Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson for September 17, 2010

I thought he slipped that little item in quite skillfully.

HE’s a slippery little tike

GM everyone

Oh, By the way…..Mom, you need to clean up on aisle 7

Calvin understands the gravity of the statement- Light is actually deflected by gravity. He is just acting dumb.

Ha Ha. Good ones. You guys are sharp this morning.

Just as much fun reading your comments!

Two corrections, Calvin… not so much planets but more massive stuff like galaxies and stars.

I’m surprised he knows so much about Einstein’s relativity theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_lens

(as opposed to, say the relative importance of not telling Mom immediately about his accident) :-P

Well, he didn’t tell IMMEDIATELY! ;) He started by impressing her with his knowledge on gravity.

According to what I learn in school is that the smaller the planet (or the moons that orbit them), the lighter their gravity is. The bigger the planet is (like Jupiter) the heavier the gravity it is.

And why were you wearing roller skates in the house, Calvin?

Calvin fails to understand the gravity of his situation.

@Josh 1360: Think mass, not size. Small objects [dwarf stars] can have enormous gravitational fields.

It’s a gift Mom.

Calvin’s dumb Mom? Who’s working the mop?

There should be a button “report spam” here..

The gravity wells of planets and moons will also bend light. It’s just that the effect is so small at that level that we can’t observe it, yet (so far as I’m aware). But such bending is equally predicted by theory.

We are already at the point where time dilation (also predicted) can be measured with regard to spacecraft orbiting the Earth. So the bending of light in the same gravity well should also be happening.

(P.S. to Mom: Intelligence and knowledge on the one hand and wisdom on the other are two different things!)

Pouring lemonade while wearing roller skates? That just cannot turn out well, no matter what …

moronbis, Light is actually affected by the Dark Sucker Theory http://www.ultimatecampresource.com/site/camp-activity/the-dark-sucker-theory.html

I hope he didn’t mess up his skates!

G’Morning, Mike, Marg & Grog!

Emilia Andrade - - By “clicking” on the word flag under the comment, you are reporting the post to Gocomics.

Intelligence, knowledge, and wisdom are three different things!

It gives me great pleasure to say that I don’t see any spam right now…

It’s certain Calvin doesn’t read “The Family Circus,” or else he would have said that Notme or Idaknow had actually spilled the lemonade.

I was wondering if someone would catch that, RinaFarina… :)

Count it as being too tired to think on the one hand and too lazy to change the error on the other.

Some strips are heavy with spam. Calvin you must be paying attention to class to talk about matter.

It’s just that the spammers are out early today so gone early. Yesterday they started about noon after most of you were off line. I was late getting to the comics and flagged one just one minute after it posted.

I agree Lewreader!

It was described to me as,”Book Smart vs. Street Smart”. My son and his friends are the, “Book Smart” crowd and they’re brillant but put them in a day to day decision making situation and they’re lost .

Calvin ‘put the squeeze on Mom’. Mom should ‘mop the floor with Calvin’! When life gives you lemonade, what then? Lemon oils are used in floor polish. Mop the whole floor with the lemonade, or is that squeezing too much out of it? Okay, I think I’ll ‘peel’ out of here now!

“GrogGenius_badge said, about 6 hours ago

And why were you wearing roller skates in the house, Calvin?”

He must have been trying to “roll toward the dip” when he slipped.

Yes I wonder,how can he be so smart. Is that true about gravity and light ?

It is true ratlum, and his analogy was dead-on. Bill Watterson must have been pretty interested in science. ;-)

Calvin is probably self-taught when it comes to science and doesn’t pay attention to subjects he has no interest in (like myself).

Clever Calvin. Where is Hobbes today?

Calvin’s the gift to his parents that just keeps on giving!

Yet, those posting about the spam take up more space than the spam did in the first place. Please just flag and move on!

Based on the size of that lemonade puddle on the floor, just how big was that pitcher anyhow?!?!?

Gretchensmom, it was one of those pitchers that bounced! Plus if you are mopping the floor wouldn’t you just mop the whole thing? I don’t know I’ve never been a mom!

While skating along with the pitcher of lemonade, Calvin’s center of gravity changed suddenly producing an intense look of gravitas on his mother’s face….

Ah, all of the wordplay is making me a “grave” person, much like Mercucio…grave, gravity, gravitas…isn’t that the Latin for bad punning? Hope your day isn’t soured by all the spilt lemonade!

I don’t know–we always got first dibs on cleaning up our messes. We learned how to wield a mop, anyway.

And, yes, any mass–even one as small as an electron–curves space-time ever so slightly. It’s not very measurable, however, on less than planetary scales–and the larger the better. IIRC, two masses of lead the size of a house (or a moderate skyscraper) would take millennia to move together over a foot solely under the attraction of their mutual gravity. But it takes under a second for the Earth to fall back to my feet when I push it away by jumping.

Book sense vs Common sense? lol

That theory didn’t work well with my wife after I spilled my coffee today either.

LeslieAnne: You’re absolutely right. If I have to haul out the mop and bucket to clean up a mess in one area I might as well just do the whole thing while I’m at it!

OK guys and gals… if ALL mass has gravity and therefore ALL mass exerts a force and the third Law of Newton states that for every force there is an equal but opposite reaction force such as I am attracting the Earth equally as much as it attracts me then what is the reaction force of star on light if light is not matter hence no gravity?

Light does have mass–the rest mass of a photon may be zero, but it moves, and has energy, which can be calculated for each wavelength of photon. Hence, it is affected by gravitational fields, according to Relativity. Therefore, one early, famous test was to photograph the sky during a total solar eclipse and check to see how much the star images near the sun moved–because the light was traveling in a hyperbola rather than in a (virtually) straight line to us.

Also: that’s how a Black hole event horizon is defined: it’s the point at which escape velocity is higher than the speed of light, so that even light is pulled into the hole by the gravity.

i know im calvins freind but i think calvin should clean up the mess