A Sense of Gravity

Reflections on the tragedy in Baltimore Harbor

In the days since the tragic accident in Baltimore Harbor brought down the Francis Scott Key Bridge and claimed six lives, I have been haunted by the concept of gravity and its many definitions.

I first thought of it when I saw the searing images of the stricken bridge cascading into the waters below.

Gravity.

It is a force of nature that the bridge was designed to withstand until the container ship Dali struck with its own force that was, according to The New Times, “so large that one reasonable comparison is to a rocket launch.” With terrifying suddenness, the bridge’s once-mighty steel structure gave way as if it were no stronger than a house of cards.

I thought of the gravity of the situation — lives lost, a major artery severed, a busy commercial port strewn with debris, the lasting impact on a great American city that has seen hard times.

When I heard that all of the deceased were migrants from Latin and South America working on the bridge, I read their stories. I thought about how strong the gravitational pull of desperate hope must be for those willing to risk leaving home in search of a better life.

In the hubris of our current age, we sometimes act like the very forces of nature no longer apply to us. The physical has given way to the digital.

We live in clouds of our own construction. Not the billowing collections of water and ice droplets that stretch across our skies, but the millions of interconnected servers that slice, dice, and store our lives — how we communicate and remember ourselves — into packets of coded ones and zeros. Our family photos, shopping lists, love letters, resumes, tax forms, pay stubs, check-ins with friends, and so much else that used to require things you could hold in your hands now are accessible mainly through screens.

As we log in and endlessly scroll, it can be tempting to think how much of the modern technological world defines our existence. We look back at eras past and wonder how people could live without our expanses of instantaneous information. Just try watching films from the 1980s with your teenage children.

And yet, the tragedy in Baltimore is another reminder that we still live in a three-dimensional, material world. Ships are one of the oldest forms of transportation, but they still account for the vast majority of the world’s trade. According to the BBC, “at any given moment, there are 50,000 merchant ships crisscrossing the oceans – carrying as many as 5-6 million containers stuffed with goods.”

Meanwhile, the human instinct to build bridges stretches back to antiquity. It has been spurred by inventions like the arch, steel, and suspension, allowing our predecessors to imagine crossing ever-greater distances. It remains a major component of global infrastructure.

In this world, the forces of gravity remain a chief concern for those engineering our future.

We move through our digitally connected lives and too often forget all the physical structures and people that make modern living possible. We are frustrated by the inconveniences of road construction and repairs without thinking enough about all that goes into the work and those who do it. We buy something with an online click and await its arrival without having to imagine the chain of activity that the purchase unleashes. There is first the making of the object and then its passage through a series of boxes, trucks, warehouses, and who knows how many human and robotic hands.

Even as we soar through the sky on airplanes, mimicking the birds and temporarily escaping the limits gravity puts on our ability to fly, we do so in metal tubes of rivets and screws. We have the ability as a species to dream big but that is made possible by the tangible.

For those who took physics back in school, we might remember that gravity is determined by the mass of objects in relation to each other. We all have our own center of gravity. This force determines our weight on Earth and how it would be different on other celestial bodies. Think of those indelible images of astronauts skipping across the lunar surface.

Gravity defines how the planets orbit the sun and how the Moon shapes the ocean tides. Plants use it to orientate their growth and its influence can be so strong, as in the case of black holes, that even light cannot escape.

Gravity is too weak a force to shape the electrons that move through our electronics but the world in which these devices live, along with us, must contend with this greater reality. Anyone who has dropped their phone and broke the screen can tell you that.

We are still physical creatures living in a physical universe. What we build, how we build it, how we manage it, how we maintain it, and how we value it, all matter. These considerations too often are the backdrop of our lives until, suddenly, they are not.

We should take solace in the wisdom of the late British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking who said, “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.”

The forces that shape the world in which we live are also those that allow us to exist in the first place. We should honor them along with the precariousness of life, physical and otherwise.