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Matt Milless
Physics professor Chad Orzel and his dog Emmy go in search of the bacon boson and other scientific mysteries — a quest documented in Orzel's latest book, "How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog."
Teaching relativity to a dog may sound like a hopeless mental exercise, but physics professor Chad Orzel says it actually makes the job of teaching relativity to humans easier.
"It makes the whole thing seem much more approachable," Orzel explains. "If you think like a dog, dogs have fewer preconceptions about how things work."
And Orzel's dog, a German shepherd mix named Emmy, won't let him get away with hand-waving gobbledygook. "A lot of the things that she interjects with, those are points where people reading along would say, 'Wait a minute! That doesn't make sense!'" he said.
Of course, Orzel isn't really teaching relativity to his dog. Rather, Emmy serves as the straight man — er, dog — for a scientific dialogue that makes the equations go down more easily. Such dialogues are standard rhetorical devices that go back to Democritus, Socrates, Plato and all those cats in ancient Greece. It's a technique that Orzel used to crowd-pleasing effect in his 2009 book about quantum mechanics, "How to Teach Physics to Your Dog" — and now Emmy is back for more in the newly published sequel, "How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog."
"If you've already talked about quantum physics, relativity is the obvious way to go," Orzel told me. "It's the other great theory of modern physics."
Orzel, who teaches physics at Union College in New York, said that Albert Einstein's special and general theories of relativity can actually be boiled down to one sentence. "All of the weird stuff you hear about E=mc2, clocks running slow when they move, time moving at different rates near a black hole ... all of that weird stuff is just a consequence of the fact that the laws of physics do not depend on how you're moving," he said.
Basic Books
"How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog" isn't just for dog lovers ... or relativity lovers, for that matter.
And if there's one thing dogs know a lot about, it's moving. So Orzel casts his explanations of the weird stuff in terms a dog just might be able to understand: For example, when he refers to the speed of light in a vacuum as remaining constant, no matter how it's measured in a moving frame of reference, he doesn't use the standard example of moving rocket ships. Instead, Orzel talks to Emmy about bunnies, cats and dogs in motion.
At times, Emmy tries to jump into the driver's seat with her inquiries into the Unified Theory of Critters, or her plans to build the Superconducting Kibble Collider and search for the bacon boson. ("It's responsible for making other kinds of particles yummy," she explains in the book.) Then it's Orzel's job to tug on the leash and get Emmy's head back in the game. And after a chuckle or two, we're ready to press on as well.
"Because of the dog, I'm able to get away putting some stuff in there that I otherwise wouldn't be able to," Orzel told me. "You can put in some heavy stuff and lighten the tone quite a bit."
That's not to say Orzel has turned relativity into a romp in the park. The book still poses quite a few mental agility trials — particularly when it comes to the counterintuitive aspects of relativistic phenomena, such as the famous "twin paradox." But as much as possible, Orzel highlights the concrete, real-world examples of relativity at work, such as the fact that a height difference of just 12 inches has an ever-so-slight impact on timekeeping, due to the relativistic effects of our planet's gravitational field. The same effects have to be accounted for in GPS satellite navigation systems.
"That shows that this isn't purely some incredibly exotic thing," Orzel said. "It's something that happens in everyday situations. It's just that the effects are usually too small to measure."
So now that Chad Orzel and his dog Emmy have run circles around the two great pillars of modern physics — quantum mechanics and relativity theory — what's next?
"We'll have to see what the dog wants to talk about," Orzel joked. "A few people have asked about statistical physics, but I'm thinking I don't know if even the dog wants to do that."
More about Einstein and relativity:
- Right again, Einstein: New test nixes faster-than-light findings
- E=mc2 and other Einstein manuscripts are going online
- Interactive: Why relativity is right, and still relevant
- Special report: A Century of Einstein
Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.
Leave a Comment:
Great article. Very clever website the author's got too.
Perhaps he can do one soon about teaching to dogs Darwin's theory of how species have evolved through natural selection. Given polls on how shockingly large numbers of Americans seem unable to grasp it and cling instead to the peculiar notion that some sort of magical designer in the sky conjured us all up, it seems to me that we need such a book just as soon as he can get it done.
