Sunday, March 30, 2014

Sorry, but Zero Gravity Day just is an old April Fool’s Day joke



















Over on News Hound Sarah Morris posted an extremely silly article titled April 4th 2014 Planetary Alignment Decreases Gravity - Float for 5 Minutes! #Zerogday. She absurdly claimed that:

“...if you jump in the air at 9:47 AM local time on April 4th 2014, it should take you about 3 seconds to land back on your feet instead of the usual 0.2 seconds.”

Sarah claimed this had been revealed by the British astronomer Patrick Moore. Well, sort of. Ten seconds of research at Wikipedia will show you that Patrick Moore died back on December 9, 2012. He’s pushing up daisies, and is not revealing anything.

I read about this silly article on Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy blog, in a post he titled: No, April 4, 2014 is NOT “Zero G Day.” No.

When you look on either Snopes or at the Museum of Hoaxes you’ll find the nonsense just was an April Fool’s Day joke done by Patrick Moore way back in 1976! It has been popping up again ever since.

If you stay on the News Hound page for a while you will get a pop-up ad saying to:

“Please Share This Page
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Take a moment to share this with your friends (on Facebook).”

Please don’t share it! It's absolute rubbish!

The image of Clayton Anderson floating while on the International Space Station is from Wikimedia Commons.

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