Zero Gravity Quotes

A cat purring on your lap while you sip hot tea, is there anything better? Oh, and you’re floating in a zero gravity environment.

I so desperately wanted to be his gravity, to hold him on this earth and keep him from leaving me.

I squeeze her and she laughs and looks up at me, "Jules, you incorrigible rake," she scolds, and then gives me a smile that makes me feel we're in zero gravity. Floating inches above the floor. weightless and timeless, and I wish this song would last forever.

When NASA started sending up astronauts, they discovered that ballpoint pens don’t work in zero gravity. So they spent twelve million dollars and more than a decade developing a pen that writes under any condition, on almost every surface. The Russians used a pencil.

I’ve tried to imagine how she’d feel knowing that her cells went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity, or that they helped with some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization. I’m pretty sure that she—like most of us—would be shocked to hear that there are trillions more of her cells growing in laboratories now than there ever were in her body.

I love the excesses of beauty, there is never enough sunlight in the world I will live in, never enough room for love.

During the heat of the space race in the 1960s, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration decided it needed a ballpoint pen to write in the zero gravity confines of its space capsules. After considerable research and development, the Astronaut Pen was developed at a cost of approximately $1 million US. The pen worked and also enjoyed some modest success as a novelty item back here on earth. The Soviet Union, faced with the same problem, used a pencil.

Been a long road to follow Been there and one tomorrow Without saying goodbye to yesterday Are the memories I hold Still valid? Or have the tears deluded them.. Something somewhere out there Is calling... Zero Gravity, What's it like? Is somebody there Beyond these heavy aching feet? Am I going home? Will I hear someone? Singin solace to the silent moon Still the road keeps on telling me To go on... Something is pulling me, I feel the gravity Of it all.

It was a strange lightness, a drifting feeling. Zero gravity. I understood that everything that once seemed solid and immovable might just float away. And that this was a truth of life, not an illusion in the grieving mind of a child. Everything that is hard and heavy in your world is made up of billions of molecules in constant motion offering the illusion of permanence. But it all tends toward breaking down and falling away. Some things just go more quickly, more surprisingly, than others.

Not only is it a wholly remarkable book, it is also a highly successful one – more popular than the Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better selling than Fifty-three More Things to do in Zero Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Colluphid's trilogy of philosophical blockbusters Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway? In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitch-Hiker's Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON'T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.

The rest of us, not chosen for enlightenment, left on the outside of Earth, at the mercy of a Gravity we have only begun to learn how to detect and measure, must go on blundering inside our front-brain faith in Kute Korrespondences, hoping that for each psi-synthetic taken from Earth's soul there is a molecule, secular, more or less ordinary and named, over here - kicking endlessly among the plastic trivia, finding in each Deeper Significance and trying to string them all together like terms of a power series hoping to zero in on the tremendous and secret Function whose name, like the permuted names of God, cannot be spoken... plastic saxophone reed sounds of unnatural timbre, shampoo bottle ego-image, Cracker Jack prize one-shot amusement, home appliance casing fairing for winds of cognition, baby bottles tranquilization, meat packages disguise of slaughter, dry-cleaning bags infant strangulation, garden hoses feeding endlessly the desert... but to bring them together, in their slick persistence and our preterition... to make sense out of, to find the meanest sharp sliver of truth in so much replication, so much waste... [Gravity's Rainbow, p. 590]

We live lives that are waveforms constantly changing with time, now positive, now negative. Only at moments of great serenity is it possible to find the pure, the informationless state of signal zero.

As on Earth, weight-bearing exercise is the best way to hang on to your bone. In zero gravity, of course, you have to create your weight.

If there is a lot of matter, gravity will cause space to curve back on itself, yielding the spherical shape. If there is little matter, space is free to flare outward in the Pringles shape. And if there is just the right amount of matter, space will have zero curvature.*

And tonight I'm feelin like an astronaut, sending sos from this tiny box,and i lost the signal when i lifted off, now i'm stuck up here and the world forgot, can i please come down? Cuz i'm tired of drifting round and round....can i please come down? Now I lie awake and scream in my zero gravity...and its starting to weigh down on me....lets abort this mission now....CAN I PLEASE COME DOWN? So tonight I'm calling all the astronauts, all the lonely people that the world forgot, if you hear my voice, come pick me up, cuz ur all i've got...

So, this Doctor Who guy travels to different galaxies in the TARDIS thing?" There was only silence on the line, so as always, I felt the need to fill it. "Because it's not very aerodynamic, and it doesn't seem like it's built to withstand the pressure of zero gravity

Theres nothing more fun than a kitten in zero gravity.

Not only is it a wholly remarkable book, it is also a highly successful one – more popular than The Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better selling than Fifty-three More Things to do in Zero Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Colluphid’s trilogy of philosophical blockbusters

I will not try to describe the beauty of life in a Swarm ‒ their zero-gravity globe cities and comet farms and thrust clusters, their micro-orbital forests and migrating rivers and the ten thousand colors and textures of life at Rendezvous Week. Suffice it to say that I believe the Ousters have done what Web humanity has not in the past millennia: evolved. While we live in our derivative cultures, pale reflections of Old Earth life, the Ousters have explored new dimensions of aesthetics and ethics and biosciences and art and all the things that must change and grow to reflect the human soul.

