Defying Gravity
Illustration
Stories
When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. (Acts 1:9)
Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven. (Luke 24:50-51)
Defying gravity! What a concept? Is there anyone here who has not dreamt at one time or another that you were actually flying? Or floating? Or in some way defying gravity?
When he was a boy in Ireland, the author Samuel Beckett would sometimes climb a tree as high as he could, and leap out, experiencing the feeling of flying. Alas, he always hit the ground, hard, and was almost immediately afterwards punished by his mother for ruining perfectly good clothes.
According to the late Douglas Adams, author of famed series of humorous science fiction novels known as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy there’s a trick to defying gravity.
This is what The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has to say on the subject of flying: There is an art, or, rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. Pick a nice day and try it.
That sounds good as far as it goes, but the guide goes on to say:
Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, that presents the difficulties.
In the five-volume trilogy, Arthur Dent and a woman named Fenchurch are the only two humans to successfully accomplish this feat of missing the ground. They were also the only two humans not killed when the earth was destroyed to make way for an Intergalactic Bypass. Don’t worry. The Earth was later reconstructed, and everyone brought back to life with no memory of what happened, but the point is, this is a novel and I highly recommend that you NOT try this.
Defying Gravity is also the title of the closing number of Act 1 of the musical “Wicked,” written by Stephen Schwartz of Godspell fame. It’s about Glinda the Good Witch (originally played by Kristin Chenowith) from The Wizard of Oz, and her fellow classmate at school Elphaba (originally played by Idina Menzell), who has green skin and who we know better as the Wicked Witch of the West in that famous movie. Spoiler alert. In the musical, Elphaba is the good guy.
Elphaba, who is something of an outsider because of her green skin, looks forward to meeting the famed Wizard of Oz, but discovers he’s not anything like what she’d been led to believe. Disillusioned, she also realizes that she needs to throw off the shackles of her past and become who she truly is — and in the process while singing this song she begins to rise above the stage, defying gravity by flying! It is an extraordinarily powerful number, requiring massive special effects during a live performance.
In his book Into Thin Air, about the ill-fated Everest expeditions of 1996, Jon Krakauer talks about the rescue efforts to bring a climber named Beck Weathers who was rendered virtually blind and maimed when left for dead and abandoned during a horrific storm in the death zone above Base Camp Four. After he staggers into camp alive, the others help him climb down to Base Two, beyond which they could go no further because of the Kuumbu Ice Falls. He would have been unable to walk blind across ladders suspended over horribly long falls into ice filled chasms. How to get him down? The air was too thin for most helicopters. Only one helicopter had made a foolhardy trip to Base Two twenty-three years before and that taught everyone it was too dangerous — but because a particular Nepalese pilot was a member of the same particular legion of honor as a senator back in the United States who was a personal friend of Weather’s wife, the climbers soon heard the straining THWOCK-THWOCK-THWOCK of a copter piloted by Lieutenant Colonel Madan Khatri Chhetri of the Nepalese army pilot a Khumbu helicopter defy gravity. His machine was stripped of all unnecessary equipment and carried only enough fuel to get up and down. He performed this maneuver twice, rescuing not just Weathers but another badly injured climber, proving one could defy gravity not once but twice, flying through thin air.
But how about the thinnest of air? In 2021, NASA successfully landed the mobile rover Perseverance onto the surface of Mars. Strapped underneath was a tiny helicopter named Ingenuity. The Martian atmosphere is only 1% as dense as Earth’s. Not only that, it takes 25 minutes or more for commands from Earth to reach Mars, and just as long for the replies to return. The craft would have to operate totally independently.
Most thought it would be impossible to design a copter that could rise even once into the thinnest of airs, much less take part in reconnaissance missions for the rover on the ground. But Ingenuity, overseen by project engineer MiMi Aung, born in the US and raised in Burma, did far better than imagined. It was designed to fly five short flights just to demonstrate the possibility. As of November of 2023, it has performed over sixty flights, many of them complex involving traversing difficult and dangerous terrain.
All of this is very interesting, but really, the best example we have of defying gravity and disappearing into thin air are the twin accounts about Jesus doing just that, written by the Evangelist Luke, in his Gospel and in The Acts of the Apostles.
Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven. (Luke 24:50-51)
Defying gravity! What a concept? Is there anyone here who has not dreamt at one time or another that you were actually flying? Or floating? Or in some way defying gravity?
When he was a boy in Ireland, the author Samuel Beckett would sometimes climb a tree as high as he could, and leap out, experiencing the feeling of flying. Alas, he always hit the ground, hard, and was almost immediately afterwards punished by his mother for ruining perfectly good clothes.
According to the late Douglas Adams, author of famed series of humorous science fiction novels known as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy there’s a trick to defying gravity.
This is what The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has to say on the subject of flying: There is an art, or, rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. Pick a nice day and try it.
That sounds good as far as it goes, but the guide goes on to say:
Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, that presents the difficulties.
In the five-volume trilogy, Arthur Dent and a woman named Fenchurch are the only two humans to successfully accomplish this feat of missing the ground. They were also the only two humans not killed when the earth was destroyed to make way for an Intergalactic Bypass. Don’t worry. The Earth was later reconstructed, and everyone brought back to life with no memory of what happened, but the point is, this is a novel and I highly recommend that you NOT try this.
Defying Gravity is also the title of the closing number of Act 1 of the musical “Wicked,” written by Stephen Schwartz of Godspell fame. It’s about Glinda the Good Witch (originally played by Kristin Chenowith) from The Wizard of Oz, and her fellow classmate at school Elphaba (originally played by Idina Menzell), who has green skin and who we know better as the Wicked Witch of the West in that famous movie. Spoiler alert. In the musical, Elphaba is the good guy.
Elphaba, who is something of an outsider because of her green skin, looks forward to meeting the famed Wizard of Oz, but discovers he’s not anything like what she’d been led to believe. Disillusioned, she also realizes that she needs to throw off the shackles of her past and become who she truly is — and in the process while singing this song she begins to rise above the stage, defying gravity by flying! It is an extraordinarily powerful number, requiring massive special effects during a live performance.
In his book Into Thin Air, about the ill-fated Everest expeditions of 1996, Jon Krakauer talks about the rescue efforts to bring a climber named Beck Weathers who was rendered virtually blind and maimed when left for dead and abandoned during a horrific storm in the death zone above Base Camp Four. After he staggers into camp alive, the others help him climb down to Base Two, beyond which they could go no further because of the Kuumbu Ice Falls. He would have been unable to walk blind across ladders suspended over horribly long falls into ice filled chasms. How to get him down? The air was too thin for most helicopters. Only one helicopter had made a foolhardy trip to Base Two twenty-three years before and that taught everyone it was too dangerous — but because a particular Nepalese pilot was a member of the same particular legion of honor as a senator back in the United States who was a personal friend of Weather’s wife, the climbers soon heard the straining THWOCK-THWOCK-THWOCK of a copter piloted by Lieutenant Colonel Madan Khatri Chhetri of the Nepalese army pilot a Khumbu helicopter defy gravity. His machine was stripped of all unnecessary equipment and carried only enough fuel to get up and down. He performed this maneuver twice, rescuing not just Weathers but another badly injured climber, proving one could defy gravity not once but twice, flying through thin air.
But how about the thinnest of air? In 2021, NASA successfully landed the mobile rover Perseverance onto the surface of Mars. Strapped underneath was a tiny helicopter named Ingenuity. The Martian atmosphere is only 1% as dense as Earth’s. Not only that, it takes 25 minutes or more for commands from Earth to reach Mars, and just as long for the replies to return. The craft would have to operate totally independently.
Most thought it would be impossible to design a copter that could rise even once into the thinnest of airs, much less take part in reconnaissance missions for the rover on the ground. But Ingenuity, overseen by project engineer MiMi Aung, born in the US and raised in Burma, did far better than imagined. It was designed to fly five short flights just to demonstrate the possibility. As of November of 2023, it has performed over sixty flights, many of them complex involving traversing difficult and dangerous terrain.
All of this is very interesting, but really, the best example we have of defying gravity and disappearing into thin air are the twin accounts about Jesus doing just that, written by the Evangelist Luke, in his Gospel and in The Acts of the Apostles.
