A Time of Magic

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Supposedly we are living in a time when there’s a thing called inflation ie prices are going up all the time.

Except that they aren’t. Well, not in many key fields.

OK, we have taken it for granted that computers and other electronic devices will drop in price over time but that price drop isn’t confined to things in those categories. Airline travel is substantially cheaper: in 1978 I flew from the UK to the west coast of Canada for just over £200 ($400) which probably doesn’t sound much now but it was considered as a “once in a lifetime” trip back then yet these days it’s commonplace and easily affordable to go to Florida on holiday.

I was seriously thinking of getting an Encyclopedia Britannica in 1981. It was just over £600 ($1200). The updated version is £650 ie no price change.

It’s the same in many fields of course. Inflation these days seems to be confined to a small range of products where there is some limitation in supply in force. Most obviously houses and land of course but also things where there are price controls such as farm products and indeed oil based products.

In some cases, it’s the case that the inflation rate for a given person or family can be negative ie prices for them reduce each year. This happens most commonly with retired people who have already bought their house thereby removing a major factor in their “personal inflation” and if they walk more rather than use a car or public transport they can easily knock out another key area ie the oil price.

Well, actually, no, it isn’t impossible.

One of the features of Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity is that time is allowed for by the equations. So, although you might think that time travel is the work of science fiction it is scientifically possible.

That’s not to say that you will be able to nip out and buy a time machine anytime soon. At present, we’re pretty much in the equivalent time to that some decades before the Wright brothers took to the air. That’s to say, it’s a time when the only potentially possible technologies which would enable time travel involve black holes and naked singularities and various things that, at the moment, appear to lie well beyond our capabilities for the forseeable future.

However, the “forseeable future” can be very near-sighted sometimes. Already experiments are going on in CERN which deal with things closer and closer to naked singularities.

But surely all the paradoxes (killing your own grandfather before you were born etc.) mean that time travel is impossible? No, just as it was often “proved” that it would be impossible for a lump of a metal to fly through the air in the decades pre the Wright brothers, just because some armchair philosopher “proves” that it’s impossible doesn’t mean anything. The fact is that it IS allowed for within Einstein’s theory which, so far, has been proven at every juncture.

Ah, but, if time travel were possible then how come we aren’t knee deep in time travellers? Good question. Perhaps we are but they’re very good at concealing themselves or perhaps our era just isn’t very interesting. Or maybe it’s just something trivial like they just don’t have enough power to get back as far as us. None of those mean that time travel isn’t possible though.

If you can cast your mind back to the 1960s one of the “big things” of the time was “programmed learning”.

A programmed learning course was a variant of a correspondence course in that you did it largely by yourself. Where it was different was that you could also do the marking ie no tutor needed to be involved.

Now the big plus point of this was that without the tutor, the courses were much cheaper and could even be sold in bookshops as they simply consisted of a series of workbooks with the answers at the back. How they worked sounds exactly how many DVD based courses work today. You went through a series of questions, then checked the answers; if they were correct, you went on to the next session and if they weren’t the book directed you to a revision of the concepts and went over it again.

Although you can get the descendants of this type of course today, we don’t use the phrase “programmed learning” because it got a very bad press at the time. Most importantly, it was felt that the technique would only work for fairly simple subjects and, to be fair, it does work best when there is a straight yes/no response.

That all changed with the launch of the Open University in the UK which started teaching the worlds first distance learning courses in 1971 after several years of preparations.

Things have obviously changed a lot since then and now similar universities exist in all the major countries of the world and together they teach just about every subject you could imagine. And then some. To be fair, there is tutor feedback in the majority of these courses but at its heart it’s still the programmed learning approach from the 1960s and before but applied to courses at a much higher level.

In fact, so much work goes into perfecting their courses that in many instances it’s actually better to study with them than it is at a conventional university: In 2004 The Sunday Times Universities Guide said “Just four institutions — Cambridge, Loughborough, York and the LSE — have a better teaching record than the OU” which is pretty amazing.

Interestingly, the Open University has been given top ranks in 19 very different subjects: Business and management; chemistry; classics and ancient history; economics; education; general engineering; geography; geology; molecular biosciences; music; organismal biosciences; philosophy; physics and astronomy; politics; psychology; social policy and administration; sociology; subjects allied to medicine; theology and religious studies which, of course, includes some rather heavy-weight topics.