It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted…secretly, it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology…by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the energy-burst of war, crying, “Money be damned, the very life of [insert name of Nation] is at stake,” but meaning, most likely, dawn is nearly here, I need my night’s blood, my funding, funding, ahh more, more…The real crises were crises of allocation and priority, not among firms—it was only staged to look that way—but among the different Technologies, Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft, and their needs which are understood only by the ruling elite… Yes but Technology only responds (how often this argument has been iterated, dogged, humorless as a Gaussian reduction, among the younger Schwarzkommando especially), “All very well to talk about having a monster by the tail, but do you think we’d’ve had the Rocket if someone, some specific somebody with a name and a penis hadn’t wanted to chuck a ton of Amatol 300 miles and blow up a block full of civilians? Go ahead, capitalize the T on technology, deify it if it’ll make you feel less responsible—but it puts you in with the neutered, brother, in with the eunuchs keeping the harem of our stolen Earth for the numb and joyless hardons of human sultans, human elite with no right at all to be where they are—” We have to look for power sources here, and distribution networks we were never taught, routes of power our teachers never imagined, or were encouraged to avoid…we have to find meters whose scales are unknown in the world, draw our own schematics, getting feedback, making connections, reducing the error, trying to learn the real function…zeroing in on what incalculable plot? Up here, on the surface, coal-tars, hydrogenation, synthesis were always phony, dummy functions to hide the real, the planetary mission yes perhaps centuries in the unrolling…this ruinous plant, waiting for its Kabbalists and new alchemists to discover the Key, teach the mysteries to others…

The matter in the universe is made out of positive energy. However, the matter is all attracting itself by gravity. Two pieces of matter that are close to each other have less energy than the same two pieces a long way apart. This is because you have to expend energy to separate them. You have to pull against the gravitational force attracting them together. Thus, in a sense, the gravitational field has negative energy. In the case of the whole universe, one can show that this negative gravitational energy exactly cancels the positive energy of the matter. So the total energy of the universe is zero.

Her tangle of wild black curls had enacted medusa feats in zero gravity.

In zero gravity, there’s no need for a mattress or pillow; you already feel like you’re resting on a cloud, perfectly supported, so there’s no tossing and turning to find a more comfortable position.

according to the laws of nature concerning gravity and motion – laws that are among the oldest in science – space itself is a vast store of negative energy. Enough to ensure that everything adds up to zero.

There is a plain under a dim sky. It is covered with gentle rolling curves that might remind you of something else if you saw it from a long way away, and if you did see it from a long way away you'd be very glad that you were, in fact, a long way away. Three gray figures floated just above it. Exactly what they were can't be described in normal language. Some people might call them cherubs, although there was nothing rosy-cheeked about them. They might be rumored among those who see to it that gravity operates and that time stays separate from space. Call them auditors. Auditors of reality. They were in conversation without speaking. They didn't need to speak. They just changed reality so that they had spoken. One said, It has never happened before. Can it be done? One said, It will have to be done. There is a personality. Personalities come to an end. Only forces endure. It said this with satisfaction. One said, Besides... there have been irregularities. Where you get personality, you get irregularities. Well-known fact. One said, He has worked inefficiently? One said, No. We can't get him there. One said, That is the point. The word is him. Becoming a personality is inefficient. We don't want it to spread. Supposing gravity developed a personality? Supposing it decided to like people? One said, Got a crush on them, that sort of thing? One said, in a voice that would have been even chillier if it was not already at absolute zero, No. One said, Sorry. Just my little joke. One said, Besides, sometimes he wonders about his job. Such speculation is dangerous. One said, No argument there. One said, Then we are agreed? One, who seemed to have been thinking about something, said, Just one moment. Did you not just use the singular pronoun "my?" Not developing a personality, are you? One said, guiltily, Who? Us? One said, Where there is personality, there is discord. One said, Yes. Yes. Very true. One said, All right. But watch it in future. One said, Then we are agreed? They looked up at the face of Azrael, outlined against the sky. In fact, it was the sky. Azrael nodded, slowly. One said, Very well. Where is this place? One said, It is the Discworld. It rides through space on the back of a giant turtle. One said, Oh, one of that sort. I hate them. One said, You're doing it again. You said "I." One said, No! No! I didn't! I never said "I!"... oh, bugger... It burst into flame and burned in the same way that a small cloud of vapor burns, quickly and with no residual mess. Almost immediately, another one appeared. It was identical in appearance to its vanished sibling. One said, Let that be a lesson. To become a personality is to end. And now... let us go.

