The incredible game that makes fun of the law of universal gravitation

In one of his first novels, Paul Auster makes a child fly. After passing the tests of the initiation rite, the boy manages to neutralize the gravitational force and, with this, makes his body levitate first and then fly. In this way, he becomes the attraction of an era. These are the years before the Great Depression and the crosses are burning at the gallop of the Ku Klux Klan.

The novel is titled

(Booket) and tells us the adventures of this flying boy along the roads of deep North America. It is one of Auster's best novels, without a doubt, and his character, the boy whom Master Yehudi teaches to ignore the law of universal gravitation, is one of the most accomplished by the Brooklyn writer who, as usual, presents us happiness as something temporary. Therefore, happiness does not always last for the child; The natural tendency to lose order in a system, that is, entropy, comes with puberty; The hormonal system will interfere with his ability to fly, as if gravity had plotted its revenge at the most opportune moment.

Before continuing, let us remember that gravitational interaction is the dominant interaction on a large scale or cosmological scale, a wrinkle in the space-time fabric that makes the Earth capable of attracting what is located in its sphere of influence or gravitational field. In this way, the famous apple of Newtonian sin is attracted by the gravitational field of the Earth, something that can never happen the other way around, since the apple in relation to the Earth lacks a gravitational field.

We already know that the Earth does not attract all bodies equally, but depending on the mass of each one. For example, the Earth attracts a 30 kilo body, such as the child's body, with thirty times more force than an apple, what happens is that the apple offers thirty times less resistance than the child's body.

For these things, when it comes to falling, both the apple and the child fall at the same speed in a vacuum, and this is because in a vacuum there is no resistance force that opposes the falling movement on which the mass of the bodies. And these details are present in Auster's novel, although they are not expressly talked about.

To illustrate the latter, it is worth referring to a curious experiment. This is the so-called “Newton necklace”, a chain of balls that comes out of a container, defying the “force” of gravity.

The pattern that the chain forms in the air, jumping from the glass, depends on the gravity that pulls downward and the upward force that arises from the chain that is still in the glass. These opposing forces create the magical effect where the chain appears to float above the container. It is science, even though it may seem otherwise. In Paul Auster's novels the same thing happens, but in reverse. That's what's good about his literature.

The stone ax