Gravity Is A Social Construct, And That's Ok

i meant what said, fight me

References:

Music:
“Alech” by Carthago

Editing Assistance by @costanzapolastri
Script feedback and voiceovers by Costanza again and also a bunch of friends who don't have online presences to plug, thanks guys :3

Chapters
00:00:00 - Cold Open
00:02:27 - Introduction
00:05:12 - Act 1: The Science
00:05:16 - Part 1.1: A History of Gravity
00:12:58 - Part 1.2: Dark Matter
00:20:51 - Part 1.3: Another Hypothesis
00:29:37 - Intermission
00:31:19 - Act 2: The Social
00:31:22 - Part 2.1: Infinite Hypotheses
00:37:35 - Part 2.2: Social Constructs
00:48:09 - Part 2.3: WHAT WAS THE REASON
00:57:11 - Final Thoughts
01:00:49 - Comment Sharing + Credits

[GabeNode]

As a Scottish person, but not a physicist, I can only give one possible explanation. The Dark Matter model is maybe really big in England, so Scottish physicists just looked for other models out of pure contrarianism.

[elijahcook]

I Sent my brother this video yesterday, and he just texted me this morning “I have now watched everything Dr. Fatima put out.” I guess we are big fans

[laurag]

Cool video! I’m a biologist and I worked on a project evaluating the genetic differences between proposed blueberry species. In the beginning of my project I thought I would have a clear answer after I collected and evaluated my data. However by the end of my project, I couldn’t really distinguish whether it was really two species or the same species maybe subspecies…idk. I realize that taxonomy is made up and biology is cooler and more complex than I thought haha

[DiputchiCAT]

I’m a marine biologist doing my Masters and omg a huge realisation I’ve had in my life is that conservation is not an environmental issue, it’s a sociological one. People are at the very front and centre of everything we do as scientists and it’s so important to remember that we don’t seek to better understand our world, we seek to make our world fit within a framework that we as humans find palatable. The environment doesn’t need to be “managed” or “conserved”, our human behaviours need management and that MUST be the focus of conservation efforts.

[nocakewalk]

I'm convinced that it makes more sense to talk about science as generating certainty than as generating knowledge or truth. Essentially, the scientist has the truth the moment they have formulated a true hypothesis. The point of all the science afterwards is to increase certainty. Certainty (not truth) is also the thing that sets science apart from other endeavors. It's not the most effective way to find truth, since anyone can come up with an idea that's true, it's the most effective way to discover whether something is true.

Despite being optimized for certainty, though, science cannot give you 100% certainty about anything, so whenever you act in life, you have to settle for an acceptable level of certainty, and then act as if something is true, at least to an extent. But what level of certainty is acceptable in a given situation is very subjective. This means that deciding which potential truths we want to increase the certainty of is also highly subjective and/or intersects with "softer" subjects like ethics/philosophy, politics etc.

[StarAsh]

I got into astrophysics because it opened up my imagination about the possibilities of our origin. Absolute truth is something I believe we can't ever achieve. But I love the predictability of science and the idea that our hypotheses are testable. We always have something we can investigate and dream about.

[petermceachern]

I'm a PhD student in this field called industrial/organizational psychology, AKA I/O psychology, AKA work psychology. Broadly speaking, we develop and apply psychology knowledge to the workplace.

I could write so much about all of the unacknowledged biases that plague our field (and I have published some stuff), but one angle that your video made me think of is that some of the first influential people to do the stuff we now do weren't psychologists, but engineers. So, we're kind of trained to treat organizations like machines and the people in them like parts of a machine. We treat the employment relationship completely apolitically, assuming that employee-employer conflict, even in the name of worker advocacy, is undesirable and the ultimate goal should be to have employees and employers be on the same page about everything. But because refusing to take sides in an uneven power relationship means you're functionally taking the more powerful side, while we're amazing at helping work units to be more productive, if we can't make "the business case" (i.e., demonstrate profitability or at least win over CEOs) for something that's good for workers, we either blame ourselves for not speaking business language fluently enough (even though business sensibilities are directly opposed to good science in many ways) or we just kind of throw our hands up and declare it to be beyond the scope of our science (e.g., we do almost no research on labor unions—at least in the US). It's endlessly frustrating. We could provide real creative fuel for worker activism if we could just acknowledge all this stuff and work to remedy it. Not everyone in the field sees it the way I do FWIW, but I think (hope) more of us are coming around.

