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I bought the most recent volume of Discover magazine (April 2010). I ought to get the annual subscription. I really like the magazine. I tend to buy the magazine when they do a special on Einstein and/or General Relativity/Quantum Theory. They seem to do this at least once every 3 or 4 months. Hey, you do what sells!

Typically, when I read about the latest Gravity/Quantum controversy, it sets my imagination and critical thinking gears in motion and I get inspired for a few days. Then it wears off. But this time is different. I am having a sustained bout of inspiration.

I decided to act on this elevated sense of motivation by rewatching the excellent Brian Greene-narrated ‘The Elegant Universe’ on Nova/PBS. This isn’t so unusual. I really enjoy that 3 hour program. However, I also decided to write out my thoughts pertaining to the unresolvable issues between relativity and quantum theory (both ideas, by the way, fathered by Einstein). Now that’s unusual! But that’s what blogs are for!

What is a GUT?

GUT stands for Grand Unified Theory. It’s an idea in physics that all of the fundamental forces can be explained/described by one theory or equation or set of equations.

GUTs are like opinions: everyone has one and most of them stink (scientifically-speaking). You have a GUT, whether you know it or not. I think most people like to call their GUT by a slightly different three-letter word: GOD.

I am not going to go there with my GUT. I am not going to ascribe anything to any supernatural force that exists outside of immediate, testable, observable experience. Religion will not be used to support my claims, just good ole reliable observation and LOGIC.

Background

GUTs can also be a lot like politics. There are certain camps with certain dogmas and points-of-view and biases. There is the very popular String Theorist Party, Brian Greene being a card-carrying member. These guys have given up on the classical ideas of General Relativity and Quantum Theory and have boldly forged a new path based purely on the mathematics of vibrating strings in higher dimensions, which happens to align well with current observation.

There is the Higgs Boson Party, composed of experimentalists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and beyond searching for the poetically named ‘God Particle.’ These are your quantum theory people and they’ve pinned their hopes on finding this particle, which is said to be responsible for giving mass to all matter. One problem though, no one has ever seen a Higgs Boson. This is what many are hoping to find from test results at the LHC.

Then there is the very minority Relativity Party, of which I am a subscriber. Many would be Relativity Party members abandoned the party for quantum theory. The Relativity Party is based on Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, specifically that the fundamental forces in nature can be described by the curvature of space-time.

Don’t get me wrong. There are very few who doubt General Relativity as a very powerful way to describe Gravity. All phd’s in physics will usually take a course or two in General Relativity. It is highly regarded. However, development in that direction has all but ceased in favor of research toward quantum theory.

Einstein himself continued to work toward the idea of unifying the forces via geometry and the curvature of higher-dimensional space. There is also Kaluza-Klein theory, which attempted to marry gravity and electro-magnetism into one theory based on the curvature of 5-dimensional space-time. The first book I read in which this idea is introduced in the very readable Hyperspace, by Michio Kaku. This is an excellent introductory read and seriously changed the way I look at things.

Why I Prefer Relativity to Quantum Theory and String Theory

Briefly: I prefer Relativity to these other theories because Relativity actually explains what gravity is. Gravity is the result of the curvature of spacetime. Simple, elegant, and complete. It leaves no bigger questions unanswered.

The same cannot be said of quantum theory. Quantum theory explains fundamental forces as the result of particle interaction. Electro-magnetism occurs due to the exchange of photons. But why do these forces exist? Why does the photon exist? These questions cannot be answered by Quantum Theory.

As for String Theory, it has even less of an observational leg to stand on and also suffers from the inability to answer the ‘why?’ question. String Theory postulates that all forces and particles are the result of interacting and vibrating one-dimensional strings. The vibrations can occur in up to 11 or 26 dimensions, depending on which mathematical model suits your fancy. These strings cannot be observed, which makes substantiating the theory difficult. Also, why are there strings? What makes these strings exist? Where do they come from? These questions are impossible to answer.

Contrast this with Relativity: Why does gravity exist? Curvature of SpaceTime. There is spacetime (this can’t be doubted) and it is curved by anything with mass/energy and this curvature effects the motions of objects within/on the fabric of spacetime, which gives the appearance of attraction. Beautiful, simple, complete!

