, you feel more and more like you’re falling “up”. The rock is pulling you “up” a bit as well. Eventually you land on your head in the clearing in the wood again, just in time to see another helicopter seed come loose from its branch and twirl towards the ground, but this time your eyes tell you that the Earth is above you, and the seed is moving up, whilst your body tells you it’s moving down. Finally you fall over and flop “down” to the ground. Lying on your back, you look “up” at the sky again.

It’s now night (this works better at night). A clear one. The sky is a vast, dark, starry canvas over you. With your back flat on the ground you couldn’t fall back down any further, try to really feel the gravity holding you in place. Now, without moving, imagine you’re not looking up, but forward. Like looking out of a window of a spaceship, with a force like a magnet anchoring you to the wall.

You’re looking ahead far, far into space. Raise your gaze higher, and you’re also looking ahead in a different direction far, far into space. Lower your gaze toward your feet, and you’re looking ahead in yet another direction far, far into space. Feeling that you’re stuck by gravity to a vertical wall[7] almost gives you the sensation that beyond your feet is a long, long, long way down! Almost like there is a bottomless drop below you as vertical fields go down, and down, and down, until they fade away in the eternal distance. You almost feel as if you would fall down there forever if you slipped. Don’t worry though, you’re perfectly safe! You can even wave your arms and legs around if you like.

Take this moment to see the reality that everything is really in space, you and the Earth included. Look at the sheer vastness of it. Look ahead to the stars. So far ahead that they look no bigger than pin pricks. These unimaginably colossal objects with overwhelming, blinding brightness have such unthinkably crushing “heaviness” that they can hold entire planets moving in limbo around them. Those planets hold their own smaller objects in orbit as well, and on their surfaces still smaller objects are stuck to the ground. I wonder if any of those objects are things that feel “up” and “down” like we do? Or if they are in fact, depressed about their career prospects. Or even if they are stargazing right now too. Gazing out into the enormity of space, we might both see just how small our worries really are.

After lying down a while, you slowly get to your feet, gently allowing your coordinate system to adjust back to its normal state. The sky is “up” again, and the Earth is “down” again, not “pull-ward” or “heavy-ward” or “gravity-ward”.

Resting your hands in your pockets, you notice that they have “heaviness” too. You look back to the stars. The stars, the planets, and any other “objects” including your hands, are all made of the same basic “stuff”[8].

So as you leap forward and click your heels in the air on the way home, you’re doing the same thing the moon is doing, and the same thing the planets are doing around the stars! They’re just too quick in other directions for the stars to get them down. So next time you’re feeling down, move in other directions too. Keep moving. And, remember that going in to challenge your perceptions really can show you just how many other directions there are[9].

[1] Mass density, not weight. But one can compare mass densities in terms of how much things would weigh on Earth if you tried to lift them up. If you tried to lift up the moon from the ground it would be pretty heavy wouldn’t it!

[2] unless the others can run away!

[3] because you carry them around with you everywhere

[4] in the vestibular apparatus

[5] Just to be clear; you don’t get blinded by the sunlight, you don’t suffocate, your blood doesn’t evaporate, you don’t roast in the solar radiation, you don’t freeze solid, you don’t get a hole blown through you by a speeding meteoroid, and your head doesn’t explode! That would spoil the narrative

[6] For some first hand accounts of the experience of zero gravity, see the following link: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-do-people-feel-in-a/

[7] that’s the ground of course

[8] matter

[9] For example: https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/can-i-start-a-sentence-with-a-conjunction

Look around, in a park, a wood or any wild place. There is beauty. Even the ugly bits. They too have a kind of gnarled, wild, twisted essence to them. Within it all, there is even more.

Sitting beneath the trees, watching the leaves rustle in the breeze or drift down in autumn like confetti slowly sinking through the sunlight, or watching the little green shoots poking up through the bare earth on the woodland floor in spring. This all has an intrinsic feel of beauty to it. Beauty may not even be the word, it’s something more like an intrinsic harmony, or a kind of vibrant yet serene sort of wholesomeness. But for want of a better word, we’ll call it beauty.

