Tuesday 30 December 2014

Getting Down With Gravity January 4th

I do hear quite a lot that Sir Isaac Newton invented Gravity which throws up images of people in the pre-Darwin days having to hold everything down and muttering how glad they will be when someone comes up with a fundamental force so they don't have to keep dragging the dining room table down from the ceiling.   
Luckily, Isaac Newton's head famously got hit by an apple and the rest is history but Gravity is a funny thing, pick something up off the floor and that's you defying the gravitational pull of a whole Planet so gravity is notoriously flaky which is why January 4th 2015 should be marked down as 'strap down the sofa day' because that's the day that an inter-planetary alignment takes place.
The social networking platforms have been buzzing with the screenshot of NASA’s tweet stating that there is an the phenomenon will cause a gravitational imbalance on Earth, causing people and objects to float for a few minutes.
According to British astronomer Patrick Moore, at exactly 9:47 on January 4th, Pluto will pass directly behind Jupiter, in relation to Earth. This rare alignment will mean that the combined gravitational force of the two planets would exert a stronger tidal pull, temporarily counteracting the Earth’s own gravity and making people virtually weightless. Moore calls this the Jovian-Plutonian Gravitational Effect.
There are those who claim this to be false, pointing out that Patrick Moore died in 2012 and NASA are denying it and the small matter of Pluto and Jupiter being on opposite sides of the Solar System that day but just to be safe don't use the toilet between 9.47am and 10.52am on the 4th January because if you are still in the vicinity at 10.53am when Pluto and Jupiter unalign themselves, it won't be apples that fall down on your head.

1 comment:

Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...
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