h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Wasn't it douglas adams who postulated that if bread always falls butter side down and cats always land on their feet, if you tied a slice of toast onto the back of a cat, you'd have anti-gravity as one would cancel out the other...
Or am i thinking of somebody else...

i believe you are correct, and the way to fly is to forget how to fall. (where's my DNA book when i need it!?)

Well I know that the forgetting how to fall bit is from 'life the universe and everything', and is something like 'there's a knack to flyin. The idea is to throw yourself at the ground and miss'. As for the toast ant cat thing, there's a whole thread about it under the Murphy's law article.

The tricky bit, of course, being the miss.

"Life, the Universe and Everything" goes on to say that missing the ground is easier if you are distracted at a crucial moment, and that various flying scholls throughout the Galaxy often employ persons with unusual features as distractors to assist their clients....

and that most genuine hitchhikers can't afford to join such clubs, though some may be able to gain employment at one

Great entry - short but fascinating - and why do I suddenly get the urge to 'try this at home'?

No, no, no... Tying a piece of buttered toast to a cat's back should give you a perpetual motion machine, not anti-gravity

Although I can readily accept the scientific principles behind the precipating toast phenomenon, surely the main issue here is the sheer malevolence of the force of gravity. This supposedly weak force is pure evil. Let us form an anti-gravity movement and dispel this joyless party pooper. Without it, we will be able to fly - and how cool would that be.

Too right!

Time to spread the word: "Gravity is a myth, the Earth sucks!"

Wasn't that in a Dnald Sutherland/Candice Bergen Movie title sequence for a 1970 antiwar mivie whose name escapes me... ??

opps mispelled Donald and movie

Getting Straight was the title! It featured an apple that students passed back in force in the title sequence and when D.S. takes the apple from the student at the end of the titles, it reads"

There is no gravity, the earth sucks" in bitten out letters on the apple. quite a nibbling feat, and several times the apple is demonstrating that darn gravity thing. Shades of Issac Newton and Karl Gustov Jung

ooooookay, so can Asimov and Jung rotate in their graves as we debate psychology and physics on the h2g2? is that antigravity or anti-matter? uncle albert, mister dirac and pandora, the mortals are attempting to discuss relativity again! who left a cat in that box?

Feynmann said it was that schroedinger guy

i never could spell that name.

I think you have the wrong Isaac- he was referring to Newton, not Asimov.

I talked to Isaac Newton back in August 2000
He not only rolled over in his grave , he got out entirely and
was giving lectures at Woolthorpe, and he looked ghastly white
said he was about 360 years old at the time.