Indian athlete Neeraj Chopra who just won the gold at Tokyo Olympics for javelin (Photo courtesy: olympics.com)
Watching India’s athlete Neeraj Chopra clear a remarkable 87.58 meters in javelin throw and win the country’s first ever Olympic gold medal in athletics played well into my current preoccupation—an intense preparation for a prospective book about Gravity.
May I remind you, like I have done several times prior, that everything we are is a direct consequence of Earth’s gravity. It is reasonable to speculate how different we might have been anatomically had Earth’s gravity been, say for instance, like Mars’s, meaning 0.375 of what it is now. Earth’s gravity is 2.66 times that of Mars’s. The distance that Chopra’s javelin traveled, its trajectory, the amount of energy it took him to run up to the line and launch it and the way the javelin landed are all a result of the way Earth’s gravity. On Mars, it would have flown a greater distance and its trajectory might be very different not to mention Chopra’s ability to run too would have been different.
A great thrill for me while reading up for the prospective book about Gravity is to understand how in such fantastically varied ways gravity influences not just sentient life but everything in the universe. The beauty of it is that it is not even a real force the way we understand real force. It is so subtle and yet so profound. The feeling of being grounded that all of us have comes from Earth’s gravity. While the idea of floating around in zero G or even less than Earth’s G may seem exciting for a while but if you were born on this planet, I can assure you that you would not like to float around all the time. Feet firmly on the ground is a thing.
The arch that Chopra’s javelin made from the launch to the landing was also a consequence of Earth’s gravity. In a sense, his javelin took some escape velocity to leave his fingers, take off, fly a bit and then eventually land at 87.58 meters. All this while a terribly subtle force we call gravity was at work.
Remember that.