Gravity Isn't Very Romantic

Or how to ruin a date with science.

When I was younger, I was terrible at dating. Or at least, I felt like I was terrible at dating. Maybe it was just subjective social anxiety, and the women in question were not in fact as bored and irritated as it seemed from where I stood. But I do have at least some objective evidence that it wasn't all in my head. I ruined one date by talking about gravity.

It seemed like a fairly safe topic initially. I had just finished an MA thesis focused on the history and philosophy of science, and I was fairly excited about the topic in a nerdy and arguably overbearing way.

So when I was set up with Georgia by a mutual friend, and she politely asked me about what I was doing with my life, I started babbling about science and religion and how the two were more similar than you might expect. I may have name-dropped philosopher Paul Feyerabend, whose 1975 classic of contrarian cosmological provocation, Against Method, argues that Galileo didn't really prove the earth went round the sun.

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