Knowledge drips slowly from your dying skull

I'm sure that when I was younger I had a much better grasp of physics than I do now. This was probably caused by studying it a lot, both at school and through university. Though some of the university stuff was very hard and I'm not sure I actually really understood it all even then. Although I think I must have been ok since I got a decent degree at the end of it all - it can't be that easy to bulls**t in a maths exam can it?

Normally, understanding physics is not something I need to do on a day to day basis. I understand the basics: Letting go of a pint glass will cause it to fall to the floor and smash (Law of gravity); Once smashed, the glass is highly unlikely to spontaneously reassemble (Second law of thermodynamics); However, if in the process you splashed a big hard man with beer, he will push you and you'll fall to the ground (Newton's first law). Ask me to explain anything really complicated though, such as "How do tides work?", "How does a gyroscope work?" or "Where have all the nice girls gone?” and I am at a loss.

So it was slightly frustrating to be looking at a website earlier and being unable to properly grasp what it was on about, or how what it was saying differed from the standard models. The central (non-standard) conjecture on the website is:

“The gravitational mass of an object varies, depending on the proximity of other matter, in order to keep its total gravitational potential energy equal to its rest mass.”

I think that this means that G, the gravitational constant decreases as matter becomes denser, or as objects move closer together. The author of the website also makes various claims about this explaining many things, but I’m sure that much of the background I need was not available to me. Or possibly I should just have read the site more slowly and attempted to understand things line by line like I had to do at university. If anyone is feeling clever (unlikely given my readership) could you do me a 50 word précis of the theory?

So overall I have no real idea whether any of it is sensible. He does suggest an experiment I could do to verify the conjecture, but since it involves owning at least two orbital satellites, it is kind of out of my budget. I could manage something involving flour, water and a jam jar. Mind, I never much liked doing experiments in physics. All that ticker tape quite tired me out.