Suppose a hole were dug from one side of Earth, through the center, and out the other side. What would happen to a man if he jumped into the hole? When he got to the middle of the Earth would he keep falling or would he stop? DEBBIE CANDLER RED BUD, ILLINOIS He would be vaporized by the 11,000° Fahrenheit temperature of the pressurized molten iron core. Ignoring this complication, he would gain speed continuously from the moment he jumped into the hole until he reached the center of Earth where the force of gravity is zero. But he will be traveling so fast that he will overshoot the center and slow down continuously until he reached zero velocity at the exact moment he emerges on the other side. Unless somebody grabs him, he will fall back down the hole and repeat his journey indefinitely. A one-way trip through Earth would take about forty-five minutes.

Humans need challenges to overcome, just like a muscle needs resistance to grow. In a zero-gravity environment, an astronaut’s muscles atrophy because there is no resistance. The government giving you a bunch of handouts and living your life for you is the equivalent of doing push-ups in outer space. Big government is like the void of space—it’s massive, constantly expanding, and if we immerse ourselves in it, we’ll simply wither away.

Guess I’ll never find out what happened between me and Rick Springfield at my senior prom on the moon. Which sucks, because we were just grinding on a zero gravity dance floor, and he was telling me that I was way cuter than Jessie’s girl.

Our bodies are full of fluids and soft tissue, we aren't built for space. Our thoughts, the things we know are sturdier in zero gravity, but they originate in gray matter, they change shape, even disappear in the face of disorientation, dehydration, oxygen deprivation. Because ideas require bodies too.

She had grown tired of the pouffy floating hair of zero gravity and, after a few weeks of clamping it down with baseball caps, had figured out how to make this shorter cut work for her. The haircut had spawned terabytes of Internet commentary from men, and a few women, who apparently had nothing else to do with their time.

La Caravelle, La Grenouille, Orsini’s. What dining experiences with this family. And who knew from palate cleansers? At Lutèce, Lulu insisted he taste escargot.

The general theory of relativity describes the force of gravity and the large-scale structure of the universe, that is, the structure on scales from only a few miles to as large as a million million million million (1 with twenty-four zeros after it) miles, the size of the observable universe. Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, deals with phenomena on extremely small scales, such as a millionth of a millionth of an inch. Unfortunately, however, these two theories are known to be inconsistent with each other – they cannot both be correct.

Not only is it a wholly remarkable book, it is also a highly successful one—more popular than the Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better selling than Fifty-three More Things to Do in Zero Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Coluphid’s trilogy of philosophical blockbusters, Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes and Who Is This God Person Anyway?

As she lies in the bed she weeps, for Bing, for the melting, shimmering candles, the filigree on the holiday tablecloth. She is an unwilling astronaut, bumping against the thick glass of the ship, her line tangling lazily in zero gravity, face mask fogged with fear. My sister reaches across, over the bed, and we both embrace the mother, holding her on earth, pulling her onto the ship, breathing our oxygen into her line. Ten hours later she is dead.

FROM TIME TO TIME, there was talk among the astronauts that it might be nice to have a drink with dinner. Beer is a no-fly, because without gravity, carbonation bubbles don’t rise to the surface. “You just get a foamy froth,” says Bourland. He says Coke spent $450,000 developing a zero-gravity dispenser, only to be undone by biology. Since bubbles also don’t rise to the top of a stomach, the astronauts had trouble burping. “Often a burp is accompanied by a liquid spray,” Bourland adds.

Newton's laws specifically state that, while the gravity of a planet gets weaker and weaker the farthest from it you travel, there is no distance where the force of gravity reaches zero. The planet Jupiter, with its mighty gravitational field, bats out of harm's way many comets that would otherwise wreak havoc on the inner solar system. Jupiter acts as a gravitational shield for Earth, a burly big brother, allowing long (hundred-million-year) stretches of relative peace and quiet on Earth. Without Jupiter's protection, complex life would have a hard time becoming interestingly complex, always living at risk of extinction from a devastating impact.

Calvino remembered he had no food in the house and would have to go shopping on Sukhumvit Road. Then he planned to crawl into his bed and sleep, the kind of deep sleep without dreams or hopes, a sleep without regrets, without knowing or thinking how things got the way they are or how occasional fragments of decency escaped the forces of gravity.

It’s the obvious heaviness of the heads, their vacancy, the way gravity pulls them down and there’s no life anymore to hold them up. The heads are zeros. Though if you look and look, as we are doing, you can see the outlines of the features under the white cloth, like gray shadows. The heads are the heads of snowmen, with the coal eyes and the carrot noses fallen out. The heads are melting.

There had been an uprising by the Bondelswaartz in 1922, and general turmoil in the country. His radio experiments interrupted, he sought refuge, along with a few score other whites, in the villa of a local landowner named Foppl. The place was a stronghold, cut off on all sides by deep ravines. After a few months of siege and debauchery, “haunted by a profound disgust for everything European,” Mondaugen went out alone into the bush, ended up living with the Ovatjimba, the aardvark people, who are the poorest of the Hereros. They accepted him with no questions. He thought of himself, there and here, as a radio transmitter of some kind, and believed that whatever he was broadcasting at the time was at least no threat to them. In his electro-mysticism, the triode was as basic as the cross in Christianity. Think of the ego, the self that suffers a personal history bound to time, as the grid. The deeper and true Self is the flow between cathode and plate. The constant, pure flow. Signals - sense data, feeling, memories relocating - are put onto the grid, and modulate the flow. We live lives that are waveforms constantly changing with time, now positive, now negative. Only at moments of great serenity is it possible to find the pure, the informationless state of signal zero. “In the name of the cathode, the anode, and the holy grid.

