Informed Optimism
All participants must enter an experiment with a reasonable understanding that the planned effort may exceed available preparation.
Office of Institutional Integrity
Research Ethics
Standards governing the responsible study of ordinary exertion, avoidable optimism, and recurring contact with physical law.
Voluntary Participation
Participation must be voluntary, except where the participant has already paid the registration fee, purchased the equipment, or told several people the activity would be easy.
Respect for Physical Law
No researcher may imply that enthusiasm, confidence, equipment cost, route selection, or personal preference creates an exemption from gravity, wind, momentum, fatigue, or geometry.
Accurate Reporting
Findings must distinguish between observed performance, intended performance, remembered performance, and performance later described to peers.
Equipment Neutrality
Investigators must disclose all material equipment acquisitions and must not characterize an additional purchase as scientifically necessary without first making a sincere, if brief, effort to use the equipment already owned.
Environmental Independence
Researchers must acknowledge that wind, incline, temperature, court surface, and other external variables may remain statistically independent of participant preference.
Peer Review
Preliminary findings remain subject to peer ridicule, informal replication, selective memory, and the introduction of one anecdote believed to disprove the entire study.
Humane Treatment
No participant may be required to repeat an unsuccessful effort solely because another participant said, “You almost had it.”
Conflict Disclosure
Researchers must disclose any financial, competitive, emotional, or reputational interest in demonstrating that the problem was caused by equipment, weather, scheduling, terrain, or another participant.
Publication Standards
No result may be described as conclusive when it is based on a single attempt, except where the result confirms a belief held by the researcher before the attempt began.
Institutional Notice: Applied Gravity Research is a fictional institution. Its findings are satirical. Its physical constraints are not.