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I believe we give rather too much credit to Sir Isaac Newton for his ‘so called’ discoveries. Just because an apple bounces off your noggin while you’re sitting under a tree really doesn’t give you the right to go pontificating at tedious length on the gravitational relationships between celestial bodies and telling everybody that you’ve discovered the answer to life, the universe and everything. Anyway, if you go sitting under apple trees you must expect, on occasion, to be attacked from above by pieces of fruit. I think it is also worth pointing out, vis-à-vis the ‘discoveries’, that the year of the bonce-bouncing Granny Smith incident was 1666, so at the very time when the ‘great scientist’ was telling the world that all things fall downwards, London was going up – in smoke – in the Great Fire thereof. If he’d spent a little less time loafing about under trees and a little more inventing something useful, like the smoke-alarm, he might have saved a lot of poor people a great deal of inconvenience.
Newton is also famous for his ‘Laws of Motion’ – A body remains in a state of rest or uniform motion unless acted upon by a force. (It moves if you shove it – Brilliant!) Was Izzie really the first to discover the bleedin’ obvious? But then this is also the man who spent several years as an alchemist trying to turn base metals into gold so perhaps we shouldn’t expect too much.
Now, our Isaac, having identified gravitation as the fundamental force controlling the motions of the celestial bodies, never found its cause, so he came up with some half-baked idea that it was all caused by the impacts of unseen particles. Oh, very convenient! “So, show us these particles, Izzie.” “Can’t, they’re invisible.” “How d’ya know they’re there then?” “Well, if you take the square root of the mass of the universe (M) and divide it by....” “Good night, Izzie.”
What he never hit on, and what I have discovered by simple observation, is that gravity is actually directly related to time and age. I am quite sure that many other sexegenarians (old farts), like myself, will have noticed that the force of gravity increases with the passing of the years. Twenty years ago the coal bucket was hardly more than half the weight it is today and my feet are considerably heavier than they used to be. Paving slabs and other concrete objects which in times past would fairly leap skywards at the merest touch now seem obstinately rooted to terra-firma, and the good lady wife, who I once carried lightly over the threshold, can now either walk in under her own steam or she can damn well stay outside.
Further evidence of the effect of time upon gravitational force can be seen in the anatomical changes which occur with advancing years. The broad chest which once adorned the area immediately below the chin descends rapidly to where the stomach used to be, and for the female of the species a certain reinforcement of the bra-straps becomes increasingly necessary as the years ebb away. Buttocks and jowls head for the ground at an alarming rate and the whole quivering mass of aging anatomical decrepitude, when posed naked in front of the mirror (don’t try this at home!), sags floor-ward off the skeleton like a well-washed duvet draped over a clothes horse.
So, next time some half-witted so-called scientist tells you that your frozen plumbing is down to ‘Global Warming’ or that if you stick your head out on a sunny day you’ll die of skin cancer, tell him to go forth and multiply. You’ve got quite enough to worry about trying to keep your bum from falling around your feet.
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