One of the most interesting things that ever happened to me was having a video showing me presenting at a physics teacher workshop go viral on YouTube. That video, Gravity Visualized, has over 67 million views as of this writing (4/26/2020). I have written about some of the events surrounding this video but have never set them all down in one place until now.
It all started in May of 2005 when I signed up to have a physicist come to my class to talk about Gravity Probe B. This was a satellite designed to test a prediction of general relativity called frame dragging. We were doing a unit in special relativity and I wanted to spend at least one class on general relativity. The physicist, Shannon Range, came into my class room with a box and a bundle of PVC pipes. I was curious about it and asked what it was. He just smiled and said to wait and see. Soon he had constructed a large drum shape that he topped off with a large sheet spandex. We placed it in the corner before students started arriving. After a fascinating slide show with some great animations, we cleared the desks from the middle of the room and brought out the spandex covered drum. Shannon finished his talk by using it as a spacetime simulator. The spandex sheet was an analogy for two dimensional spacetime. Adding masses to it warped spacetime and created geodesics for objects to follow. It was great and the students loved it. I took a lot of pictures.
It was the end of the year and students were working on a physics project to present to the class. One student, Shawn Moore, was having trouble coming up with an idea. I mentioned the spacetime simulator and gave him a few pictures I had taken. On the day of his presentation he came in with a bundle of PVC pipes and assembled a great looking spacetime simulator. It was even blue like Shannon’s. I jokingly told him he earned an A- but it would be an A if he left it with me. I have been using Shawn’s project ever since. Shannon Range came again in 2006 but moved on to other things. Having my own spacetime simulator allowed me to keep doing his lesson about general relativity. As the years went by I added more demonstrations. I brought it to workshops and helped others build their own. I loaned it out to the other physics teachers in my department. I loaned to my friend Tom Shefler who used it in a Science on Saturday presentation.
In February of 2012 I was demonstrating it to a group of physics teachers at a PTSOS workshop. It was set up in a colleague’s room who happened to be there. He had used it before but asked if he could make a video. He wanted to be able to refer to the video when preparing for his own lesson. He climbed up on a table and took a video with his phone. He later posted it on his apbiolghs YouTube channel so others could view it. He titled it “Gravity Visualized”. It got some attention but nothing unusual. Sometime in late 2013 he noticed he was getting more notifications from YouTube about comments to his videos. He turned off notifications without checking to see what was up. On December 3, 2013, I was getting ready to go to school. My son was doing the same because his marching band practice started at 7:00 AM. He walked into our living room looking at his phone and said, “Dad, do you know you are on the first page of Reddit?” I replied, “What’s Reddit?”. He explained it to me and I soon learned that my son was not the only one that would see it. Many of my students commented about it. Later that day I went to Reddit to see what the fuss was about and noticed the video was number 1. The next week the Huffington Post wrote a nice article about the video and the school paper interviewed me for an article.
After that the number of views of the YouTube video skyrocketed. It reached one million views in just 2 more days. That was pretty exciting but I thought it would soon fade back into obscurity. It quickly climbed past 2, then 5, then 10 million views. It averaged about 750,000 views a month for many years. I am not sure why it has had such staying power but it is great to know that there is a keen interest in science by the general public. I often kid that it has a lot of views but half of them are me checking to see how many views it has. I don’t check as often now but I know the view rate is tapering off and is now only a few tens of thousands a month.
I am often asked how much money I have made off the video. The answer is none but I have received other forms of compensation that mean a lot more to me. More about that later. The video was made and posted by another teacher. He receives all the advertising revenue from it. At first he nobly chose to leave ads off it. He soon found out that others will swoop in and try to take the ad revenue, including Google! He kept having to take measures to remove the ads that others placed by misrepresenting their relationship to the video. He decided if someone was going to make money from ads, it might as well be him. He has never offered to share the proceeds with me and I am fine with that. He is more likely to leave the video posted on YouTube if he is getting money from it and that is a good outcome. He placed a link to the GoFundMe website for PTSOS in the video comments for me. Unfortunately, that has not been the bonanza that I was hoping for.
