Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Black Holes and Dams

For some stories of gravity at its most intense I have been checking out Caleb Scharf's Gravity's Engines: How Bubble-Blowing Black Holes Rule Galaxies, Stars, and Life in the Cosmos.  For such mind blowing subject matter it turns out to be a pretty good read, partially because he can find metaphors for the phenomena he describes that the reader reader can intuitively grasp.  The Hoover Dam is one such metaphor.  Scharf calls it a "temple of gravity":

The enormous forms of concrete and steel are poised in space and time, feeding off the energy of the Colorado River as it squeezes through the gorge.  The dam is much more than a great engineering feat; it feels profoundly connected to the hidden glue and threads binding the universe together.
He continues to use the dam as a way introduce the reader to the mind bending effects of gravity on scales impossible to image, bolstering his metaphor with the star map set in the floor beneath the winged sentinels representing the republic.  The positions of the stars depicted in the map point to the exact date the dam was dedicated by President Roosevelt.  These kind of connections root his descriptions and allow us to follow him to the edges of our perceptions and well beyond our everyday understanding of how things work.



Thursday, January 15, 2015

Story Sketches

As I have explained this project to friends and family a few of them have relayed their own remarkable experiences with gravity.  Below are a few working sketches of some of their stories.





Falling Tiger Dream

An episode from a dream I had on 7/30/2014:

It is discovered that tigers secret an enzyme that is somehow powerful enough to dominate the world.  Many countries race to gather the enzyme.  It is discovered that tigers only secret the enzyme while they are free falling or floating outside earth gravitational pull.  Scientist team up with skydivers to run a program of tiger enzyme secretion harvest that involves parachuting tigers tandem with scientist, who then extract blood when falling and harvest the enzyme from the blood they gather.

- Jeremy