Intelligent Gravitation
Intelligent Gravitation is the theory that gravity isn't caused by the curvature of spacetime, as Albert Einstein and all those other smarty pants "scientists" claim, but is in fact caused by the noodly appendages of the Flying Spaghetti Monster pushing down upon us.
General relativityist propagandists, also called gravityists and Einsteinists, like to say that IG is pseudo sceintific nonsense inspired by religious scripture and has no scientific basis. This is unfortunate but not surprising since any old fool can understand how spacetime is treated as a 4-dimensional Lorentzian manifold which is curved by the presence of mass, energy and momentum (or stress-energy) within it; it takes a real genius to understand what is written in the Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Overview[edit]
Einstein described gravity in terms of the geometry of space time. Gravity is caused by distortions in the space time tensor due to the presence of massive objects and energy. The Einstein field equations are a set of ten differential equations which are solved simultaneously to determine the shape of the space-time fabric at any one point.
General relativity is currently the most successful gravitational theory, being almost universally accepted and well supported by observations. The first success of general relativity was in explaining the anomalous perihelion precession of Mercury. Then in 1919, Sir Arthur Eddington announced that observations of stars near the eclipsed Sun confirmed general relativity's prediction that massive objects bend light. Since then, many other observations and experiments have confirmed many of the predictions of general relativity, including gravitational time dilation, the gravitational redshift of light, signal delay, and gravitational radiation.
This is what kindergarten children are taught at least; the real intelligent theory of gravitation, called, appropriately enough, Intelligent Gravitation, describes gravity as caused by the noodly appendages of the Flying Spaghetti Monster as described in the Gospel of the FSM.
Just as with Intelligent Design, the alternative to Evilution, the closed minded diabolists known as scientists prefer to stick with theories based on observable evidence (general relativity, neo-Darwinian evolution) instead of the real explanations (Intelligent Design, Intelligent geography and Intelligent Gravitation).
Origins of the concept[edit]
Intelligent Gravitation in the late 20th century can be seen as a modern development of the dumb predictions of Isaac Newton. Like Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton was considered to be such a great thinker that he was worthy of printing on a banknote. The banknotes were English though and they have pretty low standards there, so maybe Newton and Darwin weren't so great after all.
As gravitational theory has expanded to explain more phenomena, the examples that are held up as evidence of the presence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster have changed. But the essential argument remains the same: objects on the surface of a large spheroid object like a planet can only be held to the surface due to long pieces of invisible divine spaghetti pushing down upon their heads. Examples offered in the past included the increasing size of humans as the population grows (less noodly appendages available, hence lessing pushing down on us) and the fact that the Flying Spaghetti Monster just likes touching us; current examples are mostly mathematical: the Bobby Henderson feild equations and associated vector and tensor direction equations.
Origins of the term[edit]
Though unrelated to the current use of the term, the phrase "intelligent gravitation" can be found in a 14th century issue of Scientific Medieval Europe. The term is also used in an address to the 1873 annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science by the renowned physicist Andrew Henderson (Bobby Henderson's great great grandfather). The term can be found again in Cool New Scientific Theories, a 1903 book by one of the founders of classical buffoonism, George Bush: "It will not be possible to rule out the supposition that the process of gravitation by Newton's law of gravity may be guided by a long strand of spaghetti.