Between work, trying to finish my AppEngine book, and doing all of the technical work getting Scientopia running smoothly on the new hosting service, I haven’t had a lot of time for writing new blog posts.
But in the process of doing my technical work around here, I was browsing through some archives, and seeing some of my old posts that I’d forgotten about. And odds are, if I forgot about it, then there are a lot of readers who’ve never seen it. So I’m going to bring back some of the classic old material.
For example, Neal Adams. Comic book fans will know about Neal: he’s a comic book artist who worked on some of the most famous comics in the 1970s: he drew Batman, Superman, Deadman, Green Lantern, the Spectre, the X-men. More recently, he’s done a lot of work in general commercial art – for example, he did the animated nasonex bee commercials a few years ago.
But he’s not just an artist. No, he’s so much more than that! He’s also a brilliant scientist. He’s much smarter than all of those eggheads with college degrees. They’re struggling to build giant particle accelerators to help understand things like mass. But Neal – he’s got them beat. He’s figured out exactly how things work!
According to Neal, there is no such thing as gravity – it’s all just pressure. People trying to figure out stuff about how gravity works are just wasting time. The earth (and all other planets) is actually a matter factory – matter is constantly created in the hollow center of the earth, and the pressure of all the new matter forces the earth to constantly expand. The constant expansion creates pressure on the surface as things expand – and that constant expansion is what creates gravity! You’re standing on a point on the surface of the earth. And the earth is expanding – the ground is pushing up on you because of that expansion. You’re not being pulled down towards the earth: the earth is pushing up on you.
And according to Neal, the best part is the math works!. In the original version of this post, I had a link to Neal’s page with his explanation of how the math works – but he has, since then, moved most of his science stuff behind a paywall – you now need to pay Neal $20 to get to see his material, so I can’t provide a direct link. But it’s in a video here, and you can see the original using the Wayback Machine.