Ask HN: What is Gravity?
While watching a documentary that mentioned gravity (forgive me the particulars escape me at the moment) my 8yo son reached across my lap and tapped the space-bar pausing the video. He then turned toward me and asked, ‘what is gravity?’ Now, in our house we require explanations for actions because we are becoming, sadly too late in life, convinced that being on purpose is paramount. Because it is our opinion that if you do not understand, even at the most base level (epistemological questions aside), why you are doing something then you will never have any power over what you do. When any of us does something that results in negative consequences we try to be in the habit of either tracing down the root of our reasoning or admitting that we had none. To this end we have made much of the distinction between description and explanation. Briefly; all explanations include description but not
Why it failed
While watching a documentary that mentioned gravity (forgive me the particulars escape me at the moment) my 8yo son reached across my lap and tapped the space-bar pausing the video. He then turned toward me and asked, ‘what is gravity?’ Now, in our house we require explanations f
- Kind
- startup
- Status
- Shut down
- Inventor
- shawndumas
- Ended
- 2010
- Source
- hackernews