Introduction

[Farsight]

INTRODUCTION

 

I’ve always held Albert Einstein in the highest regard. I admire his ability to think outside the box, I empathise with his curiosity, and I share his desire to understand the world in terms we can grasp. And I so love the romance of the lowly patent clerk who applied his fresh young mind to the world’s great mysteries. There he was, in the dying days of horse-drawn transport, dreaming of light, and of space and time. What he came up with was just so profound. It feels like it was ahead of its time, and I suppose it was. It took a long time to catch on, a long time to earn recognition, and a long time to catch the public eye. But when it did, the public were thrilled, as I am thrilled.

 

You find out more when you read about him. You learn of the imperfection, the humanity. You learn that he didn’t do it all, and it wasn’t all right. You learn that some things are incorrectly attributed to him, and that there have been shifts in interpretation that he might not agree with.

 

 

You also learn of things forgotten. Because he was ahead of his time, and the world wasn’t ready. Because it’s an imperfect world, because people aren’t perfect. That’s how it is, that’s how we are.

 

I ponder at what might have been, if things had turned out different. I muse that if Einstein had lived longer, the world wouldn’t be quite so imperfect. I think he would have achieved his dream of a Theory of Everything, where everything was explained through the geometry he called “pure marble”. I think he would have explained the postulates he used in Special Relativity, and explained why General Relativity works the way it does. I think he would have given us an intuitive understanding of gravity, and energy and mass, and time and space itself. I think he would have laid it all out in terms so simple that we could not have failed to have grasped how the universe works. It would have been something special, something even more thrilling, something that would have made a difference to the way we live. But nobody lives forever. The sands of time ran out for Albert Einstein, and nobody picked up the torch. The light of understanding slipped from our grasp, it spluttered and died. His dream died with him. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

 

The world turns, days go by, years stretch into decades, time passes. And here I am. I’ve found his dream. I share his vision. I know where he was going. I know what he was working on in his twilight years, when he was sidelined, out of the mainstream. He wasn’t just on his own, he was out on his own. But he never got it out. He got close. The signs are there when you know how to look. You see the resonance when you read what he said, not what people say he meant. You see the vision. You see the light. I’ve seen it, and I have to share it. There’s no time to get it perfect so right now it’s just a vision. It doesn’t qualify as a theory. It’s a model at best, a toy model. But everything has to start somewhere, so it still needs a name:

 

RELATIVITY+

 

There’s already a General Relativity+. But I wanted something with more scope. Something that covers it all. Something more general. And strangely enough, the name RELATIVITY+ fits the bill. Because less is more, because it’s a tale of something and nothing. Once you share his vision, you see how simple it is, and you’ll wonder why you didn’t see it before. I’ll show you how to see it. But first I need to tell you how I got where I am. The story starts in 2006.

 

 

 

One fine day I was going about my business when I heard that the Maths Tower at Manchester University was to be demolished. I was shocked. To me it was an inspirational icon of learning, the thing that put the campus on the skyline, on the map, and on the picture postcards. I used to sit on the seventeenth floor in a class, learning about gates and induction from the likes of Tom Kilburn, godfather of Computer Science. I listened intently with the cityscape before me and Jodrell Bank behind. I learned a lot in that Maths Tower. It shaped my life, it was my beacon. And now it’s gone.

 

 

Yes, I know buildings don’t last forever. But the building that replaced it is the Tin Drum, a thousand-seat lecture theatre for commercial seminars, part of a Social “Sciences” development, which in turn is part of a new vision for a 21st century campus. In this 21st century vision, the new mathematics building isn’t the Maths Building. It’s called AMPSS. It’s shared with other schools. And it’s on the edge of campus. Yes I’m sure it’s more modern, and more practical. But it’s out on a limb. It just isn’t so important any more. And moreover, UMIST is no more. The University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology no longer exists. It has been fused with the rest of The University of Manchester. The prospectus now shouts old stone, a retrograde vision that talks of heritage and 1824 instead of the white heat of modern technology. And the list of Humanities courses is so very much longer than the Engineering and Physical Sciences. Things have changed, and I don’t much like it.

 

Who am I to complain? Computers were the next big thing when I was starting out. Hence I’m in IT, and it’s served me well. I live in a place called Sandbanks. No, not quite Sandbanks, because Sandbanks is next door. I live in a place called Lilliput. There really is such a place. It’s a comfortable world of beach and pool, ten minutes to work, quality of life. There’s time for living and time for wine, and time to do the things you want to do. My interest is physics. It’s more than a hobby. It’s more of a passion, one that has grown deeper as I’ve grown older. I’m deeply curious about the world, I want to know how the universe works. Doesn’t everybody? No. The sound of a stylus slewing across an album. My teenagers don’t. The wife and I have two teenage children, and when the time arose for choices and courses, I was disappointed. Both the boy and the girl have dropped their science subjects. I asked them about it, talked to them. They told me physics at school was dull. They weren’t taking it forward. What can you do? You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. They are simply not interested in science. It’s my fault. I wasn’t paying enough attention, either to them or their schooling. I didn’t notice that the curriculum had changed. I didn’t notice the dumbing down, or how the dead hand of Health & Safety has turned it from Van Der Graaf generators into bookwork and pendulums. I’m not sure of the underlying reasons, but whatever they are, it’s real, it’s happening, and I didn’t realise until it was too late. Suddenly I woke up. I learned of physics departments closing down, and other science departments too, and it set my alarm bells ringing. I read that the number of A-level students taking physics has fallen 56% in 20 years, and I felt a shiver. This is serious. What are you going to do about it?

 

 

I left it too late for my own children. But perhaps, I said to myself, perhaps I could do something to enthuse other people’s children. Or laymen. Perhaps I could use my skills to make physics a little more interesting, a little more accessible, a little more fun. Maybe I could even appeal to the sort of person who gets the electrician in to replace a halogen spotlight. I say that because there’s a standing joke in our house, that I’m the only one who can change a ****ing lightbulb. But somehow it isn’t funny. If you selected a hundred people at random and tested their technical and scientific knowledge, I think the average score would be lower than that of a similar group from fifty years ago. Yes, we’re more high tech these days, more specialist, and some things are more difficult to understand. But there seems to be more people around who just don’t understand the basics, who have only the vaguest concept of how things work. They wouldn’t know where to start if their car broke down, and some wouldn’t even know how to open the bonnet. It’s like there’s an ebbing tide that doesn’t feel healthy, that slowly, insiduously, is getting worse. Something must be done, I said to myself. And if you want something done, you’ve got to do it yourself.

 

So there I was, determined to make a difference. I do have a skill. It’s subtle, understated, you don’t always see it. Like I was saying, I’ve spent my years in IT, where we work hard to keep things simple. It’s all to do with language, the right language. A good system is clear and understandable, organised in a top-down structured fashion so you can look at a picture and get a feel for it quickly. Then you can dig down a level and get a handle on a few more things, and keep on digging until you get to the bottom of it. Every step of the way you’re seeing order, discipline, clean functionality, understanding. It’s all so easy when you make it look easy. It’s all so obvious when it’s all done right. That’s what Systems Analysis is all about. You call a spade a spade and make sure it does what it says on the can. You learn to think clearly and logically, and when you do it right, nobody knows that you did it right. But you know you did, because you’ve seen what happens when people get it wrong. Because when it’s not done right, when it’s complicated, when you can’t understand it, it means somebody screwed up. And then you wonder how people can get it so wrong.

 

 

 

Where would I start? At the beginning of course, with the basic concepts. I’d explain them simply and logically in friendly fashion that made physics fun. After all, as Einstein said: If you can’t explain it to your grandmother, you don’t understand it yourself. No problem. I mean, we’re talking Popular Science, not Rocket Science. Easy, no problem.

 

 

No problem? Big problem. The problem was that when I tried to explain those basic concepts, I found I couldn’t. I couldn’t explain it to my grandmother. I consulted my books and searched the internet, I delved deep, I read substantial papers, but I just couldn’t find the answers. Then I looked at the mathematics, and thought about it. I applied my Systems Analysis experience. I broke down the problem and shuffled the pieces and checked the functionality of every component. I worked it out. I found what my problem was. Mathematics is a vital tool for physics. We can’t do physics without it. But the basic concepts I was trying to explain is where the mathematics starts. And whilst I take a top-down approach, the mathematics is bottom-up. The basic concepts were base mathematical terms, like E, and m and t and c and g. I was trying to dig under the axioms, the postulates, the things we take for granted. I realised then that whilst mathematics is a vital tool for physics, when it comes to basic concepts, it just doesn’t have a handle. It doesn’t offer any grasp. Don’t get me wrong. With mathematics we calculate and predict, and then conduct experiments to confirm these predictions. It’s vital. But mathematics shouldn’t be the only tool in the box. It can’t do it all. It can’t explain the basic concepts. That’s like trying to understand the Jury System using legal shorthand, or teaching English in a foreign language. You just can’t do it.

 

 

I understood then why Relativity and Quantum Physics have not been reconciled. Relativity is macroscopic and top down. Quantum Physics is microscopic and bottom up. It isn’t just a gap between them, they’re headed in different directions, and they’ve missed each other. And to get to the bottom of why, I had to get to the bottom of those basic concepts. That’s when the fun began.

 

That’s how I got where I am, and now I’d like you to come with me on a journey. Share the vision. It’s all about basic concepts. Concepts so basic that you’ve never really thought about them. It ends with Albert Einstein’s dream, a world of pure marble geometry. It explains time and energy and mass and charge and gravity and space, in simple conceptual terms that tell you how the universe works. This is what he was working on, and never finished. Godel handed him the key when they were together at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. It’s both disturbing and it’s wonderful. So elegant and so simple, and we were so so close. What a crying shame that Richard Feynman, the "Great Explainer", turned down that Princeton position after the war. I think he might have become Einstein’s successor, carrying the torch.

 

 

Feynman won joint Nobel Prize for Quantum Electrodynamics in 1965. The gap between QED and Einstein’s twilight work is so easily bridged. If only Einstein had passed on the torch to Feynman. Maybe we would have had a theory of everything by now, a theory that takes the best of Quantum Electrodynamics and Quantum Chromodynamics and blends them into a new improved Relativity. A Relativity that actually explains what gravity is, that tells us how to master it. But it didn’t happen. So our Rocket Science remains complicated, and difficult. Too difficult.

 

 

After the Challenger disaster it was Feynman who told NASA they’d been fooling themselves about safety, and about O rings. All it took was a touch of frost to cripple the space programme. It’s incredible how they could get it so wrong. You wonder how people can get it so wrong. I think that if Feynman had gone to Princeton, and talked to Einstein, he would have realised that this applied to other things. And then things would have turned out different.

 

So different that by now, sixty years later, NASA wouldn’t be flying rockets with O rings. They’d be flying something different. They’d be flying something bigger. Something faster, further, higher. They wouldn’t be reaching for the moon. They’d be reaching for the stars. That’s the prize. So come with me on that journey. But hold on to your hat, and hang on tight.

 

Because it’s quite a ride.