How fast time flies. It’s been about three months since my last entry. I’ve been so busy trying to put together seminars that I’ve had to let everything else go, including blogs and research. I’ve probably lost a lot of readers as a result, especially direct feed subscribers.
The irony of the whole thing is that not one seminar has been held. The reason is not because I didn’t prepare them, but because we didn’t hold them. The official reason we didn’t hold them is due to illness and bad weather, but the real reason goes deeper than that. It turns out that we had several new comers who were invited to attend the seminars, some were physicists, some engineers, some journal editors, and some were mathematicians and professors, but they all were new. It soon dawned on me that it would be unwise to have new comers, each with some degree of curiosity mixed with scepticism, attend a meeting where advanced concepts of scalar motion were being discussed.
On the other hand, the veterans familiar with the fundamental scalar concepts wouldn’t appreciate making the effort to attend, just to hear what they already understood. As a result, illnesses and inclement weather became convenient excuses to postpone. Yet, I knew that postponing the meeting wasn’t a solution either. Sooner or later, I was going to have to find a real solution. Well, I did find one, but it has taken all this time to work it out.
What I decided to do was to hold introductory meetings at the local library and videotape them, so that later I could publish them on this site and direct new comers to them. That way, if they have enough interest, they need only visit the website and watch a few videos first, before deciding if they wanted to attend the more advanced research seminars.
However, it wasn’t as easy as it seemed it would be at first. In fact, the solution soon appeared to be more of a challenge than the problem it was designed to address. Who was going to come to the library to hear someone talk about the reciprocal system? The answer was easy, no one was. To tell you the truth, I was beginning to feel the effects of stress at this point.
I realized that I needed a strategy, and though not sure what it might be, it occurred to me that the History Channel programs on physics and cosmology, which were, and still are, being heavily promoted, must be generating a lot of interest, because people don’t spend advertising dollars unless it’s making them money. The History Channel was running advertisements on the other channels, so I figured they must be making money on their shows like “The Universe,” etc.
To make a long story short, I decided to use David Gross’s talk on “The Coming Revolution in Fundamental Physics,” which could also be titled “We think string theory is the beginning of a revolution in fundamental physics, but, after forty years, we still don’t know what the darn thing is!” as a drawing card. The reason is, of course, because he makes the point that “the conceptual block” preventing theoretical progress is a lack of a fundamental understanding of the nature of space and time.
After a real struggle, I was able to put the presentation together, make flyers, brochures, and arrangements for the library facilities. Then I took the flyers to the local university and high schools, told people at church, family, and friends, and started praying and hoping someone would show up.
Well, I’m happy to report that some did, but not until just a few minutes before the meeting was scheduled to start, which initially caused me to suffer a panic attack. Though we had some technical difficulties, we managed to record and publish the meeting as planned (see: http://www.lrcphysics.com/lrc-lectures). Hopefully, we can improve the quality of the next meetings, scheduled for Tuesday, April 1st, or April Fools day (!?!), and the first Tuesday of each month thereafter.
Fortunately, it turns out that the majority of those attending were high school students, and the interest seemed high. In Gross’s talk, he prophesies that it will probably take a “young Heisenberg, fiddling around somewhere in left field,” to make the breakthrough that will usher in the coming revolution. There were several of them there that night.