Anti-Gravity Monument

Daytona Beach, Florida

Erected in the early 1960s, Anti-Gravity Monuments were the brainchild of wealthy businessman-kook Roger Babson. He gave money to various colleges, and they would agree to put up one of his monuments, which resemble tombstones. They extoll an imagined future in which visionary college students would someday "control" gravity. Babson hated gravity, blaming it for the childhood drowning of his older sister. As an obsession, it was more practical than hating water, but just barely.

Babson is long-dead, as is his Gravity Research Foundation, but many of his monuments remain, preserved by their colleges as quaint relics of crackpot science. Since our most brilliant minds have yet to control gravity, the heavy stone slabs stay in place, too much trouble to move.