82 Scientific American, December 2020 Illustration by Matt Collins
ANTI GRAVITY
THE ONGOING SEARCH FOR
FUNDAMENTAL FARCES
Steve Mirsky was the winner of a Twist contest in 1962, for which
he received three crayons and three pieces of construction paper.
It remains his most prestigious award.Back in 2010, we celebrated the life of Martin Gardner, who died
that year at the age of 95. He wrote the Mathematical Games col-
umn for Scientific American magazine for nearly 25 years, and
he re mains the gold standard for this publication’s columnists.
Upon Gardner’s death, I interviewed his friend and protégé
Douglas Hofstadter, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Gödel,
Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. The book came out in
1979, when Hofstadter was 34. Which meant that in 2010 he was
- And it struck me that it should take much longer to go from
34 to 65 than a mere 31 years. It really should take more like 50
years to go from being 34 to 65, I thought, even though the arith-
metic regarding that transition was inarguably ironclad.
In a somewhat related vein, this issue of Scientific American
marks 25 years since the first appearance of Anti Gravity. In 1995
I was 37 years old and in my salad days, when I was green in
judgment. And in only 25 years I’ve turned into an alte kaker.
I’m still green, but now it’s because of digestive issues.
Horror movie maven David Cronenberg captured the weird-
ness of this fast-forwarding in the introduction to a 2014 Eng-
lish translation of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorpho-
sis: “I woke up one morning recently to discover
that I was a seventy-year-old man. Is this different
from what happens to Gregor Samsa in The Meta-
morphosis? He wakes up to find that he’s become a
near-human-sized beetle.... Our reactions, mine
and Gregor’s, are very similar. We are confused and
bemused, and think that it’s a momentary delu-
sion.... These two scenarios, mine and Gregor’s,
seem so different, one might ask why I even both-
er to compare them. The source of the transforma-
tions is the same, I argue: we have both awakened
to a forced awareness of what we really are, and
that awareness is profound and irreversible; in each
case, the delusion soon proves to be a new, manda-
tory reality, and life does not continue as it did.”
The previous more than 300 words of throat
clearing is to set up the announcement that I’m
hanging up my spikes. Well, in truth I hung up the
spikes a very long time ago, when other kids my age
started throwing breaking pitches. So let’s say I’m
hanging up my keyboard.
I’ll still be making bad puns and snide re marks,
of course, and I’ll be ranting about antiscience pol-
iticians, but it’ll mostly be just for the benefit, if you
can call it that, of my wife and cats. Although it’s
not impossible that I may return to these pages
from time to time when said wife and cats inform
me that I really should share my golden nuggets of insight with
a wider audience if that will get me out of the living room.
By the way, I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that the greatest com-
mentary on The Metamorphosis occurs in Mel Brooks’s 1967 mov-
ie The Producers, when the title characters are looking for the worst
play in the world in order to guarantee a flop so they can keep most
of the million dollars they raise rather than spend it on the pro-
duction. Max Bialystock, brilliantly played by Zero Mostel, opens
one of the hundreds of manuscripts around him and says, “ ‘Gregor
Samsa awoke one morning to discover that he had been trans-
formed into a giant cockroach.’ It’s too good.” Which in fact it was.
Back to Cronenberg and his “mandatory reality.” In 2002 a
White House official scoffed at journalist Ron Suskind for being
in “the reality-based community.” The official explained, accord-
ing to Suskind, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we cre-
ate our own reality.”
I had two responses to that anecdote and attitude then that
I hold to today, as the current White House’s relationship with
reality seems literally psychotic. First, Scientific American is
the voice of the reality-based community. Second, if you think
you create your own reality, real reality will come back to bite
you in the ass.JOIN THE CONVERSATION ONLINE
Visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter
or send a letter to the editor: [email protected]The Real Deal
As Bugs Bunny once said, “Last look!”
By Steve Mirsky