The elevator was of the new sort that ran by gravitic repulsion. Gaal entered and others flowed in behind him. The operator closed a contact. For a moment, Gaal felt suspended in space as gravity switched to zero, and then he had weight again in small measure as the elevator accelerated upward. Deceleration followed and his feet left the floor. He squawked against his will. The operator called out, "Tuck your feet under the railing. Can't you read the sign?

When they were about a hundred meters from the death lines, Yifan waved Cheng Xin to a stop. Each death line was about twenty or thirty meters in diameter, and from here, they resembled death columns. “These are probably the darkest things in the universe,” Cheng Xin said. The death lines showed no details except an exceptional blackness showing the boundaries of the zero-lightspeed region, with no real surface. Looking up, the lines showed up clearly even against the dark backdrop of space. “These are the deadest things in the universe as well,” said Guan Yifan. “Zero-lightspeed means absolute, one hundred percent death. Inside it, every fundamental particle, every quark is dead. There is no vibration. Even without a source of gravity inside, each death line is a black hole. A zero-gravity black hole. Anything that falls in cannot reemerge.” Yifan picked up a rock and tossed it toward one of the death lines. The rock disappeared inside the absolute darkness. “Can your lightspeed ships produce death lines?” Cheng Xin asked. “Far from it.” “So you’ve seen these before, then?” “Yes, but only rarely.” Cheng

Three hundred years ago mathematicians were learning to break the cannonball's rise and fall into stairsteps of range and height, Δx and Δy, allowing them to grow smaller and smaller, approaching zero as armies of eternally shrinking midgets galloped upstairs and down again, the patter of their diminishing feet growing finer, smoothing out into continuous sound. This analytic legacy has been handed down intact–it brought the technicians at Peenemünde to peer at the Askania films of Rocket flights, frame by frame, Δx by Δy, flightless themselves . . . film and calculus, both pornographies of flight.

The answer is that the total energy of the universe is exactly zero. The matter in the universe is made out of positive energy. However, the matter is all attracting itself by gravity. Two pieces of matter that are close to each other have less energy than the same two pieces a long way apart, because you have to expend energy to separate them against the gravitational force that is pulling them together. Thus, in a sense, the gravitational field has negative energy. In the case of a universe that is approximately uniform in space, one can show that this negative gravitational energy exactly cancels the positive energy represented by the matter. So the total energy of the universe is zero.

The general theory of relativity describes the force of gravity and the large-scale structure of the universe, that is, the structure on scales from only a few miles to as large as a million million million million (1 with twenty-four zeros after it) miles, the size of the observable universe. Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, deals with phenomena on extremely small scales, such as a millionth of a millionth of an inch. Unfortunately, however, these two theories are known to be inconsistent with each other—they cannot both be correct. One of the major endeavors in physics today, and the major theme of this book, is the search for a new theory that will incorporate them both—a quantum theory of gravity.

It's a dangerous game Cherrycoke's playing here. Often he thinks the sheer volume of information pouring in through his fingers will saturate, burn him out...she seems determined to overwhelm him with her history and its pain, and the edge of it, always fresh from the stone, cutting at his hopes, at all their hopes. He does respect her: he knows that very little of this is female theatricals, really. She has turned her face, more than once, to the Outer Radiance and simply seen nothing there. And so each time has taken a little more of the Zero into herself. It comes down to courage, at worst an amount of self-deluding that's vanishingly small: he has to admire it, even if he can't accept her glassy wastes, her appeals to a day not of wrath but of final indifference...

If the total energy of the universe must always remain zero, and it costs energy to create a body, how can a whole universe be created from nothing? That is why there must be a law like gravity. Because gravity is attractive, gravitational energy is negative: One has to do work to separate a gravitationally bound system, such as the earth and moon. This negative energy can balance the positive energy needed to create matter, but it’s not quite that simple. The negative gravitational energy of the earth, for example, is less than a billionth of the positive energy of the matter particles the earth is made of. A body such as a star will have more negative gravitational energy, and the smaller it is (the closer the different parts of it are to each other), the greater this negative gravitational energy will be. But before it can become greater than the positive energy of the matter, the star will collapse to a black hole, and black holes have positive energy. That’s why empty space is stable. Bodies such as stars or black holes cannot just appear out of nothing. But a whole universe can. Because gravity shapes space and time, it allows space-time to be locally stable but globally unstable. On the scale of the entire universe, the positive energy of the matter can be balanced by the negative gravitational energy, and so there is no restriction on the creation of whole universes. Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing in the manner described in Chapter 6. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.

