***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof*** Copyright 2016 Chuck Klosterman I''ve spent most of my life being wrong. Not about everything. Just about most things. I mean, sometimes I get stuff right. I married the right person. I''ve never purchased life insurance as an investment. The first time undrafted free agent Tony Romo led a touchdown drive against the Giants on Monday Night Football , I told my roommate, "I think this guy will have a decent career." At a New Year''s Eve party in 2008, I predicted Michael Jackson would unexpectedly die within the next twelve months, an anecdote I shall casually recount at every New Year''s party I''ll ever attend for the rest of my life.

But these are the exceptions. It is far, far easier for me to catalog the various things I''ve been wrong about: My insistence that I would never own a cell phone. The time I wagered $100--against $1--that Barack Obama would never become president (or even receive the Democratic nomination). My three‑week obsession over the looming Y2K crisis, prompting me to hide bundles of cash, bottled water, and Oreo cookies throughout my one‑ bedroom apartment. At this point, my wrongness doesn''t even surprise me. I almost anticipate it. Whenever people tell me I''m wrong about something, I might disagree with them in conversation, but--in my mind--I assume their accusation is justified, even when I''m relatively certain they''re wrong, too. Yet these failures are small potatoes.

These micro‑moments of wrongness are personal: I assumed the answer to something was "A," but the true answer was "B" or "C" or "D." Reasonable parties can disagree on the unknowable, and the passage of time slowly proves one party to be slightly more reasonable than the other. The stakes are low. If I''m wrong about something specific, it''s (usually) my own fault, and someone else is (usually, but not totally) right. But what about the things we''re all wrong about? What about ideas that are so accepted and internalized that we''re not even in a position to question their fallibility? These are ideas so ingrained in the collective consciousness that it seems fool‑ hardy to even wonder if they''re potentially untrue. Sometimes these seem like questions only a child would ask, since children aren''t paralyzed by the pressures of consensus and common sense. It''s a dissonance that creates the most unavoidable of intellectual paradoxes: When you ask smart people if they believe there are major ideas currently accepted by the culture at large that will eventually be proven false, they will say, "Well, of course. There must be.

That phenomenon has been experienced by every generation who''s ever lived, since the dawn of human history." Yet offer those same people a laundry list of contemporary ideas that might fit that description, and they''ll be tempted to reject them all. It is impossible to examine questions we refuse to ask. These are the big potatoes. Like most people, I like to think of myself as a skeptical person. But I''m pretty much in the tank for gravity. It''s the natural force most recognized as perfunctorily central to everything we under‑ stand about everything else. If an otherwise well‑executed argument contradicts the principles of gravity, the argument is inevitably altered to make sure that it does not.

The fact that I''m not a physicist makes my adherence to gravity especially unyielding, since I don''t know anything about gravity that wasn''t told to me by someone else. My confidence in gravity is absolute, and I believe this will be true until the day I die (and if someone subsequently throws my dead body out of a window, I believe my corpse''s rate of acceleration will be 9.8 m/s2). And I''m probably wrong. Maybe not completely, but partially. And maybe not today, but eventually. "There is a very, very good chance that our understanding of gravity will not be the same in five hundred years. In fact, that''s the one arena where I would think that most of our contemporary evidence is circumstantial, and that the way we think about gravity will be very different.

" These are the words of Brian Greene, a theoretical physicist at Columbia University who writes books with titles like Icarus at the Edge of Time . He''s the kind of physicist famous enough to guest star on a CBS sitcom, assuming that sit‑ com is The Big Bang Theory . "For two hundred years, Isaac Newton had gravity down. There was almost no change in our thinking until 1907. And then from 1907 to 1915, Einstein radically changes our understanding of gravity: No longer is gravity just a force, but a warping of space and time. And now we realize quantum mechanics must have an impact on how we describe gravity within very short distances. So there''s all this work that really starts to pick up in the 1980s, with all these new ideas about how gravity would work in the microscopic realm. And then string theory comes along, trying to understand how gravity behaves on a small scale, and that gives us a description--which we don''t know to be right or wrong--that equates to a quantum theory of gravity.

Now, that requires extra dimensions of space. So the understanding of gravity starts to have radical implications for our understanding of reality. And now there are folks, inspired by these findings, who are trying to rethink gravity itself. They suspect gravity might not even be a fundamental force, but an emergent1 force. So I do think--and I think many would agree--that gravity is the least stable of our ideas, and the most ripe for a major shift." If that sounds confusing, don''t worry--I was confused when Greene explained it to me as I sat in his office 1 This means that gravity might just be a manifestation of other forces--not a force itself, but the peripheral result of something else. Greene''s analogy was with the idea of temperature: Our skin can sense warmth on a hot day, but "warmth" is not some independent thing that exists on its own. Warmth is just the consequence of invisible atoms moving around very fast, creating the sensation of temperature.

We feel it, but it''s not really there. So if gravity were an emergent force, it would mean that gravity isn''t the central power pulling things to the Earth, but the tangential consequence of something else we can''t yet explain. We feel it, but it''s not there. It would almost make the whole idea of "gravity" a semantic construction. (and he explained it to me twice). There are essential components to physics and math that I will never understand in any functional way, no matter what I read or how much time I invest. A post‑gravity world is beyond my comprehension. But the concept of a post‑gravity world helps me think about something else: It helps me understand the pre‑ gravity era.

And I don''t mean the days before Newton published Principia in 1687, or even that period from the late 1500s when Galileo was (allegedly) dropping balls off the Leaning Tower of Pisa and inadvertently inspiring the Indigo Girls. By the time those events occurred, the notion of gravity was already drifting through the scientific ether. Nobody had pinned it down, but the mathematical intelligentsia knew Earth was rotating around the sun in an elliptical orbit (and that something was making this hap‑ pen). That was around three hundred years ago. I''m more fixated on how life was another three hundred years before that. Here was a period when the best understanding of why objects did not spontaneously f loat was some version of what Aristotle had argued more than a thousand years prior: He believed all objects craved their "natural place," and that this place was the geocentric center of the universe, and that the geocentric center of the universe was Earth. In other words, Aristotle believed that a dropped rock fell to the earth because rocks belonged on earth and wanted to be there. So let''s consider the magnitude of this shift: Aristotle--arguably the greatest philosopher who ever lived--writes the book Physics and defines his argument.

His view exists unchallenged for almost two thousand years. Newton (history''s most meaningful mathematician, even to this day) eventually watches an apocryphal apple fall from an apocryphal tree and inverts the entire human under‑ standing of why the world works as it does. Had this been explained to those people in the fourteenth century with no understanding of science--in other words, pretty much everyone else alive in the fourteenth century--Newton''s explanation would have seemed way, way crazier than what they currently believed: Instead of claiming that Earth''s existence defined reality and that there was something essentialist about why rocks acted like rocks, Newton was advocating an invisible, imperceptible force field that some‑ how anchored the moon in place. We now know ("know") that Newton''s concept was correct. Humankind had been collectively, objectively wrong for roughly twenty centuries. Which provokes three semi‑related questions: * If mankind could believe something false was objectively true for two thousand years, why do we ref lexively assume that our current understanding of gravity--which we''ve embraced for a mere three hundred fifty years--will some‑ how exist forever? * Is it possible that this type of problem has simply been solved? What if Newton''s answer really is--more or less-- the final answer, and the only one we will ever need? Because if that is true, it would mean we''re at the end of a process that.