Notes on ‘Ramp’
Gravity is a contradiction. It is the weakest of the four fundamental physical interactions in the universe as we know it: In terms of numbers that are beyond any true human comprehension, it is 10^38 times weaker than the strong interaction, 10^36 times weaker than the electromagnetic force and 10^29 times weaker than the weak interaction. Of those three forces, we can ourselves experience only electromagnetic force and it is far stronger. That makes sense when you consider we can jump into the air under our own power, but a large magnet can pick up a car and an MRI machine can rip your watch off your wrist, with your wrist still on it.
But how much stronger is magnetism than gravity? Think of it this way: If magnetism and gravity were money, one “dollar” worth of magnetism would worth the same as:
$1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 gravity dollars.
But how much is that? Well, a trillion has only twelve zeroes after it and there are thirty-six zeroes up there. So, there’s that. Still fuzzy? We all are. We think of Elon Musk as rich, but he might be worth “only” $150 billion. That still doesn’t help much though because Mr. Musk may be the richest man in the world, but when it comes to voting for tax policy, most of us still seem to think of him as only some cut above our uncle, the successful orthodontist with the 5-Series BMW. We are just not good with large numbers.
Okay, how about this: In terms of distance, a light-year is “only” six trillion miles. The edge of the observable universe is “only” 8.74 billion light years away from us, and it is reckoned that the total universe is 1.5 x 10^34 times the radius of the observable universe. That is, if the whole fucking universe that we can see is “1” gravity, the entire universe is somewhere in the ballpark of how much bigger than that magnetism is stronger than gravity. So that tells you something. What, I’m not sure. But let’s just agree that magnetism is somewhere between a shit-ton and a fuck-load more powerful than gravity. So gravity is basically one of those fans you can plug into an iPhone.
Yet, gravity is strong as shit. If you don’t believe me, start taking the stairs up a tall building and tell me when you get tired. Oh, and it keeps Jupiter and all the planets orbiting around the Sun. And it spins the galaxy. And it can create Black Holes that tear through spacetime itself and destroy the rules of physics themselves. AND, we have to build massive rockets just to overcome Earth’s gravity to get twenty or so of Elon Musk’s tiny Starlink satellites into orbit so we can watch porn while camping.
So gravity is infinitesimally weak, but also wildly strong. In terms of fundamental forces it is like my grandfather, who could open a walnut with his bare hands, but also could barely get out of his chair. The fact that gravity seems so strong to us when it is such a piss-ant physical interaction compared to magnetism, let alone the forces at play inside the atom, tells us a lot about how small we are at anything close to universal scales and how large we are compared to the smallest of things, and just how far apart “big” and “small” are in our universe. As much as anything else, this is cosmically depressing or euphorically awe-inspiring — take your pick — yet we get angry when we miss a green light while driving to get ice cream.
While it may be interesting how gravity is strong to us but weak in the grand scheme, it doesn’t really matter. For nearly all of human history, we had no fucking idea about the strong or weak nuclear forces, or even magnetism. And most of us don’t even encounter magnetism except when wishing refrigerator doors still had it while trying to scrape scotch tape off the damned things without scratching the stainless steel. Gravity is the only physical interaction most of us ever deal with, so it really doesn’t matter how strong or weak it is, relatively speaking, all that matters is that we have to deal with it.
And deal with it we really must, at least now that civilization has gotten off the ground — so to speak. Again, for most of human history, gravity was somewhat of a hassle, but not insurmountable. We had to lift animal carcasses, pick up logs, and try to be the one on top during sex without getting tired before we’d finished. But by and large, gravity was something we didn’t need to ponder much; it was just there to be worked with or around, much like dumb herbivores that sometimes ate our food. But then we started building things and gravity became more of an obstacle to be overcome, much like smart carnivores that sometimes ate us.
