I was on Google Earth the other day, idly messing around with the perks that come from a rising empire and near omnipotence. Then, I noticed something about one of Tufts' time-honored traditions. If we assume that our cannon atop the hill is aligned with Ballou Hall and the chapel, it cannot possibly be pointing at Harvard. How depressing: our single icon of animosity towards the Ivy League's poster boy is ironically also a symbol of our own ineptitude.
Which is upsetting, right? The cannon is one of those redeeming aspects of campus that we all love and adore. While this disappoints me, I take comfort in the fact that we still have a campus rife with little eccentricities.
Our elephant fetish would be the most obvious one, although we could do far worse when picking a mammal to obsess over (whales, for instance). Then there are the "rape steps" up by Carmichael, which are apparently designed to allow women to escape while their pursuant would fall prey to the stairs' devious understanding of male anatomy.
Haskell Hall was designed and built to be riot-proof, the assumption being that you can't stick it to the man if you can't figure out how to get out of the building. And also, it is rumored that the largest collection of LEGOs in the entire northeast rests peacefully somewhere under Brown & Brew.
And then, there is the singular gem of a unique quirk, lodged in the ground by Eaton Hall. Go check it out - I'm not lying: at the top of the library steps, head straight to East Hall, and you'll see it on your right.
It is a stone tablet, bestowed on Tufts with a singular purpose, and I quote the inscription: "To remind students of the blessings forthcoming when a semi-insulator is discovered in order to harness gravity as a free power and reduce airplane accidents." The date: 1961.
It's this kind of stuff that I live for; like that antique you find in the attic that is so out of date that it's cool. And it works on all levels, too. You can laugh at the phrasing ("blessings forthcoming"?) and chuckle at the apparent futility of the idea. Or, like me, you can push aside your inherent skepticism and grasp the wholesome ideal behind it. Harnessing gravity like it was an angry bull, and using that angry bull to stop airplanes from crashing? In a word, my fellow Jumbos: inspiring.
The monument was placed there with a grant from the Gravity Research Foundation (GRF) and its founder, the esteemed Roger W. Babson. Babson, like his monument, was eccentric. He blamed gravity for the death of his sister, who drowned; Perhaps this was the motive behind his eventual founding and funding of the GRF. He was obsessed with whether gravity affected higher brain functions and whether the solar and lunar gravitational fields had any additional effect.
He located the GRF in New Boston - which is actually in New Hampshire - because of its distance from major cities like Boston and Providence, which he believed would be targeted when World War III began. Babson may have been nothing but a quack with a lot of money, but in the end, that's the best kind of millionaire there is.
The Foundation itself no longer really exists, save for an annual essay contest. Its original purpose was to compile the most complete library on gravity in the world and to help the scattered sporadic interested parties to network with each other. And finally, the foundation was dedicated to combing through files at the patent office to seize upon any and all alloys or machines that could possibly control gravity. In short, the name speaks for itself, and he wasn't joking about any of it. Go to www.gravityresearchfoundation.org and read its purpose, in his words; it's a riot of a read. Yet that idealistic overtone makes you want to believe that he'll someday be proven right.
The tradition of painting the cannon notwithstanding, I have lost much of the pride I once had in what the old gun stands for. I hereby inaugurate a push to make the gravity stone one of Tufts' foremost monuments and treasured objects. Not only is it an endearing memorial, but it is one of several other stone tablets strung out among other universities, from Hobart in New York, to Emory in Georgia, to Wheaton in Illinois.
And guess what? Of all the schools that have gravity stones, none of them are Ivy League schools. So call me petty, but that's awesome. The gravity stone can take the cannon's place. Take that, Harvard and Yale: You don't have a gravity stone. And if we can't be part of the Ivy League, then you can't be part of the Gravity League. Hot damn, the Gravity League - that rocks.