This, is only the surface.

Behind it, beneath it, within it, or in any other bit we don’t see, there are things more beautiful still, in their essence. We live in a time when some of the bits we don’t see can actually be revealed to us by scientific knowledge. A physicist called Richard Feynman once spoke about this. He was often referred to as “the great explainer”. When he saw a thing of beauty he could also perceive its inner workings with his knowledge of science. In his mind, this scientific knowledge only added to the experience of it, instead of detracting from it.[1]

Feynman was said by many to be a man who understood his science so well that this kind of experience often came to him intuitively. This level of understanding is one of the goals of all true scientists. The difficulty is building an intuition based on firm scientific evidence, which involves endless self-questioning.[2] What Feynman called “Imagination in a tight straitjacket”![3]

But each step on the journey towards this goal reveals some of the beauty within. Michael Faraday once said this gem to his students: “I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.”[4]

To a great many people, it seems counter-intuitive that all the dry and joyless charts, equations, programming script, endless data and meticulous technical jargon that constitute the scientific practice of today could have anything to do with beauty. On the surface, these will nearly always not look beautiful themselves. They will more likely look arid and stressful, but not when you clearly understand what they’re describing. Just as the letters and words that make up your favourite novel would seem stressful to someone who has never learned to read.

Remember as a child when you looked at huge, thick books and struggled to understand how anyone could possibly attempt to read them, let alone find pleasure in it?

Yet, miraculously, no matter what font I’ve used, as you read these words you don’t see vast, complex arrays of combinations of boring, repeated symbols (I hope!). No. You see yourself standing on a cliff, looking out to sea. You see the sun setting as all the little surface waves dance, like thousands of tiny swaying, sparkling, shimmering mountain ranges bobbing up and down and crashing against each other. From the coast to the horizon, you see little dotted splashes sprinkled over the water as birds break the surface from above, and fish break it from beneath. Over all the water you see the calm reflection of the sun illuminating the clouds in fiery reds and oranges, then softening them to deep violets, blues and pinks as it sets slowly and gracefully down behind them.

This surface of the sea is beautiful and so is the woodland we were sitting in. But beneath the surface of the sea, is a whole other world so strange and different to us, yet beautiful and often in ways we had never imagined. It is the sea we can’t see. But it is still the sea. In the same way, beneath the superficial beauty of the woodland is a world that we can’t see, but it is still the woodland. Under the ground is a network of tunnels of many small rodents and insects, it’s still the woodland. The air pressure gradients that make the wind rustle the leaves, that is part of the woodland. The electron transitions in the biochemicals (sorry) that cause the green shoots to sprout from their seeds in spring, that is also part of the woodland. Even the gravity that flutters the leaves down, and directs the bulbs and seeds which way to send their roots and their shoots, even that is part of the woodland. It’s the woodland we don’t see, it’s “the sea we don’t see”, but it is still the sea.

Do you see? Maybe. Lets see if you can see the sea you don’t see by seeing if you can see what I see about this sea, scientifically. We’ll see how we go! OK I’ll stop…

…and…

…wait for it…

…sea you next time![5]

[1] The Pleasure of Finding Things Out BBC Horizon 1981

[2] Questions such as “Why am I still not getting this?!” and “Why oh why did I decide to do f***ing science!?” are quite common

[3] Tiny Machines The Feynman Talk on Nanotechnology 1984

[4] The Life and Letters of Faraday Vol. 2, p. 403 (1870) By Bence Jones

[5] I promise it won’t always be like this

Hello most excellent reader, with a bit of luck you may like reading what I might like writing, that would be the ideal arrangement. Lets see how it goes!

Nature does not act by purposes. — Erwin Schrödinger