This doesn’t require mysterious fields, crazy particle interaction, or imaginary strings. So why was this approach mostly abandoned for quantum theory? Quantum theory became more lucrative. Economics, baby! People were making discoveries left and right. You could more easily make a name (and a living) for yourself in the field of Quantum Theory. There were lots of particles to be discovered. It was a particle physics gold rush. That gold rush is now over.

I would like to see a return to the idea that particles and forces can be described by the curvature of spacetime. It is just a more satisfying explanation.

Opening Remarks

I am convinced that all particles and forces are the result of the curvature of spacetime (of higher-dimensions). Not only are the 4 fundamental forces of nature the result of the curvature of spacetime, but the particles that those forces act on and the particles that carry those forces are also the result of the curvature of spacetime.

This assumption comes with nice consequences which avoid many of the current mysteries in quantum theory and cosmology, such as the graviton, dark energy, and why the photon appears to have special properties (such as being the speed-limit for the universe).

My conclusions are the result of many years of critical consideration. There was a period of a couple of years where I was nearly obsessed with this stuff. Now I like to think about it every once in a while, after reading an article about Einstein and string theory and getting inspired.

To be continued…

Next installment: Goodbye Dark Energy

Thanks for reading.

~Dylan Faullin

Here is another pencast from the 2010 NADE conference in Columbus, OH. It was an interesting look at a learning/teaching philosophy. Memorable quote: “Learning is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” Enjoy:

Let me know what you think. I have comments turned off now, I think, but please contact me on Twitter!

~Dylan Faullin

I just returned from this year’s NADE conference, held in Columbus, OH.  Columbus is a fun city, laid back, lots of diversity, lots of things to do.  Among other things, I went to COSI, an excellent Science Museum for kids (at heart), an art museum (which was mostly under renovation but was still nice), the Big Bang - a dueling piano bar (I highly recommend going), the North Market, the German Village Book Loft, and several local restaurants.

In between all of that, there was a conference!  The conference gift bag was NICE, the nicest item being a 2GB flash drive, with conference material from the sessions preloaded (great idea!).  The meals served by the conference were also very good. 

The conference itself, however, I did not find as helpful as I had hoped.  I went to this conference 5 years ago in Philly.  At the time, I was a fresh-out-of-college teacher and the conference gave me lots of good ideas.  Now that I have 5 years of experience under my belt, I didn’t find the advice as helpful.  It is hard for me to tell if the quality of the sessions that I attended were less than 5 years ago or if I am just more wise than 5 years ago.  It seems to be a little of each.

The most shocking part of the conference was the complete lack of technology used by the attendees (me included).  When I went 5 years ago, it was before the Web 2.0 revolution.  In the time since, I have read about lots of conferences (mostly in other fields) where attendees were live-blogging, tweeting, and using other such real-time communication tools.  I saw almost none of this at NADE.  NONE!

I did see lots cell phones, but these were clearly not being used in regards to the conference and live-blogging.  Very few laptops, at least at the sessions.  The couple of sessions about technology that I happened to attend were very basic.  In one technology, twitter and facebook were introduced but nothing of the way in which this technology could be used in an educational way was demonstrated or discussed.  The discussion was mostly about privacy issues.  That certainly has its place, but then the description of the talk should have been concerning privacy issues instead of tricking me into thinking I was actually going to learn something.

This lacking embrace of technology is worrying to me.  We saw this with the music industry.  We are seeing this with the print media industry.  This will be a problem for the education industry.  The way people accessed and consumed music changed.  The music industry tried to ignore it.  They tried to scare and guilt people away from it.  They tried to tightly control it.  None of these things worked.  The technology had to be embraced and leveraged to the benefit of the music industry, not ignored, squashed, or controlled.

The print media industry tried many (and are currently trying many) of the same things.  Things will not begin to turn around until the print media industry embraces and then tries to leverage it to their benefit.  The difficulty is knowing how to do that.  And you may not make as much profit as you used to, at least initially.  That just means what you are offering is not as valuable to your consumers as it used to be.  Instead of trying to hold on to the same outmoded business model and expect to make the same amount of money, you have to change with the times and offer your consumers value-added products.

