Free Falling

Free falling might seem like a simple concept—someone falling under the pull of gravity. But beneath this everyday experience lies some of the strangest phenomena in physics, and here's a little peak into the inspiration for this painting.

At first glance, free fall is straightforward: in a vacuum, all objects fall at the same rate, regardless of their mass. This was Galileo’s insight, showing that a feather and a hammer would hit the ground simultaneously on the Moon, where there’s no air to slow them down. Gravity seems to treat all objects equally. But what’s truly mind-bending is what happens when you dig deeper.

One of the weirdest ideas comes from Einstein’s Equivalence Principle: in free fall, gravity seems to disappear. This is because, in free fall, everything around you is accelerating at the same rate, so you can’t feel gravity pulling on you. This weightlessness is key to Einstein’s general relativity, where free fall isn’t about gravity pulling you down—it’s about objects following the curved paths of spacetime.

Then, things get even stranger when you approach the speed of light. Special relativity tells us that time slows down for objects moving at extreme speeds. If you were falling into a black hole, from an outside perspective, you’d appear to slow down and freeze at the event horizon, never quite falling in. But to you, it would feel like you’re falling normally, passing through the event horizon in finite time.

In the realm of general relativity, gravity is no longer a force; it’s the warping of spacetime. Near massive objects like black holes, the curves in spacetime become extreme, and the tidal forces stretch anything falling into a long, thin shape in a process called spaghettification. Time and space start to blur in bizarre ways.

And on the smallest scales? Quantum mechanics throws free fall into a world of unknown uncertainty. Particles don’t fall in a smooth trajectory; they exist in a blur of probability, defying all our classical expectations. Free fall starts as something simple—an apple dropping from a tree—but as we explore the depths of physics, it leads us into some of the most mind-bending and profound and unexplainable mysteries of the universe.

I decided to create this painting while doing an expiriment. I was testing out paint pouring, while listening to podcasts, specifically this one with Lex Friedmand and Roger Penrose, and as they spoke of conciousness and then moved onto gravity and the theory of relativity, the concept for what I would paint over this paint pour becme obvious. A woman free falling. So I drew up my rough idea while waiting for the paint pour to dry. I had to wait a few days for the paint pour to totally cure before adding her, but overall felt this was a successful expirement, that allowed me the time to go down another one of my rabbitholes where science can't even fully explain or comprehed what is happening. The cool part about this painting is no matter which way you turn it, it looks like she is running, or falling in various ways. It's gracefully done in the way the paint lines moves with the subject, to create an illusion of movement in all directions.