Frame of Reference

Answering physics and daughters.

I don’t understand science. I’m continually humbled by my inability to answer my children’s questions, which are simple in the way that only genuinely hard questions can be.

I remember sitting in high school physics, convinced I could disprove Newton’s Third Law. To every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. But if I jump out of an airplane, I am clearly falling toward the ground, not pulling the Earth up toward me. I went to my science teacher before school for two weeks straight, determined to find the flaw. What eventually clicked was that the law hinges entirely on frame of reference. From where I’m standing, I’m hurtling toward the ground at 9.8 m/s². However, if on paper I am fixed in place, then the only logical explanation is that the Earth is accelerating toward me. It’s the same reality but a different vantage point. Both are true.

Last night, I was putting my seven-year-old to bed. I told her how proud I was of her lately. (She just won a writing contest with an essay about two sisters with superpowers who think school is boring. A malicious compliance she comes by honestly!) Then she mentioned, almost as an aside, that she won student of the month for the fourth time this year.

Immediately, she asked me a question I wasn’t ready for: how can she be rewarded for doing the right thing when no one is looking, if no one is looking?

I don’t know if I got the answer right, but I told her that we’re rarely as unwatched as we think we are. At some point, in some moment we don’t anticipate, someone notices. We just don’t know who or when.

It’s the same problem as Newton. From our own frame of reference, we’re being pulled toward Earth. However, if we shift the vantage point, then the picture changes. Someone, somewhere, is watching the Earth move.

Over time, people develop a sense of who we are. Not from any single moment, but from the accumulation of small ones. The frame of reference that defines us is rarely our own.

My daughter seemed satisfied with that. I’m still working on it.