The description to the Gravity Visualized video includes my name and the school I used to teach at. Because of that I have been contacted by people all around the world. Some want to share their ideas about general relativity theory, some want to let me know how much they enjoyed it, but most want help making their own. Middle school students, BBC TV producers, science centers, STEM programs, and teachers from around the world have corresponded with me. I posted a parts list at some point but there were still people having trouble making it so I created a how-to video.
A teacher in Australia sent me some pictures of his class using the one he made. It was so large he needed a hooked pole to reach the masses in the center. His square base is worth considering because there are less PVC electrical conduit pieces that need to be bent. After a few years these become more brittle and can break. The Australian teacher also described how he made my solar system formation demo more interactive. For my method I would launch a handful of orange marbles in one direction, a slightly smaller handful of black marbles in the other. They would collide, falling into the central mass or sometimes leaving the fabric. The result would be a few marbles all orbiting in the same direction, just like the solar system. Instead, he gave each student a handful of marbles, some with one color, some with the other. First they test one to see about how fast to roll it so it orbits in a circle near the outside. Then they roll all their marbles at once, one color clockwise and the other counter-clockwise. The result is the same but it is more spectacular. Just make sure you pass out more of one color to start with and that every student rolls their marbles at the same time. You can see his students doing the demo in the picture below and my students in the following video.
Corresponding with others wanting to make their own spacetime simulator has been a great experience. A teacher in Greece was very interested in creating lessons about general relativity and we collaborated on several projects. He sent me activities he had developed for review. We created a poster for the Congress of the Union of Greek Physicists conference in Cypress in 2017 and the Astronomy Congress in Osaka in 2018. He liked very visual demonstrations and developed activities comparing the patterns formed with Chladni plates to the shapes of atomic orbitals and worked with the patterns formed in soap bubbles placed in front of a speaker. I hope to collaborate with him more and meet at an international educational conference.
Another collaboration was with a graduate student in business. He wanted to create and market a product and thought the spacetime simulator would be a good choice. He came up with some great ideas such as pre-bending regular PVC with a special tool. I introduced him to C. Peter Rea at Arbor Scientific. He was close to having Arbor carry it in their catalog when they found a cheaper kit for sale elsewhere. After that, he decided to sell them himself, but are no longer available. Maybe it would be a good item to add to the PASCO scientific catalog.
The Arbor Scientific gravity well looked worth checking out too. I purchased one and made my first and possibly last unboxing video. Arbor was kind enough to donate one for raffles prizes at a PTSOS workshop and an NCNAAPT meeting. They have kept the price at $199.00 and must sell OK because they are often out of stock: https://www.arborsci.com/products/gravity-well. You can see my review if you scroll down on the product page. Both products are worth considering but it is worth the trouble to construct your own because you can control the size, height, color, and sturdiness. Here is my unboxing video:
The popularity of the Gravity Visualized video has sparked new interest in this old way to help explain the bending of spacetime by mass. Many have come up with other ways to do the demo and/or new ideas for demonstrations. I have added the demonstration on tides and the Roche limit to my lesson since seeing it done starting at about 1:45 in this video:
They posted this video just 4 months after Gravity Visualized was posted. Why didn’t this one go viral? I suspect it is the orange fabric instead of blue. Another great demo was developed by Steve Mould. After the first direct detection of gravitational waves he created a way to show them on a spacetime simulator. They look very much like computer animations used to visualize gravitational waves. After one of my students showed it to me, I knew I had to try it. Steve explains how to generate them with a drill and a couple of caster wheels. He goes into great detail about adjusting the speed of the wave and the shutter speed of the camera to create the illusion. I wanted to show it directly to students so I hung a strobe light over the top and tried it. It worked pretty well after I found a good frequency for the strobe. I tried creating a slo-mo video and found it showed up great and was much less trouble. See for yourself:
I no longer use the strobe, instead having students take a slo-mo video and then share it with others. This also allows them to share it with their friends and family later. I did the gravitational wave demonstration at the 2017 total eclipse event sponsored by Lowell Observatory in Madras Oregon. While setting it up with fellow physics teacher Rich Krueger, we had a brainstorm. Why not use the drill from below? The result was better because you are not blocking the view. While it is worth the trouble of crawling underneath, unfortunately I don’t get to see it anymore!
