Imagining “What If?”

Abstract

With all due respect to Rod Serling, for your consideration, you are an unsuspecting traveler on the spaceship Earth. Suddenly, you notice a bright streak across the daytime sky to your left. As the long streak starts to seemingly head for you and the Earth’s surface, it becomes discernible as an incredibly huge, misshapen chunk of rock more than a kilometer wide. As it sinks lower, pulled by the Earth’s gravity, it pushes a violent shock wave ahead of it. By now, you hear only the crackling sound as layer by layer of the rock is peeled off by the friction of the atmosphere. The shock wave hits next, but it does not matter.

I do not know what I seem to the world, but to myself, I appear to have been like a boy playing upon the seashore and diverting myself by now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the grand ocean of truth lay before me all undiscovered.

Sir Isaac Newton