That would be a wonderful subject for a science writer to do but I don't know if Orzel would want to tackle that. Explaining physics is kind of a neutral subject and evolutionary theory is obviously a very heated discussion that involves you in politics and religion and can get people being really nasty to each other. Just look what happens in comment sections when the it comes up on this site! I'd love for somebody to do it in a light, conversational way that explains it in a non-threatening manner but it better be done by somebody who's ready for the fight.
Plus the dog's just not into it.
My vote is for Professor Orzel to write a book where his dog explains string theory to Schrödinger's cat and Heisenberg's canary . . .
Every once in a while someone who can do all the advanced mathematics just happens to have the ability to explain complex stuff to normal people, and this is the reason these types of books are both popular and useful . . .
In an odd moment, I might like to imagine that I can do all the advanced mathematics, but the reality is that proving the Pythagorean Theorem is a bit of an impossibility here in the sound isolation studio . . .
Yet, after reading Brian Greene's "The Elegant Universe" a few times, the bit about gravity being like what happens when one puts a bowling ball on sheet of stretched rubber--similar to putting a heavy lead ball on a trampoline and then rolling different size balls in circular orbits to simulate the planets orbiting the sun--made a bit of conceptual sense, especially when one can visualize an infinite number of such stretched rubber sheets or however the multidimensional volume or whatever is filled, since the stretched rubber sheet or trampoline is just a slice of the Gestalt . . .
Another of these bits of wisdom appeared a few years ago in a television program where one of the physicists did a segment where a fellow was riding a bicycle that had a light on the handle bar, and I am still pondering that one toward the goal of deciding how everything works, although lately I changed it to a spaceship with a front viewing port and some headlights, where the spaceship is traveling very near to the speed of light, and I think that I understand what happens, but I like to have a bit of FUN imagining that the area of space through which the spaceship is traveling just happens to be illuminated with massive lights . . .
In other words, I can go along with the idea that the light emerging from the spaceship's headlights does not travel very far, presuming this is what happens, hence someone inside the spaceship looking through the front viewing port would not be able to see very far ahead, but what if the stuff in the distance was illuminated very brightly by other lights, as contrasted to being a totally dark region of space?
And I am not entirely certain what happens when the bicycle rider and bicycle are traveling at the speed of light in totally dark space and the bicycle rider turns-on the bicycle light, at which time one reasonably might suppose that light begins shining from the bicycle light, which could be a LASER, hence a coherent beam . . .
Does the bicycle rider see a really long LASER beam nearly instantaneously, or does the bicycle rider after a while see a LASER beam which curiously is about as long as the eraser on the end of a pencil?
Or does the no light get past the end of the LASER, and if so, then why?
In other words, if a LASER device is traveling at the speed of light and you turn it on but no beam of light emerges, then why?
Does the LASER device traveling at the speed of light somehow change the way the LASER device operates?
Intuitively, if the LASER device already is traveling at the speed of light, then if a beam of light emerges from the end of the LASER device, I suppose that it would need to be traveling faster than the speed of light, which apparently is not allowed . . .
Working through a billion pages of advanced mathematics might be wonderful, but I think that a lot of this stuff can be understood in other ways . . .
So, while I have not read any of Professor Orzel's books, I like Alan Boyle's book review, and I plan to order and to read Professor Orzel's books, since I might be able to understand at least something more than I currently understand, which will count as making progress here in the sound isolation studio, which is fabulous . . .
Fabulous! :-)
Personally... I think the human race is ready for first contact (E.T.) - if it hasn't happened already.
My Bearded Collie has a "String-toy Theory" that's pretty interesting. I agree with the poster above, I think Emmy should tackle String Theory next.
If you were on a bicycle, traveling at the speed of light, your mass would be infinite and therefore there would be nothing to see outside of yourself.
...all of that weird stuff is just a consequence of the fact that the laws of physics do not depend on how you're moving," he said.
I know even less than I thought-- I thought it did depend on how you're moving for "relativity"