After the shuttle took off, Cheng Xin continued to stare at the receding death lines. She said, “The Zero-Homers give me a bit of hope.” Yifan said, “The universe contains multitudes. You can find any kind of ‘people’ and world. There are idealists like the Zero-Homers, pacifists, philanthropists, and even civilizations dedicated only to art and beauty. But they’re not the mainstream; they cannot change the direction of the universe.” “It’s just like the world of humans.” “At least the Zero-Homers’ task will ultimately be completed by the cosmos itself.” “You mean the end of the universe?” “That’s right.” “But based on what I know, the universe will continue to expand, and become sparser and colder forever.” “That’s the old cosmology you know, but we’ve disproved it. The amount of dark matter had been underestimated. The universe will stop expanding and then collapse under gravity, finally forming a singularity and initiating another big bang. Everything will return to zero, or home. And so Nature remains the final victor.” “Will the new universe have ten dimensions?” “Who knows? There are infinite possibilities. That’s a brand-new universe, and a brand-new life.” *

If dimensions are virtual like the particles in quantum foam are virtual then, entanglement is information that is in more than one location (hologram). There are no particles, they may be wave packets but the idea of quantum is, a precise ratio of action in relationship to the environment. Feynman's path integral is not infinite, it is fractal. If you look at a star many light years away, the photon that hits your eye leaves the star precisely when the timing for the journey will end at your eye because the virtual dimension of the journey is zero distance or zero time. Wheeler said that if your eye is not there to receive the photon then it won't leave the star in the distant past. If the dimension in the direction of travel is zero, you have a different relationship then if it is zero time in terms of the property of the virtual dimensions. Is a particle really a wave packet? Could something like a "phase transition" involve dimensions that are more transitory then we imagined. Example; a photon as a two dimensional sheet is absorbed by an electron so that the photon becomes a part of the geometry of the electron in which the electrons dimensions change in some manner. Could "scale" have more variation and influence on space and time that our models currently predict? Could information, scale, and gravity be intimately related?

against the velvet rope force fields that kept everyone without an invitation at bay. As I walked toward the entrance, the crowd bombarded me with a mix of insults, autograph requests, death threats, and tearful declarations of undying love. I had my body shield activated, but surprisingly, no one took a shot at me. I flashed the cyborg doorman my invitation, then mounted the long crystal staircase leading up into the club. Entering the Distracted Globe was more than a little disorienting. The inside of the giant sphere was completely hollow, and its curved interior surface served as the club’s bar and lounge area. The moment you passed through the entrance, the laws of gravity changed. No matter where you walked, your avatar’s feet always adhered to the interior of the sphere, so you could walk in a straight line, up to the “top” of the club, then back down the other side, ending up right back where you started. The huge open space in the center of the sphere served as the club’s zero-gravity “dance floor.” You reached it simply by jumping off the ground, like Superman taking flight, and then swimming through the air, into the spherical zero-g “groove zone.” As I stepped through the entrance, I glanced up—or in the direction that was currently “up” to me at the moment—and took a long look around. The place was packed. Hundreds of avatars milled around like ants crawling around the inside of a giant balloon. Others were already out on the dance floor—spinning, flying, twisting, and tumbling in time with the music, which thumped out of floating spherical speakers that drifted throughout the club. In the middle of all the dancers, a large clear bubble was suspended in space, at the absolute center of the club. This was the “booth” where the DJ stood, surrounded by turntables, mixers, decks, and dials. At the center of all that gear was the opening DJ, R2-D2, hard at work, using his various robotic arms to work the turntables. I recognized the tune he was playing: the ’88 remix of New Order’s “Blue Monday,” with a lot of Star Wars droid sound samples mixed in. As I made my way to the nearest bar, the avatars I passed all stopped to stare and point in

Jenna is acting strange. Weeping, moping, even remarks tending toward belittlement Melmoth might tolerate (although he cannot think why; she is not his wife and even in human females PMS is a plague of the past) but when he caught her lying about Raquel—udderly wonderful, indeed—he knew the problem was serious. After sex, Melmoth powers her down. He retrieves her capsule from underground storage, a little abashed to be riding up with the oblong vessel in a lobby elevator where anyone might see. Locked vertical for easy transport, the capsule on its castors and titanium carriage stands higher than Melmoth is tall. He cannot help feeling that its translucent pink upper half and tapered conical roundness make it look like an erect penis. Arriving at penthouse level, he wheels it into his apartment. Once inside his private quarters, he positions it beside the hoverbed and enters a six-character alphanumeric open-sesame to spring the lid. On an interior panel, Melmoth touches a sensor for AutoRenew. Gold wands deploy from opposite ends and set up a zero-gravity field that levitates Jenna from the topsheet. As if by magic—to Melmoth it is magic—the inert form of his personal android companion floats four feet laterally and gentles to rest in a polymer cradle contoured to her default figure. Jenna is only a SmartBot. She does not breathe, blood does not run in her arteries and veins. She has no arteries or veins, nor a heart, nor anything in the way of organic tissue. She can be replaced in a day—she can be replaced right now. If Melmoth touches “Upgrade,” the capsule lid will seal and lock, all VirtuLinks to Jenna will break, and a courier from GlobalDigital will collect the unit from a cargo bay of Melmoth’s high-rise after delivering a new model to Melmoth himself. It distresses him, how easy replacement would be, as if Jenna were no more abiding than an oldentime car he might decide one morning to trade-in. Seeing her in the capsule is bad enough; the poor thing looks as if she is lying in her coffin. Melmoth does not select “Power Down” on his cerebral menu any more often than he must. Only to update her software does Melmoth resort to pulling Jenna’s plug. Updating, too, disturbs him. In authorizing it, he cannot pretend she is human. [pp. 90-91]

