Can you imagine a group of cave men sitting around, huddled in a circle to keep warm, draped in dead animal skins to stay alive in the drastic cold of winter – when one of them suddenly stands up and says “There simply must be a way to create fire!”
There’s two ways to look at that: One is that this cave man was simplistic – that fire was somehow “magic” and could only be started by lightning – and that if it were to be used for warmth and cooking then it must be kept aflame 24/7 – carried around with them as they nomadic-ally scoured the landscape.
The other way of looking at it is that this particular cave man noticed that fire usually only occurred in wood – and he also noticed fire is incredibly hot. I know in a way that sounds simplistic itself – but after having lived all these years i can tell you that not all cave men would have been able to put those two things together. Just as most of their descendants today seem incapable of putting things together. But this particular cave man put a third thing together with the other two things – the idea that rubbing two sticks together caused them to get hot. Ergo his hypothesis was born – maybe heat could start fires – and not just lightning. And the age of fire was born.
Man is generally stupid. I’ll bet the elders in that cave-man group who sat huddled together for warmth laughed their asses off at the guy sitting over there feverishly rubbing two sticks together for what must have seemed like hours with no apparent result. But when the result of fire did finally come they all probably got scared as hell and then probably killed that dude for practicing witchcraft. Or they made him the “medicine man” and off in distant corners would whisper things like “That dude’s weird.” Man is generally stupid. And most definitely egotistical. Even today most people think if they had lived back then that they themselves would have easily created fire. But the truth is that almost all of them would have soon become frozen popsicles without that handful of men who did indeed put things together like wood, heat and two sticks rubbing. Like the egotists we are – we all take credit for that though, don’t we?
Einstein had a particular knack for putting things together also. He postulated that light, like fire, was not “magic” either. He proposed that light particles had mass – an actual physical presence – and weight – and that light itself was not just some magical glow. Several other scientists worked to prove that by determining that light rays bend as they pass planetary bodies – proving in fact that photons are indeed physical since they are affected by the planetary pull of gravity.
The next obvious step (in my opinion) is to de-magic-cize gravity. Because no matter how I look at the definition of gravity – it is simply defined as magic. “Gravity exists because mass exists.” To me that’s not a definition. To me that’s like saying fire exists because lightning exists or that light exists because the sun exists.
If it looks like a duck, and if it quacks like a duck – sometimes it’s just a duck. The only thing in our entire world of knowledge that has the ability to attract something toward it is a magnet. And I don’t care how the huddled idiots in our current circle want to hem and haw and nay say the whole magnetism/gravity thing. The truth of the matter is that they are going to be completely shocked to see how this hypothesis is going to drastically change the curve of man’s technology. And then they’ll take credit for it.