Free Fall

Why is Love the only emotion we fall into? We don’t fall into Hate, or even into Apathy. For better or worse, there are various diseases which can cause us to fall. One of the best known is epilepsy. One of its supposed sufferers was Julius Caesar. In Shakespeare’s play, one of the people who witnessed this reports how it happened in public, in a crowded place. Caesar was said to have the “Falling Sickness,” and this, apparently, did not disqualify him from a position of leadership.

But that was before his real fall from power, when he was assassinated by a group of conspirators, of whom his supposed friend, Brutus, was the most eminent. In the play, the scene of the killing is actually enacted, but the truly dramatic climax occurs in a subsequent scene, when another friend, Mark Antony (who was not involved in the plot) is permitted to speak at Caesar’s funeral.

This is the famous speech which begins “Friends, Romans, Countrymen – lend me your ears.” It is a masterpiece of oratory, in which Antony sways the crowd from pity over the loss of their great leader, to fury against those who committed this terrible act.

And the “Fall” is treated both literally and figuratively. Caesar, says Antony, fell at the very base of the statue of his great predecessor, Pompey. And then comes the punch-line: “O, what a fall was there, my countrymen! Then I, and you, and all of us fell down, Whilst bloody treason flourished over us.”

How can we account for Shakespeare’s genius? The more we read of him, the more staggering it is to think that one man – apparently not even very highly educated – could produce such an impressive body of work.

Of course, there are those who believe that the real author must have been someone else – and various candidates have been advanced – but never with any convincing proof.

But to get back to falling, it is remarkable to me that – whereas through all of human history, this was something to be afraid of and to avoid – it has recently to some extent come under control, and has even become a form of sport, entertainment, and pleasure.

Leonardo da Vinci, that Renaissance polymath, in 1485 contemplated the earliest known parachute to have even been drawn. So far as we know, it was never even experimented with at that time. More closely to our own time, one brave man tried using Leonardo’s design from an airplane in flight. But he also wore a modern parachute and used it in the final part of the descent, casting off the experimental da Vinci prototype, which was so heavy that he was afraid it would crush him.

But consider in how many ways people have learned to enjoy the sensation of falling. First, we have downhill skiing. Then, there is Bungee Jumping, which involves using a long elastic cord. The jumper launches from some high point, such as a bridge over a deep ravine, and the cord allows them to fall as nearly as possible to the ground before pulling them up, after which climactic moment several more thrilling downs and ups exhaust all the latent energy in the cord.

More suitable for children are the trampolines on which they can jump in safety, surrounded by protective netting. There are also the “rides” now common at fairgrounds and amusement parks, which provide a feeling of falling straight down.

But much more impressive than any of these are the people who jump out of airplanes at high altitudes, actually fall for hundreds or thousands of feet, and try to avoid using their parachutes until the last possible moment before descending safely to the ground. While in the air, usually as part of a group, they perform various kinds of aerobatics.

If you lived in northern Italy in the sixteenth century and wanted to experiment with the descent of falling bodies, one problem would have been to find a convenient place to drop things. That is why the Leaning Tower of Pisa has played such a large part in these stories. 

By Galileo’s time, that tower had already been there for several centuries. The accounts we have say that, by dropping objects of different weights at the same time from the top the tower, and having it observed that they landed simultaneously, Galileo proved that the rate of falling does not depend on weight.

On which one might comment: Next stop, Einstein and Hiroshima.