Seth Godin and Scientific Illiteracy

Seth Godin is a really good marketer.

But man does he not understand much about physics. In a recent post about marketing one's product as "gravity" versus "evolution", he writes:

Newton gets all kinds of credit. They call it the Law of Gravity. They put his picture on pages that profile geniuses. They say he discovered gravity. Nonsense. He just named it.

Everyone 'believes' in gravity. And yet, we know virtually nothing about it. We don't know how gravity waves (if there are any) are transmitted. We can't block them (anti gravity boots!) and we can't amplify them and we have no idea how fast they travel. There are very few people doing serious gravity research and development, either. But it's apparently a law.

That's so wrong I don't even know where to start.

If you think determining the nature of a inverse-square law from observations of the elliptical nature of the orbits of planets is "just naming," well, dude, what does someone have to do to impress you?

Godin might want to say "And yet, I know nothing about it." Because the "we" that actually pay attention to these things know a shit-ton about how gravity works. It's called "Einstein's General Theory of Relativity." Wikipedia it if you want to see how successful that theory is. We know how gravity waves are transmitted (vibrations in the spacetime metric). We know how fast they travel (speed of light). And we know how they are amplified (just collide a few black holes together).

Yes, I know. It's a metaphor. He's trying to be funny while he sets up his marketing point. But the problem is -- it propagates (there's that wave idea again) bad notions about science. I don't go out and spout half-baked ideas about marketing while writing science blog posts; marketing ad-wizards should try to respect what scientists do when writing their blogs at least enough to do some basic Googling.

We live in a technological world, based on basic scientific research. And yet a smart guy like Seth Godin, with many orders of magnitude more readers than this blog, puts out very wrong ideas about our understanding of the most basic of physical forces. Pretty sad when Isaac Newton can't get no respect.