HOW DID THEY DO IT?

MB: That's right. In fact, the shots of me weren't even
done the same day! The video appears like we're all in the same room
together but it is in fact two separate classes that were involved.
Also, I never told any of them who the scientists were that came up with
the thought problem because I didn't want them to then get on the
Internet that night and tell their web buddies that they had out smarted
Stephen Hawking before the project was ready.

SWWNEWS: So everything that we see is real, just slightly rearranged?

MB: That's a good way of putting it. The answers appear out of sequence
to allow for a development of the sophistication of the answers so that
they don't appear to all be saying the same thing the same way. But I
didn't change what they said, I only selected who would appear in what
order so that seemingly natural development would arise out of the
conversations.

SWWNEWS: So the way that we see it is different?

MB: Sure. It's like the first kid says the rocket wasn't going at the
speed of light, which is correct but doesn't solve the problem with the
mistake. It was only half right. Well, in real life, he was in the
second class and said that first. In the video you next see Josh
struggle with the answer and get it right but he leaves out a detail or
two. Then Michael comes along and says that the spaceship won't reach 10
light years away because it's not traveling at the speed of light. In
reality, he said that after the next girl that you see, who was actually
the first person of all to get it right, say her answer which is that
the spaceship can only go 5 light years out and is followed by a girl
from the second class who says that the ship will go five light years
and then five back because the whole trip lasts 10 years, which solves
the mistake problem but isn't quite exactly right. She's followed by the
last girl we see who was the last person with an answer in real life
which was that the ship wouldn't make all the way to 5 light years but
almost and then it would turn around and go back, which is exactly
right.  So, I didn't change their answers I only rearranged the order so
that I could maintain a proper narrative.

SWWNEWS: It is like a little movie in a way...

MB: Yeah, you're right. It even has the happy ending. I in fact
deliberately found shots where the kids are looking at the camera like,
"Who is this guy? I wonder what I have second period...", you know, so
it looks real. They're polite but skeptical. So I take them on this
little exercise in theoretical physics, this little journey through
wormholes and rocket ships and relativity theory because I want them to
prove what I know they're capable of.

SWWNEWS: And in the end they do.

MB: Right. Just like at the end of To Sir With Love !

SWWNEWS: What?

MB: Nothing. It's an old classic movie with set in '60s
London, where a teacher has to win over his class of students of working
class toughs. Certainly nothing like Bexley, so I'm joking. I still had
to make it work, nonetheless and for a moment there I suddenly thought
it might be more difficult than I expected.

SWWNEWS: So why could they do it? I mean that's what everyone wants to
know.

MB: It's really simple, they just didn't have a psychological bias
hindering them. Once I told them to just think about the elements of the
problem, they pretty much got it - the rocket can't ever be 10 light
years away.

SWWNEWS: Yes, but Stephen Hawking didn't see that, and neither did Kip
Thorne...

MB: Or Robert Geroch or Robert Wald from the University of Chicago and a
number of others mentioned in the book. And I'll be honest with you;
this is just the tip of the iceberg. There's more to come.

SWWNEWS: But why couldn't they see it?

MB: The bottom-line is that they're psychological biased against seeing
it. Thorne wanted the thing to work and it was Geroch and Wald and
Hawking trying to say why it wouldn't work, and Thorne’s was so obsessed
with the details of the physics behind their objections that he didn't
really notice that their objections were predicated on an error. The
funny thing is that the error seems to have been made originally by
Thorne himself, at least in the book. He states that he looks through a
powerful telescope to see her wife Carolee traveling away on an outbound
journey that will last 10 years and then goes right back to talking
about how the journey out and back will take 10 years.

SWWNEWS: He's not talking about 10 years out and 10 years back?

MB: No. He even gives the dates - January 1, 2000 to January 1, 2010.
That's a ten year journey for the whole trip.

SWWNEWS: Amazing.

MB: Yeah, well I've been finding mistakes like these all over the place.
I have enough to do a two hour lecture on them.

SWWNEWS: Really? Anybody else famous that people might know?

MB: How about Michio Kaku? I have about three or so that he's made in
his book Hyperspace. Enough so that the next time I hear him say, "but
to do this would take the energy of entire star" I want to say, "How
would you know? You can't even see that a circle in a 2 dimensional
plane would prevent Flatlanders from seeing into it".

SWWNEWS: What's that about?

MB: Oh, it's in reference to an illustration in Hyperspace. The
illustration is supposed to be describing one thing but the way that it
is rendered would make that observation impossible. Even the caption
reinforces the error, so, like all of the mistakes that I cite, it's not
just a misquote or typo. It all goes to the over-arching point that if
these are the kinds of oversights being made by our top PhDs, then what
else are they wrong about. That's the problem. 

SWWNEWS: I was wondering what other scientists will say...

MB: Hey, what can they say? The proof is in the pudding. Mr. Cramer was
even doubtful that it would work, but it did. He even checked the book
to make sure that that was the answer, that I hadn't misinterpreted it
and it was right there - the Earth to spacecraft distance shrinking from
10 light years down to a Planck-Wheeler length - you can't be anymore
plain than that. And what that means is that Kip Thorne wrote those
words and didn't understand what it meant and neither did his editor and
neither did his post-doc student that was helping him and on and on.
Yet, a handful of high school physics kids in the Midwest, who didn't
even know what a wormhole was, or a light year, or the speed of light,
or the twins paradox...none of that, were able to see the problem. So
what that means, especially since I have a whole string of these kinds
of goofs just waiting to be trotted out in more videos with other
schools and colleges, what that means is that I don't think anyone is in
a position to be very glib about what is and isn't possible, especially
since no one else discovered the goof in that example. The punch line to
the joke is that Hawking and the rest, that thought this model wouldn't
work because of the feedback loop at the 10 light years distance,
completely missed an entire smorgasbord of other problems with it.
There is a whole list of published, well known physicists who have
discussed this model and have missed these fine details, which will only
prove my point more and strengthen my position on this.

