and when they get to the end, boom, they smatter into particles of matter and they smash it all apart and they take a look to see what it's made of. for example if i wanna know what this watch is made of, the one way to find out what this watch is made of is to take the watch, find a concrete wall, take that watch and throw it as fast as i can. and when it splatters, take some pictures, quick. and that way i can find out what's inside. does that make sense? well, that's what the phys-ers do. they do that with atoms and they smash them apart and they see all the debris. they takphotographs and they get it. well, that's what the people do at the stanford linear accelerator. well, it turns out those particles are electrons. the electrons that are shot in your tv tubes, same old electrons. and those electrons are going 99.9999999999999% the speed of light by the time they hit the target at the end, honey, they are going fast. but let me tell you something, that was kinda neat. those electrons in the first couple of feet are going more than 99% the speed of light right there. and they're pushed all the way down.

push, push, push, push, push. the copper wires eding that accelerator are thicker than your wrist. enormous amperage, enormous power. and that is put into driving that accelerator. and that energy takes little tiny part electrons. you know how light they are, my goodness, my goodness? it pushes, pushes, pushes, pushes for 2 miles. and as they push and push and push and doesn't gain much speed. but it gains something else. it gains momentum without gaining much speed. and what's that ply about the mass? that the mass is becoming enormous. when these things get down the end, they land--they hit with thousands of times more mass than they started with. and so all this energy you're pumping in, all that energy, that energy is going into mass. and how much? given by this relationship. so at the end of the tube, you'll have more mass than you had when you started. because you're energizing it all the time. and as you push things, push things, some people will say

w come you can't go faster than the speed of light? well, to go faster than the speed of light, if you gotta push, you gotta push, you gotta push, when you wanna accelerate something, there are two factors involved. some of you people know what the two factors involved are. if someone said to you, hey, you, you're physics type, huh? i understand that acceleration involves two ideas. what are those ideas? and you would say how hard you push, force, compared to how much inertia you have, mass, isn't that right? so force per mass. now as you're pushing faster and faster and faster and the mass becomes more and more and more, what happens at the speed of light? at the speed of light, what would the mass be? see this little piece of chalk. what's the mass of this piece of chalk if i push it to the speed of light? i can use this equation to guide me. if v is the speed of light

zero...infinity. this mass will be pushed to the infinite. now someone says, now that it has an infinite mass, which means an infinite resistance to any further change in motion. now if someone says, could you push it in hyperdrive, honey? hyperdrive, i've got an infinite resistance to any change in motion now. and so we find out in the universe as we understand it in the 20th century, you can't do that. at least with material particles there is a speed limit, the speed of light. so you get that down. one of the important parts of relativity is this. before we understood relativity, we understood that the human race, no matter how sophisticated they became couldn't travel very far in space. and the reason is simple enough. the center of our galaxy for example is 20,000 light years away. it takes 20,000 years for light itself to go from the center of our galaxy to us.

and our galaxy is nothing compared to the expanse of the whole universe. so how are you gonna be going through the universe when you can't even get to your galaxy, it's not gonna take you 20,000 years. if you're traveling at high, high speed, you might get there in 5 minutes. and if you travel at the speed of light, how far away would it be from a speed of light frame of reference. what's the distance between things. i remember leon russell used to sing that song, "i love you in a place where there's no space and time. i love you forever, you're a friend of mine." a place where there's no space and time. that makes sense? how can there be no space. how about the speed of light frame ofeference. from a speed of light frame of reference, what's the length between one edge of the universe and the other... when v is c?

zero. from a speed-of-light frame a reference, there is no distance at all between the one side of the universe and the opposite. and from a speed-of-light frame of reference, how does the duration of time travel? it's frozen: no time, no space. did you ever hear the buddhist type say everything, the universe, really, is just a point in space. you say, gibberish. gibberish? maybe from one frame of reference, that's true. think about that.

