I hope that everyone enjoys their Christmas and because our readership so heavily skews to a science literate audience I thought most would enjoy a little sci-fi story written by James P. Hogan, celebrating the birth of Sir Isaac Newton, born on Christmas Day of 1642.

Merry Gravmas

“Is that you, Li?” Cheng Xiang called, looking up from the notescreen propped against his knee. He had been amusing himself with a few tensor integrals to clear his mind before taking his morning coffee.

The sounds of movement came again from upstairs. Moments later, his ten-year-old son appeared, floating down the staircase on an anti-g disk. “Good morning, father.”

“Merry Gravmas.”

“And to you.” Li hopped off the disk and stood admiring the decorations that the family robot had put up overnight. There were paper chains hanging in hyperbolic catenary curves and sinusoids, Gaussian distribution bells, and pendulums wreathed in logarithmic spirals. In the corner opposite the total-sensory cassette player, there stood a miniature apple tree with binary stars on top, a heap of gaily wrapped gifts around its base, and its branches adorned with colored masses of various shapes, a string of pulsing plasma glows, and striped candles shaped like integral signs. “It looks nice,” Li said, eyeing the presents. “I wonder what Santa Roid has brought this year.”

“You’ll have to wait until your brother and sister get here before you can open anything,” Xian told him. “What are they doing?”

“Yu is sending off a last-minute Gravmas present to a schoolfriend over the matter transmitter to Jupiter. Yixuan is helping Mother program the autochef to cook the turkey.”

“Why does everyone in this family always have to leave everything until the last minute?” Xiang grumbled, setting down the screen and getting up. “Anyone would think it wasn’t obvious that the ease of getting things done varies inversely as the square of procrastination.”

Li walked over to the window and gazed out at Peking’s soaring panorama of towers, bridges, terraces, and arches, extending away all around, above, and for hundreds of meters below. “How did Gravmas start?” he asked his father.

“Hmph!” Xian snorted as he moved to stand alongside the boy. “Now isn’t that typical of young people today. Too wrapped up in relativistic quantum chromodynamics and multidimensional function spaces to know anything about where it came from or what it means. It’s this newfangled liberal education that’s to blame. They don’t teach natural philosophy anymore, the way we had to learn it.”

“Well, that kind of thing does seem a bit quaint these days,” Li said. “I suppose it’s okay for little old ladies and people who –”

“They don’t even recite the laws of motion in school every morning. Standards aren’t what they used to be. It’ll mean the end of civilization, you mark my words.”

“You were going to tell me about Gravmas . . . “

“Oh, yes. Well, I presume you’ve heard of Newton?”

“Of course. A newton is the force which, acting on a mass of one kilogram, produces an acceleration of one meter per second per second.”

“Not a newton. The Newton. You didn’t know that Newton was somebody’s name?”

“You mean it was a person?”

Continue reading Merry Gravmas.

Posted by TangoMan at 11:59 PM