BeatingGravity.com was born out of a desire to come up with ideas to “beat gravity”, hence the name Beating Gravity. With “beating gravity” we mean finding new ways to make flying into space, and flying around the Earth much easier and vastly more efficient than it currently is. And while that is the ultimate goal, we also happily pursue the somewhat more down-to-earth goal of publishing exciting articles about related topics.
This deserves some more explanation, which we’ll happily provide below. Let’s take off!
Beating Gravity, the ultimate goal
Why do we think it’s a great idea to find new ways to make flying into space, and flying around the Earth much easier and vastly more efficient than it currently is? And how can we realize this ultimate goal?
Some obvious benefits
- Drastically reducing the cost of space travel and flying around the Earth
- Making space travel much more readily available
- Exploring (much) more of the beauty of outer space (here we’ll also run into inertia but let’s take it step by step)
- Moving away from flying being organized via large centralized airports, which are highly inconvenient and extremely inefficient considering all the traveling to and from airports
- Reducing climate impact
- Economical improvements around the world
While the above list is not exhaustive, we believe it sums up more than enough reason to devote a website to it!
How on Earth will we make it happen?
If we already had the answer, we probably would be doing something else than publishing articles on this website! What we can say though is what kind of ideas we will consider. Things like:
- Technological inventions
- Engineering breakthroughs
- New materials
- Completely new physics theories
- Extreme ideas such as anti-gravity or gravitational amplification
- Aliens coming to our aid (ok maybe this one we’ll skip for now)
So, alien assistance aside, we’ll consider pretty much everything. And we’ll happily write about all this.
Isn’t this all a bit farfetched?
We are the first to admit that the goal to beat gravity, in the way alluded to in the paragraphs above, is quite ambitious. And that’s putting it mildly of course! However, we strongly believe that it’s ok to aim high (no pun intended). So why not try to come up with new ideas to take to the air or travel to space.
Such ideas often meet with a lot of skepticism, and rightly so! After all, ideas in this direction will most likely become part of a long list of “failed ideas”. However, at Beating Gravity, we believe that we should never stop trying to come up with new ideas. After all, long before humanity invented awesome things like steam engines, airplanes, electrical devices, computers, the internet, etc., there probably were not a lot of people who believed such things to be possible at all.
Beating Gravity’s down-to-earth content
When we are not busy dreaming and brainstorming about “the ultimate goal”, we may publish intriguing articles about a range of related topics, such as:
- Technology
- Science
- Engineering
- Space
- Mathematics
- Statistics
- Relevant economics
Here and there we may even throw in a bit of science fiction or futurism, but we’ll always make that clear when doing so. Also, we may try to be funny on occasion. We appreciate not everyone’s taste for humor is the same though. So apologies in advance if any such attempts are lost on you (then it’s probably us, not you).
Please also forgive us for throwing in some of our cool branding from time to time:
Does Beating Gravity publish scientific articles?
The articles we publish are not usually written in scientific style and therefore do not qualify as such. And for Beating Gravity that is a good thing as we aim for something different. That’s usually not science fiction either though. Let’s clarify this seeming contradiction:
- A lot of the ideas published on BeatingGravity.com are meant as sources for inspiration and directions to explore.
- Most of our articles are very light on mathematical formulas (if any). That doesn’t mean we think the math is not important (on the contrary). However, thinking too much in mathematical frameworks can be counterproductive when trying to get creative and come up with new ideas.
- We believe that as part of a creative process it’s ok for ideas to be in contradiction with established physical laws or theories. What? Really? Yes, because when an idea evolves, it might change in ways that makes it align with existing laws or theories even though at first it wasn’t able to do so. And one idea might inspire another, and another and so on, until the point that you think of something that is actually useful even though the initial idea didn’t seem to make much sense at all.
The following table gives some further idea regarding the differences between Beating Gravity’s articles and scientific articles. It’s a rough comparison and not everything we mention in the table applies to all of our articles. Hopefully, though, it helps to get an idea.
Table with some differences between Beating Gravity’s articles and scientific articles
| Beating Gravity articles | Scientific articles |
| Generating and describing ideas, inspiring creativity, sharing opinions | Creating or improving scientific knowledge, sharing research, engaging in exchanges of scientific arguments, developing scientific theories, proving or falsifying hypotheses |
| References in articles are often used for informative and inspirational purposes | References in articles are used to build solid scientific arguments grounded in existing research |
| Usually light on mathematics | Often heavy on mathematics (when considering physics) |
| Some entertainment value (hopefully) | Usually not so entertaining (for most people) |
We believe this format allows for maximum creativity, which is highly desirable when trying to come up with something new. However, we do have some rules, to which we will now turn.
What you will not find on BeatingGravity.com
We only publish articles written in the spirit of the ideas explained above. To clarify that further, here are some examples of things you will (hopefully) not find on our site:
- No claims of having found a breakthrough solution for something without properly backing this up. While we would be thrilled about a breakthrough, we’ll believe it when we actually see it! For example, there are individuals posting in forums, or even publishing “scientific” articles or books, claiming that they found a breakthrough solution for overcoming the force of gravity (or other problems). Such individuals sometimes even claim that established scientists simply don’t want to believe them and are ignoring their breakthrough. That’s not the type of stuff we’d like to entertain on BeatingGravity.com, and we trust (almost) everyone agrees.
- No claims that most or all current physics theories are completely wrong and useless. Yes, there are people who believe this to be true and happily write about this. BeatingGravity.com shall not be a platform for such nonsense.
We are not explaining all concepts and terminology from scratch
Beating Gravity is not an educational website. Fortunately, though, there are other great websites and books that do a good job explaining lots of (scientific) concepts and terminology from scratch. We often refer to such websites or books instead of giving full-blown explanations ourselves. If the context calls for it, we frequently give summary explanations and add references for those interested in more details.
We allow ourselves to mix brief and limited explanations with more advanced ideas and thoughts. We do this in the spirit of creativity and we apologize for the confusion this may create for some. If you are looking for websites that feature good explanations of relevant scientific concepts, there are quite a few options. Some may consider Wikipedia, and it can definitely be helpful. However, keep in mind that some Wikipedia articles about physics are quite technical. Therefore, such articles may not necessarily be suitable if you are completely new to a topic and/or don’t have a lot of mathematical knowledge. To find alternatives, it might be worthwhile to browse through the lists with references that we include with many articles on our site. In that case, you probably want to skip the references that link to scientific articles and focus on the rest instead.
Let’s take off!
Now you know all about Beating Gravity and we have just one thing left to say:
