Friday, January 4, 2013

Common Criticisms part 2



A direct link to the above video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nlSZ8NOnEg

See part 1 here. This is a discussion of ten proposed reasons for why Henry of the popular YouTube channel minutephysics and his supporters are saying people shouldn't watch my videos.

Reason #2: Because it's dangerous.
In his video Common Physics Misconceptions Henry asks this question about simplified ideas that are often taught as a way of introducing more complex concepts to students: "is that an excuse to mislead our children about the true nature of things? No." And yet teachers the world over have always used this technique. Why? Because this is how knowledge is conveyed. You start with something simple and basic, then once those concepts are understood you build idea upon idea until you arrive at university-level classes and beyond. In many cases, teaching university-level concepts to young children is simply not a viable option.
Since my original video was published online in June 2006, and first appeared on YouTube in January 2007, there are people who first watched my original video a number of years ago who are now entering university. Almost every day I get messages from people saying things like this: "Thank you Rob Bryanton for opening my eyes to the wonders of the universe. You are the reason I am now pursuing a degree in one of the sciences."
Did I somehow destroy these people's minds, make them unable to learn? Or did I wake them up and get them interested in the concepts that minutephysics talks about regularly in his videos (most of which I find to be excellent).
"But Rob", one might ask. "Surely these students would have eventually stumbled across some other video, or book, or teacher who awakened their sense of wonder?"
Of course! That's life. But that's not an argument for removing something that has already inspired millions of fans from around the world to want to learn more.

Here are the some of the ideas that are NOT wrong which my visualization can help you remember:

- a "wormhole" is a hypothetical construct which can be visualized as a "folding" of spacetime
- some theorists say the fifth dimension and above are compatified, or "curled up at the planck length"
- Kaluza showed how general relativity and Maxwell's equations could be resolved at the 5th dimension
- A phase space is defined as "a space in which all possible states of a system are represented, with each possible state of the system corresponding to one unique point in the phase space."
- M-theory says that our reality comes from ten spatial dimensions plus time. This visualization arrives at a "timeless" tenth dimension, and does this by saying that time is not a dimension, it's a direction, or a way of describing change from state to state within the phase space of any of these spatial dimensions
- Michio Kaku says that antimatter can be described as "matter which is moving backwards in time", and while there are other ways of describing antimatter this approach is accepted as being equivalent
- this visualization shows how our observed reality is created from timeless "frames" of 3D space, and we're "locked in" at the seventh dimension. Some string theorists have said our universe is embedded in a D3 and a D7 "brane", or membrane.

1 comment:

Mark D said...

I say keep going with it. As a meditation tool your videos are amazing. It, and I'm not sure if this was your intent, teaches one to hold in their mind, the concept of something they may have previously been unable to conceive, and more importantly add to it. Have you ever thought of how your idea relates to the Qabalistic Tree of Life?

Tenth Dimension Vlog playlist