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Lethbridge, T C - ESP Beyond Time and Distance – The Laws of Gravity; where is the string in real life?
Identifier
021772
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
T C Lethbridge – ESP Beyond Time and Distance
It has apparently been successfully demonstrated that growing plants are affected by the phases of the moon. All old gardeners when I was a boy used to maintain that, if you wanted a crop to grow well upwards, it should be planted when the moon was waxing, and that a root crop should go in when the moon was waning. This, the fruit of centuries of observation, appears to be supported by scientific evidence today, as well it might be. Why should our ancestors who took more time, interest and pride in what they were doing, have been any less observant than a man in a laboratory brewing poisons to kill off the natural inhabitants of the countryside?
Now, presumably every child is still taught about Newton and his discovery of the law of gravitation, because an apple fell on his head. It is explained that, were it not for gravitation which causes small objects to be pulled towards a larger one, a force known as centrifugal force would cause all planets to fly outwards into space away from the sun and the moon to fly away from the earth. This state of affairs is often demonstrated by swinging a tennis ball round the teacher's body and then letting go the end of the string. The ball flies outwards from the demonstrator. This illustrates centrifugal force causing the ball to fly outwards, while gravitation is represented by the string.
But where is the string in real life?
The facts of centrifugal force and gravitation are obviously correct; but how does gravitation act? Surely it cannot act across nothing at all, or why all this weightlessness problem for astronauts in space? Of course we are told it isn't quite nothing at all, but relatively it seems a very poor substitute for the string on the tennis ball, which, compared with the earth, would be many miles thick. Something to the casual observer seems to have been forgotten in this gravitation story, and if anybody can be bothered to think about it and not just swallow everything he is taught, he must see that this is so. No mathematical learning can explain away the absence of the string. Just to say, 'Gravitation sees to that', explains nothing at all. Gravitation must have something on which it can pass. There must be a substitute for the string on the tennis ball.