Molly, funny stuff!
Now at the risk of sucking all the humor out of your post, the pedant in me must point out that comparing the rules of golf to the laws of physics constitutes what the philosopher Gilbert Ryle called a "category mistake"...one example of which is Descartes' mind/body dualism, which Ryle called the Ghost in the Machine.
May I suggest, if you haven't already read it, Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature in which he exposes three modern myths: the tabula rasa, the Ghost in the the Machine, and the Noble Savage.
I'm aware that most verbal humor involves the manipulation of categories and juxtaposition of unrelated concepts, and also that I've just set the record for the most boring post in the long and storied history of the wgt forum.