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Gravity Monument - Atlanta.

Anti-Gravity Monument

Field review by the editors.

Atlanta, Georgia

Roger Babson was a rich businessman who hated gravity. He wrote an essay titled "Gravity - Our Enemy Number One," and in 1948 established the Gravity Research Foundation to find some way to defeat it.

Gravity, however, proved an elusive foe. By the 1960s, with no victory in sight, Babson feared that a new generation of scientists would fail to recognize its threat. So he paid to have tombstone-like monuments erected on a number of eastern and midwestern college campuses, extolling the Gravity Research Foundation and its goals of harnessing or controlling gravity (the inscriptions vary). Most still stand.

The monument at Emory University was threatened when a new Mathematics and Science Center went up. But instead of being hauled off to maintenance shed, a little plaza was built for it. It's behind the building, at the top of a wooded hill, impossible to see from the road, and you have to climb a path to get to it -- but it's still there.

Anti-Gravity Monument

Address:
1400 Oxford Rd NE, Atlanta, GA
Directions:
Rose-colored tombstone hidden atop a wooded hillside, on the north side of Oxford Rd NE just east of its intersection with Pierce Drive NE. On the campus of Emory University, just below the Mathematics and Science Center. Park on the side of Oxford and walk up the hill.
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In the region:
Papermaking Museum, Atlanta, GA - 4 mi.

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