Once we had fire under control and could sharpen rocks into blades and pokey things, I would have to think gravity was next on the agenda for our developing hominid minds. “There,” I imagine our primitive ancestors thought, “we’ve got heat and meat sorted, now let’s move those giant stones. I’d like to make a ‘Henge.” Helpfully, gravity was an easy thing to figure out. Not the whys, but the wherefores. You drop something, it falls down. Water goes downhill and over and down cliffs. Heavier things are harder to lift up than lighter things. Walking up a hill was far easier than running down it. We knew the problem; our little, hairy primeval tool makers simply had to tackle the solutions. Some solutions were more difficult to sort out. Elevators, zeppelins, rockets, and that one good song from Wicked would take a few millennia to get right, but one solution to gravity’s limp but awesome grip had to have been the easiest as it was staring us in the face the whole time: the ramp.
Ramps didn’t need to be invented; they were right there in the form of… the slope. Forty thousand years ago, you and your tribe were hiking along a riverbed and decided to walk up to some woods to gather some delicious non-poisonous berries. One way looked shorter, but it was steeper, a tricky climb up rocks, sharp ledges and iffy logs. Go up that way and your legs would be sore and you’d be out of breath. You might even slip and break your ankle and immediately be left for dead by your spouse, who probably was sick of you anyway. Another way up looked longer at first blush, but it was a smooth walk up a clear path to higher, berry-filled ground. You would get there and not be tired, sore, or dead. Eureka! The ramp was discovered.
Form there it was a simple task for even the thickest of thick-browed, opposable-thumbed australopithecii to lay a few long logs over a jagged set of rocky steps to create a more easily traversed slope and voila, the artificial ramp was invented. Once axes came around, logs could be split into flat-topped ones and the ramp was more easily walked upon. Throw in a wheel or two and a barrow, whatever that is, and you’re in business. Once you’d got a few good shovels you could pile up some dirt, pack it down, and build long ramps to overcome even the steepest and trippiest climbs up to the tops of otherwise insurmountable hills and now you’ve got an easily defensible fort. (Conversely, siege ramps could be built to attack high forts, see, e.g., the Siege of Masada.) Before too long, on early human ancestors’ accelerated evolutionary schedule, you have homes and storehouses that could be built in multiple levels and you could still easily get up into them with the good old ramp.
Sure, the ramp had limitations. You needed a long run, most obviously. A ramp that is too steep at some point isn’t really a ramp at all; it’s just another tough climb. Go so far as to shorten it to its end point and you’re back where you started: a cliff. So in constrained spaces, you would need stairs and ladders (devices that are beyond the scope of this discussion.) But provided the room was available, nothing was a cheaper or easier solution to the problem of ascent — that is, overcoming gravity — than the ramp. That ramps were cheaper than stairs and ladders — in terms of physical and mental effort, and technological know-how, money having not been invented — is obvious. But why was it easier to ascend using a ramp? What’s going on here? What’s up with ramps anyway?
A common sense explanation was obvious even to our largely dim-witted progenitors, even if they may not have stopped to work it out: It takes effort to overcome gravity. To lift something up in defiance of God’s apparent will that things ought to stay as low down as they will go requires work in the colloquial and mathematical sense. And back in those days, all work was done by our own muscles. We will not address here the chemistry and physiology of all that, except to say muscles get sore, using them takes energy in the form of food, and all animals — and indeed all mass — is axiomatically lazy. Now, back to ‘work.’ It takes the most work to lift something straight up, whether a basket of berries or your own body. Pick up something heavy, lift it up high in a straight line and set it on a surface up there. The heavier it is, the harder it is, in terms of work. Stairs, or a steep, rocky slope in those darker times, are clear illustrations of this, as referenced above. Climb up the steep slope and you’re tired. Take a leisurely stroll up a long, low slope to the same place and you’re not. But why? Simply put, because work takes time. When you divide the same amount of work over a longer period of time, it is easier. Even Homo habilus knew this, though he would have a shit time writing this essay. And that is essentially what a ramp does: It takes the work of lifting something up from one place to a place five feet higher up and stretches that work over time by starting it farther away from the higher surface. (Because it takes time to move distance, a longer distance and a longer time are being treated roughly equivalently here. Obviously, you could run up the ramp to save time. But doing so would be more difficult, obviating the benefit of the ramp in the first instance.) So instead of lifting something straight up and setting it there, say, you push, pull, or even carry it up the ramp. Sure, you have to start farther away, but by doing so, you are spreading the work over a longer distance (time), and thus over a longer time (distance), making the task easier.