SWWNEWS: You gave copies of The Trouble of Physics to the students who
got the answer right and one to Craig Kramer to give to the school
library as well.

MB: Yes. That was a donation arrangement done with credit to the
Columbus Jewish Foundation and the H. Lee Thompson Law firm. I've done
things like that before with the SuperScience for High School Physics
program, which this project is a spin-off of. One time it was gift
certificates to CD and Tape Outlet. I think the donation of the Smolin
book was a bit more fitting and certainly a book that should be read, in
particular by teachers.

SWWNEWS: How so?

MB: Because of what it says about problem solving and inspiring students
and how critical imaginative thinking is to detecting hidden
assumptions. That’s why I think Lee Smolin's book, The Trouble With
Physics is so important. I know there's been a debate over the way that
he handles string theory in it, and by extension, the string theory
community, but that's only part of the picture. Another third or so of
the book is about this academic culture and environment that actually
leads toward the stifling of imaginative thought, which I am totally
against. This experiment with Mr. Kramer's class proves the validity of
my position as well as Smolin's. After all, what do you want to do at
the college level, stagnate the minds of these kids just to satisfy the whims
of some fuddy duddy professors whose brains are as hardened as their
arteries? You do that and you get the perpetuation of rocketships
causing feedback loops once they get 10 light years away during a
journey that out and back is supposed to take 10 years at a random
sub-light velocity. Just like it's been accepted for the last 18 years.
That makes a lot of sense, doesn't?

SWWNEWS: I see your point.

MB: We're at a time where we have two critical points. First, all of our
significant advancements in science and technology either border on, or
cross, the line that used to be the realm of science fiction and yet,
simultaneously, we have professors like Thorne who state that they are
afraid to consider research topics that go too far in that direction
because of pressure from their academic peers. That, while we actually
have the NASA Breakthrough Physics Program and NIAC, both now defunct,
but who had called for more imaginative thinking that would be
considered beyond accepted reality because without it we aren't going to
get the advancements that we need to move along the same trajectory that
we did at the beginning of the last century, when sci fi concepts were
pretty much expected to come true.

So that's one point. On the other we have critical issues in energy that
need to be dealt with now. They should've been dealt with back in 1992
when Clinton promised that he was going to do it when he got elected - a
promise that he made on the lawn behind the Ohio Union at OSU during the
summer of the '92 campaign - and nothing ever happened except the
unbridled advent of the two things which now threaten our very way of
life - cheap Saudi oil and the SUV. Do the math - cheap foreign oil gets
so cheap that it drives out domestic production because they can't
compete and simultaneously encourages people to buy over-sized vehicles
that they don't need because they think they can afford the gas.  The
math says otherwise - every dollar wasted on inefficient fuel mileage
equals another dollar out of the general economy and going only to the
oil companies. Between 1998, which is when I was first thinking this,
and today, that equals a figure safely towards the billions of dollars
range.  A conservative figure would be around $800,000,000. Perhaps even
more.

So that's $800,000,000 that could have gone toward the economy, but
didn't. $800,000,000 worth of gas that's wasted that represents what
could have happened if that fuel wasn't wasted - less demand and a more
stable price on the long term. That's $800,000,000 that further
entrenched the country into a reliance on foreign oil and contributed to
the crisis we have now, because it's not rocket science to introduce the
calculation of what would happen if suddenly oil became less plentiful
and more expensive, like it is now. It's simple - you end up with people
who can't afford to put gas in their SUVs and they can't sell them
because nobody wants them anymore. People who wasted money over the last
10 years who could probably use it about now. Exactly what's starting to
happen right now.

So now we need a National Defense Research Committee style agency to
focus on solving this problem but do we have one yet? No. We have
leaders who are still acting like the rocketship is 10 light years away,
or to put it on a local level, that streetcars are going to solve a
transportation problem in 50 years when working men and women can't
afford to drive anymore, which is just as ridiculous. So this brings the
problem down to Earth where it effects the future of these kids, and
everyone else. It's the same essential problem - the inability to see
the hidden assumptions.

There are many instances in that book that I can readily identify with,
in fact Smolin complains about how none of the colleges where he taught
would allow him to develop a freshman level course in quantum mechanics,
despite the fact that Smolin was saying that the students were not only
ready for it, but found it interesting and a reason to continue on with
physics. Well, I regularly cover topics from quantum mechanics in my
high school presentations, and what this video with the Bexley students
proves is that Smolin was right and the academic bureaucracy was wrong.

SWWNEWS: It sounds like this video could have major ramifications in a
lot of areas.

MB: It would appear that way. Particularly if every teacher got a copy
of Smolin's book and read it and applied what he's talking about to
their own classroom situation. It doesn't even have to be a physics
class, it could be anything. The important thing is to foster creative
thinking, outside the box thinking, visionary thinking, because it is
only that type of thinking that solves the big problems and advances the
civilization. We need to empower the individual, not the bureaucracy,
not the corporate monolith. We need more Teslas, Edisons, and George
Washington Carvers. If we don't foster them in our schools, where are we
going to find them?

 Craig Kramer and Marshall Barnes pose with a copy of Lee Smolin's The Trouble With Physics. (Photo credit Rhoda Cronebach)

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