Relating this back to education, we are heading down the same path.  We are currently in the ‘ignore’ phase.  We have adopted some technology to some extent, but, on the whole, we certainly are not making any fundamental changes in the way we do things that embraces the technology and then leverages it.  Education has been happy to use email and youtube and powerpoint, but that’s about it.  And none of these things are being used in very innovative ways. 

And no technology is being embraced at any fundamental level to change the way we educate.  The powerpoint just supplements the lecture.  Youtube is just being used to show videos instead of having to use DVD.  Email is just another way to communicate (which many of the younger crowd find inconvenient).

Some teachers are experimenting within individual classrooms and doing some great things, but that isn’t enough.  If it’s anything like at my institution, they are the only one.  They have no support or collaboration, which makes their pioneering activities mostly futile.  There needs to be some industry-wide change at the administration level, in the way education is administered AND in the way education is offered up for consumption. 

To give you an idea of how radical this may need to be, we need to consider that the idea of ‘classroom’ may be outmoded!  Think about it!  Why did the internet cause so much grief to the music industry and the print media industry?  Because those things which once required a physical object to be consumed were no longer necessary. 

To consume music, you had to buy a CD.  To read the news, you had to buy a paper or magazine.  It was through that physical object that these industries exercised control of their products and made billions in profit for years.  The internet changed that.  You no longer had to buy a CD to listen to your favorite songs from the radio.  You no longer had to buy a magazine to read about your favorite topic.

(It was possible to borrow from a friend and make a copy.  But this was never convenient before the internet.  Besides, the Internet doesn’t just allow your friend to make a copy, it allows you to distribute material to the public at large.  That is a huge difference.)

With the loss of this necessary physical object to consume a product, the industries could no longer leverage that physical object to make money.  No longer were you forced to buy a CD or borrow one from a friend who had to buy it in order to listen to the music you liked.  You could just get on the Internet and download a copy of the song from a complete stranger.  The floor fell from underneath them. 

The SAME thing is happening in education.  The physical object that the education industry leverages to make money is the classroom (and textbooks, but that is a whole other industry that could have collapsed because it is education AND print media; however, many textbook companies are adapting quite nicely by offereing ebooks, online homework systems, class management systems, etc.).  It is through the control of classrooms that institutions of higher education have had leverage, deciding what classes the students had to take, what would be taught in those classes, how many classes were required for a particular degree, how much the student would have to pay for these classes and all the other incidentals.

With the internet, the classroom may now be unnecessary in the delivery of education.  Anything that I could lecture about in class could easily be recorded and uploaded to youtube for consumption.  Lectures can easily be moved outside the classroom.  Interaction with the teacher and fellow students can now take place outside of the classroom, in real time, conventiently from a cell phone. 

Is there anything that takes place in a classroom that could not take place outside the classroom via the internet?  The only thing I can think of are labs.  Labs will still have leverage.

Classes are no longer needed to learn.  I think I have gotten pretty good at using javascript and I have never taken a class on javascript or bought a book on javascript.  I just use the internet.  Anytime there is something I want to do that I don’t know how to do in javascript, I search Google.  It usually doesn’t take long to find the answer.

What happens when schools lose their leverage and the classroom is no longer seen as necessary in the learning process (and hence no longer carries value)?  They will no longer be able to make money from the sole fact of owning the access to the classroom, because people will stop paying for it.  Schools will need to have something else of value to sell, where the classroom is not the central mode of delivery or the central selling point.

Online classes, in their current incarnation, do not seem promising to me, because they basically take the same old format for education and *try* to move it online.  It is still centered on a classroom, lecture-style format (at least the online classes I’ve seen).  Online classes are not “open” enough.  It doesn’t seem very innovative or different from the way we do things now, just online instead of in a physical classroom.

That was a much longer detour than I was expecting to take on education and technology.  I recorded the sessions that I attended at NADE using my Pulse SmartPen.  I will be posting my pencast online soon and will update the blog to let you know when it is available.

Thanks for reading.

~Dylan Faullin