This is self-evident, but perhaps not as much so as is obvious at first glance. After all, you could slowly lift something straight up too rather than in a quick snappy jerk. But that alone doesn’t make it easier. For one thing, you might tear the basket. Why? We’ll skip that level of physics. Most obviously to the simple minded proto-human, while you’re doing the slow lifting, you are still necessarily having to hold up the bag against our old nemesis, gravity. With the ramp, on the other hand, each step along the way, the basket of berries and your own body are resting cozily on the ground or log, which, due to the — call back(!) — strong and weak nuclear forces of the atoms of which it is comprised, can as easily as nothing at all suspend the mass of the hominid, the basket, and the berries against gravity with no additional work on the part of the berry-carrying, slumping biped. In this way, the ramp is not only allowing our schlepper to spread the work of raising the basket of berries across a longer period of time/distance, but, crucially, it is helping to do the work by holding up the berry basket and the lifter thereof all along the way. This is true whether the basket is being dragged along the ramp or held up along the way by the “person” walking up the ramp. The ramp, figuratively if not literally, is helping push the load up the required ascent. The result is that less force is needed to make the ascent, albeit over a longer distance/time. And less work over a longer time or distance is easier than harder work in a shorter time. E.g., you might walk a marathon over the course of a couple of months just puttering around those house and not even notice; but try to run one straight through in two hours. This antediluvian truth remains in our language today: “Ramping up” to something means to take one’s time slowly in preparation for a task, implicitly to save one’s energy for that task’s difficult end.
There are still more exogenous benefits to the ramp. For instance, round things or things on wheels or rollers can be rolled up them, further enhancing their work saving properties. Try that shit with a ladder!
Yet how is it explained exactly, what the ramp does? By math. Duh. If you want to know that, might I recommend Wikipedia. I’m not about to create a shortcut key for theta or learn how to import mathematical illustrations here for something so easily available elsewhere. Suffice it to say, the longer the run of the ramp, the less work required to move the load to the top. Thought of in this way, the ramp — or the ‘inclined plane’ in more technical parlance — is magic. You can do a difficult thing — move a heavy thing up to a higher place — with much less effort, indeed, an almost infinitesimally small amount of effort, provided the ramp is long enough (leaving friction aside). In practical terms then, the only limits to the ramp’s magic are space and time.
Surely, there are drawbacks to the ramp, you say? Yes. In any real-world situation, ramps have spatial constraints on the length of their runs. Even if a run is zig-zagged like a wheelchair ramp tacked on to an aging office building to avoid an ADA lawsuit, sometimes a ramp just won’t fit. Also, the longer the run, the more time it takes to move the load up it, unless you want to put in more work to go faster, which, as mentioned, defeats the purpose. At some point then, the extra time inherent in a long, low run will not be worth the corresponding savings in work.
It can also take a lot of work to make a ramp. Think of the amount of earth moving required to built long ramps, i.e., roads, that climb up mountain sides. If built with other materials, the ramp faces typical material and pecuniary constraints. Were it not for these, I am convinced, we would have built a ramp to the Moon long ago. (/s)
So the ramp is not perfect, it only almost is.