The spacetime simulator or gravity well has been used on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Brian Greene demonstrated one among other things when he was a guest in 2015. I am positive they both watched my video before doing this, especially when Colbert uses my “rip in the fabric of spacetime” remark:
I had several people send me the link to this local news broadcast featuring staff from the Michigan Science Center and a very familiar looking spacetime simulator:
The best thing that happened as a result of the viral video was I got to travel to India. Here is an email I received out of the blue:
From: Dr. P. Narayanasamy
To: Dan Burns
Subject: Invitation to deliver a Guest Lecture at College of Engineering, Guindy
Dear Dr. Dan Burns, I am Dr. P. Narayanasamy, Dean, College of Engineering, Guindy (CEG), Anna University, Chennai, India. CEG is one of the premier institutions for higher education in India and has been a renowned centre of academic and overall excellence since its inception. We are India’s oldest technical institution established in 1794. CEG Tech Forum is a non-profit, completely student run organisation that aims to widen the technical horizon of the student community. We do this by helping students turn promising ideas into projects and provide assistance to take projects to the next level. It is in celebration of this culture of innovation, that students of our college are organizing Kurukshetra â an international techno-management festival to be held in January 28âtâh – â31st 2015. As the Chairman of the CEG Tech Forum, I extend my invitation to have you as a Guest at Kurukshetra 2015 on Jan 31st, 2015 to deliver a lecture on the topic “The Science Behind Interstellar”. I am certain the students would benefit greatly. This would certainly inspire them to propel into their own paths toward science and technology. Kindly consider and accept our invitation. Thanks & Regards, Yours sincerely, Dr. P. Narayanasamy Dean, College of Engineering, Guindy
I was excited but I received the email on 12/26/2014 and my talk was scheduled for 1/31/2015. I also had an expired passport. I replied positively but asked if they expected me to give the talk over the Internet. No, Dr. Narayanasamy assured me that the students had watched my Gravity Visualized video and wanted me there in person. They were prepared to pay all my expenses. I researched ways to fast-track passports and agreed to go. After a lot of frustration, I received my passport the day before I needed it to apply for my visa. Thank you Willow Glen post office for helping make that happen. I booked a flight on Emirates Airlines and was excited to see it was an Airbus A380, the world’s largest passenger plane. The flight was long with a stop in Dubai but flying over the North Pole, glimpsing an aurora, and watching the world through my window and the 3 plane-cams made the time pass quickly. I arrived in Chennai after about 23 hours.
I was picked up at the airport by a group of students that were helping to run the conference. They put me up in the university guest house where I shared meals in the communal dining room with the other guest speakers. These included a vice president of Microsoft and a scientist from the Indian space agency. We had some great conversations and delicious Indian food. The complete Kurukshetra 2015 speaker list below can also be found on this Wikipedia page.
The next two days were a whirlwind of activity. I had a car and driver that took me everywhere around campus, even if it was just a few blocks away. I had a Pakistani student escort me when out of the car. All the students were fascinated and highly knowledgeable about science. We had lots of great discussions that often went well into the night. I attended most of the other speaker’s talks and some of the other events. I soon learned that my talk on the science of the movie Interstellar was the keynote address, the pressure was on!
Founded in 1794, the College of Engineering, Guindy is the oldest engineering college in India. It is the oldest technological institution outside of Europe. I had a tour of the campus and was impressed with how well they were doing with such antiquated equipment. By the looks of some of the labs, some of it was original equipment! I doubt that was much of a hindrance for the undergraduates. They were enthusiastic about their college and the education they were receiving.
