Bill Walton was a great NBA player, but has spent his entire broadcasting career demonstrating that rocket science and brain surgery weren't robbed on that account. SC's latest evidence for this claim comes from an inane (also subscriber-only) column he just wrote for ESPN. It starts off like so:
In glorious celebration of Albert Einstein's 100th-year anniversary of his theory of anti-gravity...
Einstein developed three theories in 1905 -- concerning special relativity, Brownian motion, and the photoelectric effect. Nothing about anti-gravity. However, there are a couple of things Walton could be talking about. Some physicists have argued that the state of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate could be used as the basis for an anti-gravity device, but there is room for skepticism about whether Bill Walton has anything like a detailed understanding of the arguments involved. More likely, he saw either this editorial or some similar article, and drew from it the conclusion that Einstein was concerned with developing a theory of anti-gravity against the objections of the larger community. In fact, SC's sure of that, because the column ends with:
When Albert Einstein came up with so many of his most important theories 100 years ago, he was often chastised for being so wrong. For a while, even he thought that he had blown some of them. Time, hard work and patience were his greatest allies.
In fairness to Bill Walton, Einstein did meet with considerable resistance to relativity. Fortunately, he had people like Arthur Eddington to fudge the data for him until such time as actual data could be produced to support it. Einstein did postulate an anti-gravity force, but he certainly didn't think it was the centerpiece of anything, at least not by what he called the book where he introduced it. But this isn't so much about whether Einstein ever produced a "theory of anti-gravity" as Bill Walton's understanding of its contents. The noted astrophysicist goes on:
Who's your MVP, Shaquille O'Neal or Steve Nash????? [sic] Despite looking like anti-gravity, the similarities are actually eerie.
Writing about Stan Van Gundy's coaching job in Miami:
Stan's positive, up beat, constructive, reinforcing style of freedom and expressiveness is the anti-gravity to what is happening in Houston.
Writing about the Chicago Bulls' two losers, Tyson Chandler and Eddy Curry:
They are classic representatives of anti-gravity. What one guy has, the other guy doesn't.
One school of thought in linguistics holds that a word's meaning is just the contexts that it occurs in. On this version of things, "anti-gravity" in Waltonese means "opposite". Alternatively, Walton is suggesting that the key component of an anti-gravity device is an adequate supply of NBA players, who are often metaphorically referred to as "gravity defying". More likely, though, Walton has got "gravity" mixed up with "matter", since matter/anti-matter would seem to be a more apt metaphor for the comparisons he's making. It is possible that Bill Walton actually is onto a workable theory of quantum gravity, making the conflation of these terms meaningful, but until the publication of Walton (Hell Freezes Over) on his new interpretation of the cosmological constant, he might want to reconsider his use of physics-based metaphors.
Walton's not quite as stupid as you might think. Einstein's postulated cosmological constant was an ad hoc gimmick to keep the universe from collapsing under gravitational attraction; in some real sense, it is "antigravity". And indeed, if, as now seems likely, that constant is greater than 1, the universe is expanding faster and faster, impelled by an antigravity "dark force".
Posted by: Theophylact | January 13, 2005 at 05:37 PM
Sorry; didn't read far enough. I see you've covered this. And of course I don't mean to apologize in general for the intellectual deficits of overpaid athletes...
Posted by: Theophylact | January 13, 2005 at 05:40 PM
Excuse me &^%$face,
I was reading your little article on my good friend Billy Walton. I was noticing that you have a problem with anti-gravity. If you had any sense of smell you could smell the skunk weed from your padded lounge chair at your favorite coffe shop you stupid *&^%. Never ever allow Mr. Walton's name to escape your vocal box again. If you do ever feel his name coming out of your rectum flavored pie hole swallow those words back down like warm cum spewing out of your lover's cock.
Sincerely,
Your Mother
Posted by: ingi johnson | February 27, 2005 at 01:02 AM