THE IRIS OF THE EYE WAS TOO BIG TO HAVE BEEN FABRICATED AS A single rigid object. It had been built, beginning about nine hundred years ago, out of links that had been joined together into a chain; the two ends of the chain then connected to form a loop. The method would have seemed familiar to Rhys Aitken, who had used something like it to construct Izzy’s T3 torus. For him, or anyone else versed in the technological history of Old Earth, an equally useful metaphor would have been that it was a train, 157 kilometers long, made of 720 giant cars, with the nose of the locomotive joined to the tail of the caboose so that it formed a circular construct 50 kilometers in diameter. An even better analogy would have been to a roller coaster, since its purpose was to run loop-the-loops forever. The “track” on which the “train” ran was a circular groove in the iron frame of the Eye, lined with the sensors and magnets needed to supply electrodynamic suspension, so that the whole thing could spin without actually touching the Eye’s stationary frame. This was an essential design requirement given that the Great Chain had to move with a velocity of about five hundred meters per second in order to supply Earth-normal gravity to its inhabitants. Each of the links had approximately the footprint of a Manhattan city block on Old Earth. And their total number of 720 was loosely comparable to the number of such blocks that had once existed in the gridded part of Manhattan, depending on where you drew the boundaries—it was bigger than Midtown but smaller than Manhattan as a whole. Residents of the Great Chain were acutely aware of the comparison, to the point where they were mocked for having a “Manhattan complex” by residents of other habitats. They were forever freeze-framing Old Earth movies or zooming around in virtual-reality simulations of pre-Zero New York for clues as to how street and apartment living had worked in those days. They had taken as their patron saint Luisa, the eighth survivor on Cleft, a Manhattanite who had been too old to found her own race. Implicit in that was that the Great Chain—the GC, Chaintown, Chainhattan—was a place that people might move to when they wanted to separate themselves from the social environments of their home habitats, or indeed of their own races. Mixed-race people were more common there than anywhere else.

Yes, he admitted, if gravity is always attractive, and never repulsive, then the stars in the universe might be unstable. But there was a loophole in this argument. Assume that the universe is, on average, totally uniform and infinite in all directions. In such a static universe, all the forces of gravity cancel one another out, and the universe becomes stable once again. Given any star, the forces of gravity acting on it from all the distant stars in different directions eventually sum to zero, and hence the universe does not collapse. Although this was a clever solution to this problem, Newton realized there was still a potential flaw to his solution. The universe might be uniform on average, but it cannot be exactly uniform at all points, so there must be tiny deviations. Like a house of cards, it appears to be stable, but the tiniest flaw will cause the entire structure to collapse. So Newton was clever enough to realize that a uniform infinite universe was indeed stable but was always teetering on the edge of collapse. In other words, the cancellation of infinite forces must be infinitely precise or else the universe will either collapse or be ripped apart. Thus, Newton’s final conclusion was that the universe was infinite and uniform on average, but occasionally God has to tweak the stars in the universe, so they do not collapse under gravity. Why Is the Night Sky Black? But this raised another problem. If we start with a universe that is infinite and uniform, then everywhere we look into space our gaze will eventually hit a star. But since there are an infinite number of stars, there must be an infinite amount of light entering our eyes from all directions. The night sky should be white, not black. This is called Olbers’ paradox. Some of the greatest minds in history have tried to tackle this sticky question. Kepler, for example, dismissed the paradox by claiming that the universe was finite, and hence there is no paradox. Others have theorized that dust clouds have obscured starlight. (But this cannot explain the paradox, because, in an infinite amount of time, the dust clouds begin to heat up and then emit blackbody radiation, similar to a star. So the universe becomes white again.) The final answer was actually given by Edgar Allan Poe in 1848. Being an amateur astronomer, he was fascinated by the paradox and said that the night sky is black because, if we travel back in time far enough, we eventually encounter a cutoff—that is, a beginning to the universe. In other words, the night sky is black because the universe has a finite age. We do not receive light from the infinite past, which would make the night sky white, because the universe never had an infinite past. This means that telescopes peering at the farthest stars will eventually reach the blackness of the Big Bang itself. So it is truly amazing that by pure thought, without doing any experiments whatsoever, one can conclude that the universe must have had a beginning.

You never know what’s around the next bend,” he says, “whether you are on a train or a plane or walking down the street. Every day’s a mystery. We make plans but it’ll unfold how it will. What we can each do is give a little love and light into the day. Make it just a little bit brighter.