[iamthewalrus]

To the question prompt( 53:58 ): Assigning monetary value to people as a justification for why they should be valued. As an accountant I find it very interesting any time someone realizes that the natural world in its ability to maintain itself has value and tries to communicate that by assigning a monetary value to that natural process. I remember hearing the Hudson River needing to be cleaned as it provides drinking water to 100 M people. An industrial plan to help clean it needed several billion dollars, but they were able to restore the natural purifying processes of the ecosystem with just a 44 million in restoring the forest around it. The American capitalistic view of resources having value that needs to be harvested to maintain economic growth obscures the value of nature in of itself as well as the value of clean air and water that nature provides. But this also holds true for humans, its not enough that school lunches should be provided to children in poverty, it must be justified. What is the expected return? Is it cheaper to feed a child and have an eventual tax payer, return on that investment? or have them eventually drop out of school and turn to crime so they can eat, being a burden on the justice system and prisons. This does not look at the child as an ends in of themselves, and a member of a community, but as a monetary investment, a risk to be calculated, and if the risk is too high, or return too low, they are discarded as an underperforming asset. We are taught in high school that capitalism is the best because it distributes limited resources to the highest profit motives, but what price could people put on nature itself, poverty, or access to opportunities? Are we doomed to a capitalistic world that sees people as a "mere means" (Kant) instead of a means in of themselves, or can people choose to live good and kind lives. Not for any profit motive, but for the sake of goodness and kindness alone, because that is the world they want, they have chosen to be the change they want to see in the world.

[thgeremilrivera-thorsen]

You've just earned a subscription from this astrophysicist. Good work on this one! I am among the few research physicists who agree with you on the point of social constructivism - but with none of the communication talent. So I am really happy to see a video like this!

[kensurrency]

100% AGREE
i’ve been telling everyone i talk with “we think we’re so smart now. wait until the future judges us. we will appear just as ignorant as the people of 100+ years ago appear to us.” science is a PROCESS. there is no endpoint.

[MrMinorChord]

I work in music education, and boy oh boy are we influenced by cultural values. One cultural value that we have in music education is the value placed on written music notation. A lot of music education past grade 6, and sometimes even earlier, is geared toward learning to read written music notation. This is ultimately at the expense of musical genres that do not rely on written notation to disseminate music, and it is at the expense of the students' ability to think musically, understand music by ear, or create their own music. Additionally, I can see the physicist's love for elegance and simplicity influencing Western tonal music; the tuning systems we have used almost always came from elegant mathematical calculations.

[Kaepsele]

I'm a particle physicist. What convinced me that MOND is not a valid description of nature is two observations. First, the bullet cluster, where the dark matter from two galaxies has been separated from the visible matter in a collision of two galaxies. Second, that we have found galaxies without dark matter. To my understanding, this conclusively disproves any theory that proposes a change in fundamental laws to explain the observations. Although I think from a philosophical standpoint the MOND theories (or other theories that are not just "more particles") would be more interesting, we cannot ignore observations.

Also, I recognize that the MOND/dark matter discussion was not the main point of the video, and the argument the video presents still works. But I wanted to give that context anyways.

[LeeCarlson]

My dad taught me "If you have never made a mistake then you have never learned anything new, " and I have made it my mission to pass that idea on to my teenager.

[marcodallolio]

It's always fun to witness scientists grapple with the much dreaded fact they are human beings

[wademasterson]

i am 62 years old, and about three months from becoming homeless. i have only recently discovered your videos. You are amazing. When the upcoming state of my living situation, I am going to miss this time with you. thank you so much.

[hymio]

The astronaut dropping the pen and looking so heartbreakingly confused spoke to me on a spiritual level

[carochalu]

I'm a geophysicist, which i guess technically is a branch of physics but really is a part of the Earth Science community. I would say we don't have that thing of wanting a unifying theory of everything, probably because the complexity of the phenomena we study is very apparent, and even objects within the same category can behave very differently. However, one thing that can be quite frustrating is the lack of communication between Earth science disciplines, which means that sometimes geologists and geophysicists and geochemists can end up with pretty different ideas of what certain objects or phenomena even are.

[josephfishman]

nuclear engineering undergraduate here: one thing I love about the field of engineering is how it can be a source of knowledge driven entirely by practical instead of seeking "truth" The field of thermodynamics came out of a practical need for a steam engine. Classical thermodynamics is a beautiful field that never makes claims to be fundamental because it developed out of practicality. There are also layers. Statistical mechanics is an abstraction of classical thermodynamics that ALSO has practical uses while still making no claims to fundamentality. It is beautiful nesting dolls of merely useful models.

[quentinmerritt]

You are literally so hilarious. I love all the memes and cultural references in you videos, while also maintaining their informative and thoughtful nature.

As a PhD student in Nuclear Physics, it's refreshing to hear a viewpoint that contextualizes the role our beliefs, cultures, and societies play in how science is done, and what motivates the paths we take to seeking discovery. It's rarely talked about in a PhD program, that's for sure haha

[frasercain]

I wonder how this concept relates to an artist's indecision on how to express thoughts or feelings. There's an infinite number of ways you could express yourself, so you just have to decide. You choose one idea, implement it, rinse repeat. Same thing with testing a hypothesis.