What Goes Up Must Come Down?

After my mention of technology yesterday, I got to musing about an interesting fact. It is that all things cycle in human experience, but inventions cumulate and seemingly are never lost. Empires may crumble but useful knowledge is never forgotten. A significant test of that lies ahead in coming centuries if, as I am fairly convinced, modern culture will collapse as one of its major supports, fossil energy, is finally exhausted. Will the use of electricity—unquestionably the most important discovery of this particular era of modernity—also disappear? My bet is that it won’t. What goes up must come down—to be sure. But useful knowledge just keeps rising.

That titular phrase is interesting. Pop culture attributes the line to Isaac Newton, who never actually said it. What Newton did say, in Principia Mathematica, was something else. He said: “Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it.” Translated into pop lingo, Newton said: “What goes up will come down—as soon as it gets tired.”

We may exhaust our fossil fuels, but the knowledge that motion can be used to capture invisible energy that’s simple there, in the air, you might say, will not be lost. Knowledge belongs to a range of human experience not in the least affected by gravity or external forces. We may be on the way into a new Dark Age, but it will be lit by electricity. Somehow. Somehow we’ll manage to keep the copper turning inside its jacketing magnets to hold on to something that went up, spectacularly, in the nineteenth century and will never be forgotten again.