Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Gravity versus Evolution

( http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/12/gravity-is-just.html ). Ok , here I veer off , being nerdy again. And btw, it is extremely ironical that I am talking about Gravity AND Evolution the very next day after writing
"All about myself blogs - Almost every blog is. You are in the wrong place , if you are looking to read about cosmology or genetics. "
Hmm.... that is how life humbles you at every turn. Now Seth Godin for whom I have a lot of respect says

"Newton gets all kinds of credit. They call it the Law of Gravity. They put his picture on pages that profile geniuses. They say he discovered gravity. Nonsense. He just named it."

--- wooww wait a minute. He was the first one to write a precise expression for gravity. In other words while people who came before him had some qualitative understanding, Newton went ahead and bam -- gave us a formula.

Granted it was somewhat inaccurate (you need to allow for some relativistic effects and perhaps even more stuff that we don't even know about as Seth points out), still it is heck of a lot more useful a theory than Darwin's evolution. It wasn't just spiel. It let us develop accurate projectiles (err missiles), compute the stress induced by their own weight in numerous materials used in construction and many other such precise utilitarian calculations.

In contrast, Darwin's theory was more of a paper giant. It was the elucidation of the structure of genetic material by Watson and Crick (or perhaps Rosalind Franklin, depending on who tells the story) that ultimately led to an explosion in the study of genetics.


"If the timeframe of the message of your marketing is longer than the attention span (or lifetime) of the person you are marketing to, you have your work cut out for you as well."

I would believe that it is easy to say "Man came from ape and was not created by God on the seventh day" and hold someone's attention (or wrath) than to try and convince them that the gravitational attraction between two bodies drops inversely to the square of the distance between them.

Anyways, Seth is Seth. He does have his own unique way of making his point. I do agree with him on the Atkins diet though ;-)

3 comments:

bess said...

First comment! Your a virgin no more, Surya.
Congratulations on your blog.

bess said...

What? No edit button. I'd go back and change that first "your" to "you're". But hey, perfection's overrated.

Surya said...

hahaha. Thanks Bess, for taking away my virginity (in da blogosphere). And I have already moved my blog over to Word Press.

http://surya2cents.wordpress.com/

Leave ur comments there as well. ;-)