Stephen Hawking and "Zero Gravity"

I get a lot of push back on things I present here. One topic where loads of energy was invested has been on this notion of "Zero Gravity". SSH archives are loaded with these discussions.

Well today Stephen Hawking died. And he will be remembered as the foremost expert on gravity. Yet on his own website, he has for quite a long time listed a video which presents the title as "Zero Gravity Flight". You can see it for yourself right he

http://www.hawking.org.uk/videos.html

That video is a presentation by Peter Diamandis about Hawking's flight on the Zero-G plane, run by the company that Diamandis started with a NASA astronaut, with both of them having earned advanced degrees from MIT. These two guys actually named their company "Zero Gravity Corporation". And they even went so far as to host their homepage on this URL:

http://www.nogravity.com/

That's right. Two MIT guys offering "Zero Gravity" flights at NoGravity.com.

It is one thing for Peter Diamandis and Byron Lichtenberg to be clueless on what gravity is and what gravity isn't. But when Stephen Hawking buys into this and posts the video on his own website under the words "Zero Gravity Flight", then I'm left wondering how well Stephen Hawking himself understood gravity.

I'm actually quite sure that he did. So maybe the problem here is that he didn't care a lick about his own website. He let someone else run it, and he himself never looked at it.

I look forward to the day when NASA's astronauts gain a complete understanding that being in orbit is NOT zero gravity. A lot of progress has been made on this since first being raised here in this forum many years ago. "Zero Gravity Corporation" even stopped calling themselves that. Their airplane says "Zero-G" on the side, and they no longer use the URL nogravity.com. Their old URL won't even redirect you to their new URL. It was good to see this change happening in the months before Hawking's 2007 flight.

I myself believe that a healthier approach would be to own your past mistakes. It would be great if NoGravity.com would be a page that explains the distinction between the general concept of acceleration and gravity.

Stephen Hawking did not put much effort into educating the masses on this, as far as I saw. He apparently had more important things to do. And his life ended today with his website promoting this common fallacy about gravity.

There's still hope that the younger generation, including folks like Eddie Redmayne, will have a rock solid understanding that flying parabolas through the Earth's atmosphere or flying orbits around the Earth or Moon will never get the acceleration of gravity anywhere close to zero.

Surely Stephen Hawking knew this.
Even if his website didn't.

~ CT