Candy Crush and the Theory of Relativity

Pretend you can see into my living room. 

You see me in my comfy sofa/chair playing Candy Crush on my iPad.   Lazy, lazy, lazy, you might think.   Middle of the day, doing nothing but playing a silly game instead of mowing lawns, or splitting wood, or doing laundry.    Which is what I should be doing.

Not my fault.  I am being pushed into my chair by unseen forces, forces so powerful that without them, we all would go spinning off into space.   My authority for this is none other than Albert Einstein and his Theory of Relativity.

You can add Sir Isaac Newton and gravity, too.

I just learned all this on my drive home from litter picking this evening.  The time was after 7 P.M., and the radio was on, and Dr. Michio Kaku was talking about things scientific on Science Fantastic.  What he said about Newton (remember the apple-falling-from-the-tree guy?) was that he didn’t go far enough with his theory.   I mean, gosh, give the guy a break.   He’d just discovered gravity.  Let him rest on his apples for a while.

Then along came Albert Einstein who considered Newton’s discovery and posited that matter (you, me, and other solid things) bends space.  Makes sense, doesn’t it?   Everything bends the space around it.   Einstein’s next step was that space pushes down on matter.  

Voila!  The Theory of Relativity as understood by someone who was dodging cars heading to the Kenai for salmon fishing/dipnetting, getting into or out of her vehicle, bending space to pick up litter which was being held to the ground by space pushing on it, and maybe missing a thing or two of what Dr. Kaku said.

I heard enough for my purposes:   It’s not my fault when I’m sitting in my chair playing Candy Crush on my iPad.

There is one thing, though.   Airplanes and lift.   I’ve always heard that lift is generated by air moving over wings.  That’s the Bernouili Principle.   But shouldn’t that air be holding the plane on the ground just as I’m held in my chair playing Candy Crush on my iPad?

Well, you have to add motion and tilt to get upwash and downwash to that air/wing thing to create lift and get that plane off the ground.

All of which is far too taxing on my brain.   I barely made it through high school biology 101.

I’m more in tune with Newton’s First Law which states that a body at rest will remain at rest.   Just until I finish this game and then I’ll go mow the lawns.

Ooops.   Raining.   

Oh, dear.  That naughty space is pushing me down into my chair.   Might as well play some more Candy Crush.  

And one more thing about that space pushing down on matter?   Is that why my bathroom scale shows such an obscene number?  Maybe a smaller bathroom so there isn't so much space to push down on me and the scale?    Would I weigh less in a tiny outhouse?