Science n’ Shit in a Hip-Hop Style with Stephen Hawking (Kick-snare, kick-kick snare). ‘Let me tell you my plan for the human race, well I would but I can’t, ‘Cos I can’t move me face, So my computerised voice is how I’ll go, I type with me eye to keep the flow We’re all gonna go live in outer space Where zero gravity will stop me dribbling all over the place I’ll tell y’all how I’ll get there: With some rockets built into me special wheel chair The moons of Jupiter, in perfect animation We’ll all live in a huge space station I’ll be able to dance and chase all the fanny And finally get me end away with me nanny.’ Science n’ Shit in a Hip-Hop Style with Stephen Hawking II ‘From the moons of Ganymede, Io & Titan, I’ll tell y’all somethin’ that’s sure to enlighten In space, there are galaxies nebula & stars And dying suns that are going super no-va But no anomalies can compare, To how much I wanna run my fingers through your hair Sir Patrick Moore, a true space oracle, With your knowledge of cheats and gorgeous monocle I’m coming out as gay, and I don’t give a hoot I’m the first fuckin’ vegetable that turned into a fruit Word.

Americans tend to overanalyze. Like during the space race, NASA spent fifty thousand dollars developing a zero-gravity pen that didn’t skip. Know what the Russians did? Pencil. Think about

Pity is when I’m feeling sorry for someone but I’m looking down on them, I’m patronizing them, feeling like I’m giving them a gift. Compassion and empathy is when I feel bad for them, but I’m on the same level. That I’ve felt what they are feeling too, that I have experienced pain and sorrow like they have. I am with them, not above them. Same goes for self-pity.

The answer is that in RS2, the influence of four-dimensional gravity is inescapable, no matter where you are in the fifth dimension. Although the graviton’s probability function is largest on the Gravitybrane, objects everywhere can interact with one another by exchanging a graviton, and therefore all objects would experience four-dimensional gravity, independently of location. Gravity everywhere looks four-dimensional because the graviton’s probability function is never actually zero—it continues on for ever. In the localized scenario, objects far from a brane would have extremely weak gravitational interactions, but weak gravity would nonetheless behave in a four-dimensional manner.

The "paranormal" is what we call a phenomenon when examined through the narrow lens of what we consider "normal." You have to leave the entrapment of "normal" beliefs to understand them much as zero gravity can't be understood when you are earthbound.

Past the bouncers outside and the girls smoking long, skinny cigarettes, past the tinted glass doors and the jade stone Novikov has put in near the entrance for good luck. Inside, Novikov opens up so anyone can see everyone in almost every corner at any moment, the same theatrical seating as in his Moscow places. But the London Novikov is so much bigger. There are three floors. One floor is “Asian,” all black walls and plates. Another floor is “Italian,” with off-white tiled floors and trees and classic paintings. Downstairs is the bar-cum-club, in the style of a library in an English country house, with wooden bookshelves and rows of hardcover books. It’s a Moscow Novikov restaurant cubed: a series of quotes, of references wrapped in a tinted window void, shorn of their original memories and meanings (but so much colder and more distant than the accessible, colorful pastiche of somewhere like Las Vegas). This had always been the style and mood in the “elite,” “VIP” places in Moscow, all along the Rublevka and in the Garden Ring, where the just-made rich exist in a great void where they can buy anything, but nothing means anything because all the old orders of meaning are gone. Here objects become unconnected to any binding force. Old Masters and English boarding schools and Fabergé eggs all floating, suspended in a culture of zero gravity.

Amos took a high-caliber automatic that fired self-propelled rounds, recoilless and designed for use in zero g. Old-fashioned slug throwers were more reliable, but in null gravity they were also maneuvering thrusters.

In order to achieve the goals of the Paris Treaty – that global warming should not exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius – CO2 emissions must be reduced to zero by 2050. In order to succeed, we will also need to invent technologies that remove CO2 from the atmosphere in quantities that are equal to all today’s emissions. This is one of the biggest challenges humankind has ever faced. What is being proposed is an unprecedented turnaround in the world’s energy mechanisms. And 2050 is exactly as far into the future as 1990 is in the past. Since 1990, emissions have increased from twenty-two gigatons to thirty-six gigatons. That’s a 60 per cent increase. To get emissions down to zero in thirty years sounds like an unmanageable task. Like constructing a time machine, thwarting gravity or inventing a pill for bringing someone back to life. No one knows whether it’s technically possible to capture thirty gigatons per year. The technology is at an early stage and no one has figured out buildings or infrastructure that could enable us to achieve our goals. Even if we reduce emissions by 50 per cent, our problems will still have increased if we do nothing to remove the carbon dioxide already in the air. If we don’t succeed in that project, the Earth will continue to warm, the glaciers will continue to melt and the sea levels will continue to rise, submerging cities and coastal areas. The market value of a 100 million barrels of oil is about $6 billion, assuming a $60/barrel price for oil. We therefore burn approximately $600 billion a day. If anyone thinks changing our sources of energy will

That's the old cosmology you know, but we've disproved it. The amount of dark matter had been underestimated. The universe will stop expanding and collapse under gravity, finally forming a singularity and initiating another big bang. Everything will return to zero, or home. And so Nature remains the final victor.

