Moving the Earth

Archimedes had said : Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.

I have a plan to move Earth too. But it centres around the concept of Newton's Third Law of motion and not the concept of the lever. Now, I know that the regular readers of my blog (as if there are thousands of them!) are probably wondering if it is indeed Govindraj who is writing the post, because even after as many as three lines, there has not been a funny word, forget a funny, rib-tickling sentence. It is indeed I and for once, I have decided to be serious about my blog posts. I have realised that every person should have a challenge in his/her life. And the person should think of things other than whether he has taken a bath in the morning or not. I, for one, do that every day. Not the bathing. The thinking. So, this morning I decided to challenge myself to write an article that was mentally stimulating and would be well received in scientific circles. These scientific circles like to indulge in what is called "Mental Masturbation". They stimulate the brain cells and then they do nothing more interesting than solve some problems such as finding the distance between two stars located three hundred zillion light years away. As if that is of any real utility to the poor dumb species that inhabit this planet. A more practical research would be to find out how to make oneself disappear. This will be of particular use when a person encounters an embarassing situation.

I say this because I recently was invited to a party where the hostess was a huge lady, who had a booming voice. And she was boring everyone to death by voicing out her opinions about the state of the country. The only reason all of us remained seated where we were was that the sound waves emanating from her mouth had such force that they kept us rooted to our seats. Another reason was probably the fact that dinner was yet to be served and her chef was known for doling out exotic and exquisite delicacies. Now, due to the divine smell wafting in to the hall from the kitchen tingling my nasal sensors, I had developed a primal urge to make a dash for the kitchen and eat whatever it was that was giving off the smell. And I had nearly made it to the kitchen when the hostess saw me.

Hostess : "Where are you going, Govindraj?"
Me : "I was wondering what the distance between Alpha Centauri and Sirius could be! So, I was making my way to the gallery to find out"

As you can see, the ability to disappear would have served me much more purpose than the distance between the two stars (I have a niggling doubt if they are even two different stars. I think they are the same star!) So, I think that the scientific cirlces should get their act together. But then, they are the only ones who are the most respected in the whole world. Which brings me to my topic for today's post, which you have probably forgotten by now. I want to propose a method to move earth so that I can be well-known in the world, once my critical review of the mechanism of the earth's rotation and the way to change it has been accepted.

Some posts ago, I had proposed the idea of all the local train travellers in Mumbai jumping off together to trigger an earthquake. That I realise, was unscientific, in the sense it was a bad idea to ask people to jump off the train. They might hurt themselves in the process. And of course, there was the small matter of the earthquake, which would probably send tsunamis to the neighbouring country, about which I care two hoots. Anyway, I have come up with a better plan. Which is this. All Indians should stand in straight lines extending from Kanyakumari to Srinagar and then walk from the west towards the east. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. This will result in the rotation of earth in the opposite direction or atleast a stopping of rotation. For rotating the earth in the opposite direction, we would need to enlist the support of the Chinese.

Now, you will be tempted to ask the practical utility of this. Well, for starters, we could maintain day over India whenever we wanted to. Better still, by preventing the motion of earth, we could have a extended night, so that we could sleep till our heart's content. To continue the night, we could take turns at walking in the straight line. And we could black-mail the sparsely populated western, developed countries into submission to our demands. The idea is infallible. Now you probably understand why they say that India's population is it's strength. I think we should put this plan into action as soon as possible, along with the Somalia mosquito plan (The Powai Lake and National Interests) We will very soon become a super-power!