Week in Review: Babies and Gravity Edition (July 5 - July 12)

Top of the agenda this past week: a really, really smart person says gravity is an "illusion" and LeBron James's Princeton grad dad emerges from the mist. Wait, what?First off: we pay our respects to Norman Ryder, a revolutionary Princeton sociologist who passed away at the age of 86. Ryder pioneered the "cohort" approach to demographic study, which analyzes a group of people of the same age as they "go through life and share similar experiences," sort of like that movie about babies.Speaking of babies, Ryder did a lot of massively influential research on fertility. He and another Princeton professor, Charles Westoff, co-directed the National Fertility Studies in '65, '70, and '75, interviewing thousands of American women and eventually demonstrating, among other cool things, "that a drop in unplanned births accounted for nearly the entire decline in U.S. fertility following the post-World War II baby boom."And speaking of unplanned births ...This past week, LeBron James, one of the best humans to have ever touched a basketball, decided where he was going to bounce and shoot that basketball for the foreseeable future. For those who managed (somehow) to miss it, it was a big deal. The national media salivated, tongues lolling dumbly, as Mr. James managed to scientifically pinpoint himself as the center of the known universe (I don't want to talk about it here it will get ugly I'm going to stop right now). It was a spectacle -- and in the midst of it all a strange 55-year-old man decided to smack LeBron with a lawsuit, claiming to be his father and accusing his "son" of a fraudulent cover-up.

You may be wondering why I am talking about this. The fact is ...

... Leicester Bryce Stovell '??, as the media never fails to gleefully mention, is an alum of Princeton University. He says that he met LeBron's mother at a D.C. nightclub back in the day and impregnated her. This unsavory fellow also says that Ms. James sought him out months later to inform him that she was bearing his child; apparently his only request was that the little guy play basketball one day. The kid turned out to be pretty good, so maybe Stovell is some kind of weird soothsayer or something.Despite a negative paternity test, Stovell remains convinced he's LeDaddy, and thus has started building his own case. (Yeah, he's a lawyer too, by the way, though this degree's not our fault, it's the University of Chicago's.) Said case is ostensibly based on rock-solid evidence, including:

• The fact that they are both tall.
• The fact that they both have bearded, prominent jawlines.
• The "fact" that LeBron's name is an homage to him: the "Le" borrowed from "Leicester," and the "Br" from "Bryce."

Meanwhile, LeBron's camp denies all connections, points to that negative paternity test, and just sort of watches as this odd, sad man takes his case to (non-hardwood) court, seeking $4 mil in damages. Oh, and Stovell assures us that the timing was coincidental: "This is not one of those popping out of woodwork to exploit a celebrity's fame and fortune." Right.And now, for a significantly less offensive yet equally shocking assertion: gravity is not what we think it is! That is, according to physicist Erik Verlande, a former professor of physics (he left for the University of Amsterdam, though twin bro Herman stuck around). This audacious string theorist thinks that we're looking at gravity entirely the wrong way, thinks it's a mere consequence of something much deeper: the laws of thermodynamics."For me, gravity doesn't exist," he quips (and I visualize him smugly puffing at a bubble pipe while chilling in a bath tub full of money).His incendiary paper, "On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton," is apparently lot more incendiary than the title might immediately suggest since it has sparked an uproar in the physics world. Plenty of smart physicists are baffled by this theory, while other smart physicists believe there's some merit to it. The Times attempts to explain Verlande's notion to the layman:

Dr. Verlinde’s argument turns on something you could call the “bad hair day” theory of gravity.It goes something like this: your hair frizzles in the heat and humidity, because there are more ways for your hair to be curled than to be straight, and nature likes options. So it takes a force to pull hair straight and eliminate nature’s options. Forget curved space or the spooky attraction at a distance described by Isaac Newton’s equations well enough to let us navigate the rings of Saturn, the force we call gravity is simply a byproduct of nature’s propensity to maximize disorder.

He could be onto something. Regardless, he should probably come back to Princeton so we can take credit for this ... because in all likelihood, we cannot take credit, even indirectly, for LeBron James.(images via www.princeton.edu, www.huffingtonpost.com, www.nytimes.com)