Chapter 3 addresses the issue of bone-density loss and WBV’s capacity to stimulate bone growth. WBV was, in fact, originally developed forty years ago in Russia to counteract the devastating effects of zero gravity on their cosmonauts in outer space.

Zero gravity is part of the reason NASA price tags seem so extravagant. For every new piece of equipment that goes up on a mission—every pump, fan, throttle, widget—a prototype must be flown on the C-9 to be sure it works in weightlessness.

Jujitsu, combined with knife fighting, was lethal in zero gravity.

misnomers

We had some fine chats about Jesus, Homer, and the Rig Veda from a strictly automotive point of view.

I signed the agreement as Vigorish stared lupinely at what undoubtedly appeared to his eyes as an order of lambchops in Ralph Lauren tweeds.

Solvency being the better part of valor, I let it slide rather than nuke the trio with one lick of my vermilion tongue.

You’ve been awash in melancholy for days. Don’t tell me you’ve never completely gotten over the end of truffle season?

He is one of the few men at the club who witnessed a human sacrifice and would have found it barbaric if the victim had not been an insurance salesman.

Finally, we were led into the chamber of the High Priest, who bid us welcome. We bid him good tidings. He bid us sit down. We bid him speak. Soon there was a bidding war, and somehow, we outbid him and wound up with a walnut armoire, which we got at a steal.

you may return here and live amongst us forever in paradise, and when you do come back, if you can remember, bring me a Junior’s Cheesecake.

Goatley forms an acting group which performs avant-garde plays written in palindromes, but the group slowly peters out as the members start dying off of starvation.

Wurm has learned to live with his wife’s peccadillos, but only because he does not know what peccadillos are as she has convinced him they’re Mexican food.

He keels over clutching his abdomen and is rushed to the hospital, where he is placed in the Intensive Apathy ward.

Wurm, who had been madly in love with Nurse Waxtrap, winds up with her identical twin so considers it a wash.

There are also many sounds, including greetings in many languages, singing, nature sounds, and music from all over the world!

if you take people and you put them in a zero-gravity environment like astronauts, they lose muscle mass, they lose bone density. We’re taking these kids in the name of protection, we’re putting them in a zero-gravity environment, and they’re losing muscle mass and bone density. They need to live in a world that has gravity. When you—you need to expose your children to germs and dirt in the environment to build up their immune system.

The development and use of vibration in the 1970s allowed Russian cosmonauts to be in space twice as long as their nonvibrating American counterparts (approximately two hundred days versus one hundred days). More recently, a NASA website cited the effects of vibration on turkeys, sheep, and rats as “profound . . . promoting near-normal rates of bone formation”[21] under laboratory conditions simulating the zero gravity conditions of space flight.

Everything is bound to change, even the world and the safety of it. The world doesn't give a rat's ass if you lived a wonderful life where you slept in your house with every door unlocke and the windows open. Onward with the future.

Onward with the future.

Don’t lose your heart because someone broke it. Hearts can be repaired, to ya know?

The owner, Al Capon, a small-time egg baron whose fortunes rose and fell with every new study on cholesterol, offered his pudgy hand and blew a gust of smoke my way from a panatela

Bolt, who not only acts but writes, directs, and produces, had just opened his latest film, Requiem for a Schnorrer, to raves.

The star’s proudest possession, I learned, is the engraved Rolex he was given for Valentine’s Day by Mother Teresa.

for sheer astonishment nothing beats an uncanny bit of prestidigitation perpetuated by a neurasthenic homunculus with black-framed glasses, imposing crown baldness, and a romantic presence to rival the late Arnold Stang.

I had a myocardial infarction that registered at the oceanography lab in Tokyo.

Rita Moleskin—what are you doing here?” I said, discreetly pocketing the melting remains of my Snickers in a move Cardini would have envied.

He wrote the definitive book on How to Achieve Orgasm in a Rent-Controlled Apartment.

I walked her home, chatting about this and that, trying to impress her with tales of my brief stint in the Navy SEALs throwing fish to our men each time they completed a successful mission.

My GPS, accurate as a racetrack tout, steered me off course, and instead of heading toward Bucks County, I was approaching Niagara Falls.

Only Hollywood studio head Harvey Nagila. Nagila was a quadrillionaire from his Oscar-winning film, Naked Coed Zombies from Pluto.

By now I had taken to sauteing my Xanax for culinary variety

I knew General Tso was a great hero, but what were the details surrounding his fabled fowl? Was he a Von Clausewitz yet chef manqué?

It’s all schlock,” the impresario railed. “Chazerei for pubescent sub-mentals.

How wrong Emily Dickinson was. Hope is not ‘the thing with feathers.’ The thing with feathers has turned out to be my nephew. I must take him to a specialist in Zurich.

After all, would the world really miss this fatuous little suppository, with his preening self-confidence and emetic cuteness?

We now have two homes,” I bleated to my wife, fishing out the cyanide capsule my accountant had given me in the event things had taken precisely this turn.

The truth is you never know when you have to rely on Aristotle or Confucius when faced with choosing to hit a lamppost or running over a man coming from Zabar’s with fresh bagels.