The ramp is one of the six “simple machines” as defined by Renaissance scientists — presumably after more complex machines were invented. The others are the lever, the wheel and axle, the pulley, the wedge, and the screw. Of these, for all the reasons described above, I believe the ramp was the first to be discovered/invented. Perhaps the wedge and lever came around about the same time. Clearly all these machines are designed to save human effort — that is what a machine is. More particularly, aside from the wedge (in some use cases), all the simple machines appear designed to solve the same work-heavy problem that faced the witches in Wicked: defying gravity. I suppose it is obvious why: It just isn’t that hard to move heavy objects down. It is quite easy, in fact. You can drop them, push them off cliffs, roll them down hills… The list goes on. (Or maybe that’s all of the ways?) All those ways, though, have one thing in common, they are using gravity — the weakest of fundamental forces — in our favor. As weak as it is, there is no limit to what gravity can pull downward. Boulders, mountains, the moon, the planets themselves, all would be pulled into the sun were they not moving so damned fast. So it is to move objects — be they giant stones or dainty Broadway actresses — up, in the aforesaid defiance of gravity, that we feeble humans needed a little help. Thus, it should not be a surprise that the six most basic machines we have are all designed to do just that one thing, at least in part.
Even the wedge, though most obviously designed to split wood, could be used to lift a heavy object up if you were to hammer the thin end of the wedge under a heavy thing and then did the same all around the thing with several wedges. When used in that manner, it is apparent that a wedge is only a ramp being used in reverse. So too the screw. It is most obviously a fastener in today’s parlance, but when seen in action in a car jack, for example, it is clearly a wedge twisted in a circle to easily allow its work to continue for as long as the screw might be. This overcomes the obvious limitation to the wedge: that it gets very tall relatively quickly, foisting a very tricky external limit on its usefulness in practice. But if a screw is a twisted up wedge being used as a ramp in reverse, the screw is itself only a ramp wound up to compress a long run in a much smaller space. Thus, the wedge, screw, and ramp all are, in essence, only variations on a device for the sliding of a load along a flat surface, as pointed out by 19th Century German engineer, Franz Reuleaux. Of these three machines, it cannot be reasonably questioned that the ramp not only came first but too is the most elegant, for the other two are merely fancy,more specialized ramps.
Accordingly, of the six simple machines of classical antiquity, only three are not ramps: the lever, the wheel and axle, and the pulley. Of those, the wheel and axle and the pulley (though I would argue the wheel and axle is just a pulley with a handle) only serve to allow heavy things to be lifted up where there isn’t space for a ramp; they are ramp alternatives, in other words. And even the lever, though commonly used to move heavy things forward, regardless of ascent, or to launch things, catapult style, could and sometimes is used to lift heavy things up as well. What’s more, Reuleaux deduced that these three simple, non-ramp machines are all only variations on a body rotating on a hinge. I figured that out too, though (just now), so it’s hardly an Earth shattering revelation. Sorry, Reuleaux.
In the final analysis, then, there are only two simple machines: the ramp and the hinge, both designed to overcome gravity, the weakest force, which to humans is nonetheless the strongest pain-in-the-ass force that we regularly encounter.
But once we overcame it, the sky was literally the limit! The ramp, first and every bit as much as the other simple machine(s) and complex ones that followed, allowed the construction of the temples, granaries, castles, roads, the myriad cathedrals that gave birth to modern civilization, including the very Tower of Babel itself. So one could truly say that ramps allowed humanity to encounter God, though He was quite a dick about it at first. But ramps are hardly relegated to the ancients. Ramps today allow roads to criss-cross almost all high mountains, eliminating obstacles to trade and freedom of movement. In that regard, dare I say, the only limits to driving to the summit of Everest itself are petty external financial constraints. We could damn sure build a ramp up there if we wanted to; we can land a man on the Moon after all.
Indeed, ramps can be said to have been the ur-tool that allowed all other tools to come into being, facilitating the long march of technological progress that has allowed humanity to leave God behind and become gods ourselves, if we see fit. That’s a lot to be said of what is, in effect, a triangle. Nevertheless, I don’t think you could say that about the square, or even the circle. Although, ball bearings might have something to say about that. But let’s save that for next time. For now, we can all well and truly say to gravity, piss off, you weakling. And all thanks to the humble ramp.
