I don't think think an appeal to physics here helps Erich's argument as
he envisions. First of all, the gravitational behavior of individual
sub-atomic particles has not, to my knowledge, ever been directly
measured. In the early 70's (I think) Fairbank attempted to measure the
free-fall acceleration of electrons in the Earth's gravitational field to
see if electrons obeyed usual gravitational laws, but the experiments
failed to successfully perform the measurement due to systematic errors
whose effects swamped the results. (As I recall, the gravitational
settling effects on the sea of conduction electrons in the copper tube
shield for the experiment created an electric field in the tube whose
force on the falling electrons canceled out the gravitational force on
them. I think there were problems with forces due to image charges in
the tube, as well.)
Even though direct measurements of gravitational effects on individual
sub-atomic particles have not been done, there is scarcely a physicist
anywhere who thinks "sub-atomic particles disobey the laws of gravity".
My guess is that Erich has in mind that sub-atomic particles obey
quantum mechanics rather than a direct application of classical
mechanics. This is true in general, but the laws of classical mechanics
are a *special case* of those of quantum mechanics under conditions where
the minimal conceivable action for a given process is huge compared to
Planck's constant and the initial & final states are sufficiently
classical-like. So for situations involving localized subatomic
particles undergoing high-action (compared to Planck's constant)
processes, such as measuring the free-fall acceleration and other
possible gravitational effects of electrons, then the laws of classical
mechanics work out just fine, as they are just what quantum mechanics
would predict anyway. BTW, the beam(s) of individual electrons striking
the phosphor screen on the CRT that you are now looking at (assuming you
are not using a laptop computer), obeys the laws of *classical*
electrodynamics to a very high degree of precision in getting from the
electron gun(s) in the neck of the CRT to its phosphor screen.
Because subatomic particles are believed to *obey* the usual laws of
gravity--even though that obedience has not been verified by direct
observation--the situation *is* analogous to that of the case of
biological evolution/common ancestry--but the analogy is inverted from
what Erich had in mind. For the biological end of the analogy it is
macroevolution that is too slow to directly observe, being inferred from
other indirect evidences--even though micro evolutionary changes are
directly observable. In the physics case the individual subatomic
particles are too small to directly observe their obedience or
disobedience regarding the macroscopic laws of gravity, Equivalence
Principle, etc., but it is believed that they do obey these laws because
of other indirect consequences that are consistent with such obedience.
We can directly verify the laws of gravity for the macroscopic aggregates
of subatomic particles that comprise ordinary matter and we infer that
those laws work on the individual level. This is somewhat analogous to
the biological inference of macroevolutionary common ancestry tied to the
accumulation of microevolutionary changes that are, in principle, directly
observable. The main change across the analogy is the inversion of the
micro <--> macro prefixes because biological observations are more easily
done at the micro-level than the macro-level, whereas the physics
observations are more easily done at the macro-level than the micro-level.
David Bowman
dbowman@georgetowncollege.edu