In addition to my talk, I was asked to conduct a question and answer session with middle and high school students as part of the Kurukshetra conference. I shared the stage with V. Adimurthy, dean of research at the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology. He had developed the trajectory for the Indian Mars Orbiter Mission. I expected most of the questions would go to him but that was not the case. The students had read a lot about black holes, cosmology, Einstein’s relativity theories, and the latest discoveries in astrophysics. It turns out a high school physics teacher is more prepared to answer student questions on these topics. Dr. Adimurthy deferred to me for most of the questions. It was fun but exhausting.
I tried to get a good night’s sleep before my talk but the students who had been running the conference asked if they could bring some friends over to the guest house to talk with me. Of course I agreed but this turned out to be another marathon session. They each brought a group of friends that would stay for about an hour, then another group would come in. They had great questions and I learned a lot about their culture and expectations for the future. They were highly knowledgeable about the United States and its university system. Many were determined to go to graduate school in the USA and then return to India. Whenever I read or see something dismal about India I think of these students and how passionate they were about creating a better future for India.
I was too tired to be nervous when I entered the standing room only TAG center, their largest venue. I was confident that my talk would be well received given the high interest in science shown by everyone at Kurukshetra. I was less confident about how some of my cultural references would go. I had clips from WALL-E, Ender’s Game, and The Simpsons. I quoted Kurt Vonnegut. Carl Sagan and Spock. My doubts were unfounded, they were knowledgeable about American culture too. The talk went very well and they laughed at all my jokes. They even knew what the Vulcan “live long and prosper” sign was.
The Q&A extended up to the next event scheduled in the auditorium so it spilled out into the courtyard. I was surrounded by people 8 deep as I answered questions, posed for selfies, and signed autographs. Soon it was time to head back to the airport. The guy who stamped my passport did a double take. I had my passport stamped on arrival just after midnight local time. It was now just before midnight so the date was the next day. He asked if I had come all the way to India to spend just one day. I replied, “don’t be silly, it was actually 2 days!” I would have liked to spend more time but as an AP Physics teacher I could not afford to miss more days of school. I got a good look at the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, coming in to Dubai and scored an amazing window seat behind an exit door for the 18 hour flight to San Francisco. At the time this flight was the 5th longest scheduled flight in the world. I was glad to get back home and to school. Turns out it is a lot easier answering my students’ questions, even with the large California class sizes.
Every time I get the spacetime simulator out it is an adventure. The last one of note was at the Bay Area Science Festival at Oracle Park in San Francisco. This is an amazing event where organizations and companies of all types set up science and engineering based interactive display booths. I had considered bringing the spacetime simulator before but my schedule never worked out. In 2018 I bit the bullet and applied for a display under the auspices of the Los Gatos High School Physics Club. There was no such entity at the time but with some help from 3 former students, we quickly organized one.
They placed us on the club level, just outside the area designated for small children. This turned out to make the day very interesting. The plan was to go through the demonstrations at every half hour and then give the audience time to experiment with the spacetime simulator. It turned out this latter activity was extremely popular, especially with the younger children exiting their area and seeing kids playing with marbles on this big blue trampoline. We were mobbed with kids all day. Marbles were rolling all over the club level which was a safety hazard. One of the security guards would come over with a handful of marbles every 20 minutes or so. We were happy the exhibit was popular, after all, that is why we were there. Since I had so much help, we were able to handle this until the early afternoon, when Ana and Hannah had to leave. Taylor and I soon learned we needed to put away the marbles after about 5 minutes of play before things got out of hand. I would say “the marbles are tired and need to rest before the next show, come back in 10 minutes.” That worked but then Taylor had to go. I managed to run things by myself as the crowd thinned. It was an exhausting day but I would definitely do it again, as long as I can find another amazing group of helpers.
