Why Stuff Falls Down

Table of Contents

1. We Got This, Right? 1

Facts, Hypotheses, Theories (and Gravity) 2

What Direction Is Your Down? 4

Elements and Atoms and Particles, Oh My! 6

Meanwhile In India... 9

Our Round Planet, and the Direction of Down 11

2. Common Sense Ain't Always Right 13

Aristotle Pontificates 13

Stevin and de Groot Drop the Ball 14

Galileo Gets Theoretical 15

Let's Drop the Ball! 18

3. Science Settles On a Method 21

Is That Idea Falsifiable? (Does It Make Predictions That You Can Test) 27

4. Scientific Notation 29

5. Weighty Subjects 32

It Takes Force To Mess With Inertia 32

Mass Is Not Weight 34

An Orbit Is Gravity Balanced by Inertia 35

Let's Play With an Orbit 40

6. Newton Asks "Why?" 42

Newton's Laws of Motion 46

An Apple, Inertia, and an External Force 47

Newton's Laws and Gravity 51

7. So Close, and Yet - So Far 54

8. Secrets Hiding in the Light 56

Invisible Forces 56

How To Catch a Beam of Light 60

thereal Dreams 62

Time, Distance, and Mass Get Squishy 65

The Experiment That Revealed the Unseen 69

9. Squeezing and Stretching Reality (Special Relativity) 73

Einstein Sets Sail On an Elastic Sea of Spacetime 76

Picking Your Relatives 77

Traveling a Straight Stretch of Highway at 60 mph 79

Pick a Frame, Any Frame 81

Reality Is Relative 81

Lightspeed Is How the Universe Is Built 83

Time is a Location 84

Spacetime's "Speed" of Causality Isn't Just a Speed 86

You Are Traveling At Lightspeed Through Time 88

Welcome to the Twins Paradox 95

10. The Day the Universe Got Bent (General Relativity) 99

Speed, Velocity, Acceleration, and an Inertial Frame of Reference 100

You Don't Want to be in Einstein's Happiest Thought 102

Inertia, Acceleration, and Einstein's Gravity 103

Elevators in Spaaaaaace! 103

Einstein's Orbit 107

Mass Creates a Field of Warped Spacetime 108

Mercury's Motions 115

Go In And Never Come Out 116

Gravity Does the Wave 117

Your Head Runs Faster Than Your Feet 118

11. The Quest for a Theory of Everything 124

TOE #1: A Song of Superstrings 126

TOE #2: Loopy Gravity 129

12. Are We There Yet? 133

P.S. The Pull of the Dark Side 135

Appendix A: Breaking the Universe to Bits (Quantum Mechanics Part 1) 139

The Heat of Light 140

Granular Light 143

E=hv 152

Appendix B: Unveiling the Absurd (Quantum Mechanics Part 2) 158

Light Travels Like a Wave 159

The Double-Slit Experiment 160

Atomic Fingerprints in the Rainbow 162

Leaping Electrons 163

An Atom Isn't Built The Way It "Should" Be 165

Quantum Orbits 166

All Atoms Would Become Inert Lumps 167

Quantum Energy Levels to the Rescue! 168

The Absurd Behavior of Quantum Particles 171

Wave-Particle Duality 171

Quantum Waves Ride on a Quantum Field 172

The Collapse of the Wave Function 173

A Standard Model of All the Bits 177

The Uncertain Wavicle (Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle) 180

Virtually Invisible 182

Entangled Relationships 182

Wormholes in Quantum Space 183

About the Author 191