Physics 101

Newton's Laws and fannish behavior. Because it must be said.

The first law, in its basic form, is "An object at rest will remain at rest unless acted upon by force." This also means that an object in motion will continue in motion unless acted upon by a force. In other words, this is inertia.

The second law is easy: F = MA. In other words, the force on an object is equal to the product of the mass and acceleration of an object. This formula manifests itself mostly in objects falling off the Tower of Pisa (and is also a pretty good way of calculating what falls with greater force - one kilogram of iron or one kilogram of feathers. Gravity/acceleration is approximately 9.8 meters/second - you can do the math if you still aren't sure which one falls with faster).

The third law is the one people go around quoting all of the time. "For every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction." So theoretically, if someone in China sneezes, there ought to be some kind of reaction in the US. Okay, so maybe that's not in the spirit of the law, but you get the idea. This is the law I see most often in fandom - someone snarks in a blog, then someone else has to snark back. Fandom Wank is devoted to the idea of "you snark, I snark, we all snark for snark."

A very wise person said to me the other day, "If someone snarks in hir blog and no one reads it, is it still snark?" Yup, still snark, but in this case Newton's first law applies. It's snark at rest and so it shall remain, unless someone decides to put the Newton's third law into effect. But it's only worth acting on a snark at rest if the equal and opposite reaction is worth it. Whether it's worth or not is debatable - the snark continues, back and forth, and thus, fandom_wank. Once the third law takes effect, along comes the second law to top it all off. The more controversial the controversy, the greater the mass of fen involved, thus accelerating the discussion until fen take their toys home or realize that there's no reasoning with incoherence and/or illogic. When Isaac Newton got hit on the head with an apple, he was way ahead of his time in predicting fannish behavior.