The Gravity Monument

Standing on the campus of Middlebury College, near where you are now, is a small granite monument placed in the nineteen sixties by something called the Gravity Research Foundation. It asks students to look forward to the day when a semi-insulator of gravity is discovered, one that could harness gravity as a free power source and reduce airplane accidents.

The foundation was created by Roger Babson, an eccentric Boston financier who became obsessed with gravity after his sister drowned in childhood, a death he blamed on what he called gravity's oppressive pull. Babson spent decades commissioning these monuments at colleges across America, each one urging future scientists to defeat gravity. His foundation also sponsored serious academic prize competitions in physics, though the mainstream scientific community regarded his ideas with considerable skepticism. The monument at Middlebury is one of the surviving originals, a strange and earnest relic of one man's very personal war against one of the fundamental forces of nature.