What Will Habitats Celebrate on Dec. 25th?

Considering that their lives will be a testament to the unique
insight of one man, a man who I might add was born on December 25th,
I venture the opinion that the event will be Gravitational Mass and
a day to celebrate Isaac Newton.

Credit to James P. Hogan

Merry Gravmas

"Is that you, Li?" Cheng Xiang called, looking up from the
notescreen propped against his knee. He had been amusing himself
with a few tensor integrals to clear his mind before taking his
morning coffee.

The sounds of movement came again from upstairs. Moments later, his
ten-year-old son appeared, floating down the staircase on an anti-g
disk. "Good morning, father."

"Merry Gravmas."

"And to you." Li hopped off the disk and stood admiring the
decorations that the family robot had put up overnight. There were
paper chains hanging in hyperbolic catenary curves and sinusoids,
Gaussian distribution bells, and pendulums wreathed in logarithmic
spirals. In the corner opposite the total-sensory cassette player,
there stood a miniature apple tree with binary stars on top, a heap
of gaily wrapped gifts around its base, and its branches adorned
with colored masses of various shapes, a string of pulsing plasma
glows, and striped candles shaped like integral signs. "It looks
nice," Li said, eyeing the presents. "I wonder what Santa Roid has
brought this year."

"You'll have to wait until your brother and sister get here before
you can open anything," Xian told him. "What are they doing?"

"Yu is sending off a last-minute Gravmas present to a schoolfriend
over the matter transmitter to Jupiter. Yixuan is helping Mother
program the autochef to cook the turkey."

"Why does everyone in this family always have to leave everything
until the last minute?" Xiang grumbled, setting down the screen and
getting up. "Anyone would think it wasn't obvious that the ease of
getting things done varies inversely as the square of
procrastination."

Li walked over to the window and gazed out at Peking's soaring
panorama of towers, bridges, terraces, and arches, extending away
all around, above, and for hundreds of meters below. "How did
Gravmas start?" he asked his father.

"Hmph!" Xian snorted as he moved to stand alongside the boy. "Now
isn't that typical of young people today. Too wrapped up in
relativistic quantum chromodynamics and multidimensional function
spaces to know anything about where it came from or what it means.
It's this newfangled liberal education that's to blame. They don't
teach natural philosophy anymore, the way we had to learn it."

"Well, that kind of thing does seem a bit quaint these days," Li
said. "I suppose it's okay for little old ladies and people who --"

"They don't even recite the laws of motion in school every morning.
Standards aren't what they used to be. It'll mean the end of
civilization, you mark my words."

"You were going to tell me about Gravmas . . . "

"Oh, yes. Well, I presume you've heard of Newton?"

"Of course. A newton is the force which, acting on a mass of one
kilogram, produces an acceleration of one meter per second per
second."

"Not a newton. The Newton. You didn't know that Newton was
somebody's name?"

"You mean it was a person?"

Xian sighed. "My word. You see you don't know anything. Yes,
Newton was the messiah who lived two thousand years ago, and came to
save us all from irrationality. Today is his birthday."

Li looked impressed. "Say, what do you know! Where did this happen?"

"In a quasi-stable, in a little town called Cambridge, which was
somewhere in Britain."

"That's in Europe, isn't it?" Li said.

"Oh, so you do know something."

"My friend Shao was in Europe last year," Li went on distantly. "His
parents took him on a trip there to see the ruins. He said it was
very dirty everywhere, with the streets full of beggars. And you
can't drink the water. It sounds like a strange place for a
civilization like ours to have started from."

"Strange things happen" Xiang thought for a while. "Actually,
according to legend, it didn't really start there."

"What?"

"Gravmas."

"How do you mean."

"Supposedly it was already a holiday that some ancient Western
barbarian culture celebrated before then, and we stole it. It was
easier to let people carry on with the customs they'd grown used to,
you see . . . At least, that's how the story goes."

"I wonder what the barbarian culture was like," Li mused.

"Nobody's quite sure," Xiang said. "But from the fragments that have
been put together, it seems to have had something to do with
worshipping crosses and fishes, eating holly, and building pyramids.
It was such a long time ago now that"

"Look!" Li interrupted, pointing excitedly. Outside the window, a
levitation platform was rising into view, bearing several dozen
happy-looking, colorfully dressed people with musical instruments.
The strains of amplified voices floated in from outside. "Carol
singers!" Li exclaimed.

Xiang smiled and spoke a command for the household communications
controller to relay his voice to the outside. "Good morning!" it
boomed from above the window as the platform came level.

The people on board saw the figures in the window and waved. "Merry
Gravmas," a voice replied.

"Merry Gravmas to you," Xiang returned.

"May the Force be proportional to your acceleration."

"Are you going to sing us a carol?" Xiang inquired.

"But of course. Do you have a request?"

"No, I'll leave it to you."

"Very well."

There was an introductory bar, and then,

"We three laws of orbiting are,
Ruling trajectories local and far.
Collisions billiard,
Particles myriad,
Planet and moon and star.
O-ooo . . ."

TangoMan