paul hewitt here, a few words. you know who we are and what we're about has a lot to do with the influences in our life, the people who have influenced us. and i, like everyone, have had many, many influences. and i just wanna cite, oh, very few, just three or four here. i know when i was in high school, there was a counselor, edward gibbs, high school counselor, and he advised me to not take any academic subjects because i wouldn't need to, because he was aware of my talent for art. i was the guy that would paint the posters for the dances, make the cartoons in the yearbook and that kind of thing. and so he said i wouldn't have to take academic courses, so i took his advice and i didn't. and so in high school, i took no physics, no science. i did mathematics for boys in the freshman year, and there was a general science course and i thought it was wonderful.

but that's about it for that. and another one of my influences was kenny isaacs. kenny isaacs was a local boxing hero. and i was one of these kids that was getting beat up all the time by bullies. i wasn't much of a physical specimen. and kenny isaacs was-- he was the fighter of fighters. everyone admired that guy. i remember going to lynn and watching him fight sometimes. i was about maybe 14 years old, 13, 14, and saying, "wow, this guy is so great." i wish i could be there in his corner, be sort of the kid that comes up with the water bucket, you know, and helps him. this is a gladiator, no one beat him up. but anyway, kenny isaacs was a big influence because, to make a long story short, three years later, kenny isaacs was in my corner. and a fellow lived next door to me, eddie mccarthy, who was a professional fighter, 135-pound, lightweight, very good guy. and he took me under his wing. but then he went off to the korean war. just before he did that, he turned me over to a local boxing hero, kenny isaacs.

and he told kenny, "kenny, take young paul here under your wing. he's my protege." kenny did that. and i was gonna retire as soon as i won the flyweight championship of north america, but i never got th far. i got up to the silver medal for the aau in new england at the age of 17. and that was about it. after that, in the follow-up fight, getting ready for the nationals, i got knocked out, the end of that career. another big influence on my life was burl grey, a sign painter that i met back in the late fifties. burl was painting in miami and i was assigned to paint with him. no one else would paint with him because there was a rumor going around about him that he was, yeah, one of them. he was accused of being, and i found out for myself that old burl was an intellectual. and intellectuals didn't cut it at the sign painting circuit.

anyway, burl grey influenced me a lot. he's the one that lit my fire to get into science. and many of the ideas i had about things were-- burl sort of demolished. he was a very philosophical type and he was a nontheist. and he, you know, convinced me that things were so much simpler if you took a more scientific view of the world and there's so much that we're taught to believe or that we come to believe that simply isn't true. and how does one determine what's true or not? do you find out when you're an old person ready to die that everything you've been doing is just junk? well, you know, we each need a knowledge filter, sort of, to tell the difference between what's true and what isn't true. and burl convinced me that the best knowledge filter ever invented is science. and so i got into science. i went to school. i went to college, lowell tech in massachusetts, after doing a year of prep school 'cause i didn't take the recommended courses in high school,

i had to do this, you know, make up for deficiencies. so burl was a big influence of mine. and then i went through it and i got a physics degree. and while getting that physics degree, it was very, very difficult for me. but there was a book i read when i was in graduate school in the summertime. it was wonderful. it was a book called "basic physics" by ken ford. and ken ford became my mentor and another big influence on me. and ken ford's book, awesome. he told it like it is. ken ford is a giant himself. he doesn't have a nobel prize but his friends do. he's one of those type guys. he was the exec officer of the american institute of physics. i'm proud to say now, i'm very proud of him to have him for a personal friend. so he was a great influence on me. and now i find myself, my greatest satisfaction is to realize that i myself am an influence for other people. i'm sort of a kenny isaacs or a burl grey or a ken ford to many students.

and this many is with a capital m, thanks to the efforts of my friend marshall alenstein who has put together these videotapes and these dvds that spread my lectures from the classroom into the classrooms of many people. and so, it's wonderful being that role model for other teachers and students. and whatever i can do to be a burl grey to other people, to let them see that perhaps a very good foundation for, hey, what's going on in the world, certainly, is science. so let's hear it for physics. physics first, it's a wonderful way to look at the world. it makes sense out of what ordinarily might be just too cplex to understand. physics, i love it. i hope you do too.