Intelligent Falling - History

History

In June 2002 a user named Jeff Stubbs posted a draft of a letter to the editor that mentions intelligent grappling to the alt.atheism and talk.origins usenet groups. He commented that "I don't like the theory of gravity, I feel personally insulted that engineers design structures only considering physical mass. What about our souls? I propose that science classes also teach the theory of "Intelligent Grappling". There's no way a weak force such as gravity can possibly hold everything onto the planet. It must be God, using our souls, to hold everything together." This was followed by a Elf Sternberg posting a "FAQ on intelligent grappling" on the sci.skeptic usenet group. D. C. Simpson published, in May 2005, an I Drew This comic strip titled "Teaching Gravity". This was followed by Joshua Rosenau, a graduate student at the University of Kansas, presenting the idea on his blog, citing Isaac Newton. Intelligent falling was the subject of an article in The Onion in August 2005.

In January 2010 Indian news satire website Faking News used the idea to write spoof news: "Apple dropped from Burj Dubai to validate Newton’s laws disappears". A Turkish Scientist, Prof. Dr. Esat Rennan Pekünlü of Ege University, mistakenly thought that IF was being proposed seriously, and wrote an article in the a popular science journal Cumhuriyet Bilim. He later retracted the article.

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