The idea
One chapter. Three levels.
Every student reads the same chapter. What changes is how far the physics is taken. A twelve-year-old and a calculus student work from the same scene — so a mixed-age household, a co-op with three grade levels, or a class with a wide spread all teach one story instead of three curricula.
I have spent years watching capable people talk themselves out of hard things before they begin — learners who decided a subject was simply “not for them,” who mistook feeling intimidated for being incapable. The Einstein Field Equations look like a wall of symbols. So does a first job, a diagnosis, a business plan. Most walls are not as solid as they look.
What I wanted to give young readers is not a stack of facts about spacetime, but a habit of mind: that a seemingly impossible problem becomes manageable the moment it is broken into parts that can be understood, and then solved one piece at a time. Physics turned out to be the perfect place to practice because relativity feels impossible — until, piece by piece, it isn’t.
Every chapter teaches real, rigorous physics, and every chapter is really teaching something larger: how to think. If a learner finishes it having learned that “beyond comprehension” usually just means “not yet explained clearly enough,” then the physics will have done its work — and so will I.
— Alan Lasker, from “A Letter from the Author” in the STEM Program
The course itself runs one thread — reasoning, models, reference frames, motion, gravity, relativity, orbital mechanics, black holes, spacetime, and the ethics of what people do with what they know. Physics outside that thread, such as electricity and thermodynamics, appears only where the story calls for it, so alongside a general-physics text this runs as a complement rather than a replacement.
Here is Chapter 7, on time dilation, at each of the three levels.
"So, it's not just speed. It's the shape of the trip."
"That's the part people miss."
A moving clock runs slower than one sitting still beside you. Not because the clock is broken — time itself passes differently. Of two twins, the one who leaves, turns around, and comes back has aged less than the one who stayed. Both felt perfectly normal the whole time.
The faster she goes, the wider the gap. At the speeds of cars and airplanes the difference is far too small to notice. At the speeds the Odyssey travels it is real but still small — minutes over a voyage of years. Speed is only half of it: a clock close to a black hole also runs slower than one far away, and that is where the gap grows wide enough to matter.
Time dilation follows from a single stubborn fact: light travels at the same speed for every observer, however they are moving. Trace a light pulse bouncing inside a moving clock and the arithmetic forces the result.
Δt = γ Δt′ γ = 1 / √(1 − v²/c²)At everyday speeds γ is indistinguishable from 1, which is why nobody notices. At 0.9c it is about 2.3 — one year aboard the ship, 2.3 years at home.
One postulate does the work: the spacetime interval between two events is the same in every inertial frame. Everything after it is bookkeeping forced by that.
ds² = c²dt² − dx² = c²dt′² − dx′²A word on signs: here the timelike interval is taken positive, so a clock’s proper time obeys ds² = +c²dτ². The opposite convention, ds² = −c²dt² + dx² — the one most general-relativity texts use — is equally valid and merely flips every sign below; the physics is identical.
Evaluate it in the frame where a clock is at rest. There dx′ = 0, so the whole interval is carried by the clock’s own elapsed time — its proper time τ:
ds² = c²dτ²Now read the same interval in a frame where that clock moves at speed v, so dx = v dt. Setting the two evaluations of ds² equal and solving:
c²dτ² = c²dt² − v²dt² = c²dt²(1 − v²/c²) dτ = √(1 − v²/c²) dt → dt = γ dτ , γ = 1 / √(1 − v²/c²)γ is not a formula to memorize; it is the factor you are forced to introduce to keep ds² invariant. Time dilation is the immediate consequence — a moving clock’s proper time τ lags coordinate time t by γ.
The twin paradox is then calculus on worldlines. Proper time elapsed along any path between two events is the integral
τ = ∫ dτ = ∫ √(1 − v²/c²) dtThe stay-at-home twin is inertial, v = 0, so her integral is simply τ = T, the coordinate time. The traveler carries v > 0, and since √(1 − v²/c²) < 1 her integrand is everywhere smaller — the integral comes up short. The straight worldline maximizes proper time between two events; the bent one logs less. Her turnaround is a real, felt acceleration that marks which twin is non-inertial and breaks the symmetry — but the age gap is the difference of these two integrals, not the acceleration itself.
Who it's for
Built to work in more than one kind of room
The STEM Program was written for anyone teaching physics to a student who would rather be reading a novel — whether that is one child at a kitchen table or thirty in a classroom.
Homeschool families
Siblings of different ages read one book and work at their own levels. The Program guide assumes you are learning alongside them.
Classroom teachers
A thematic modern-physics sequence built to fill a school year: 31 chapters at roughly one a week, with the heavier chapters taking two. Standards mapping, assessments, and rubrics throughout. Differentiate by level without preparing separate lessons.
Co-ops and micro-schools
One text for a mixed group. Meet weekly on a chapter, then let each student go as deep as they are ready to go.
Independent learners
A student working alone has the workbook and the answer keys — enough to get all the way through without a teacher. Ask PATCH is separate: during the pilot Ask PATCH goes only to the families in the Ask PATCH cohort.
“Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking.”
What you teach from
A novel, and everything needed to teach it
The story does the motivating. The teaching materials do the rest — written for an adult who is learning the physics alongside the student, not one who already knows it.
The novel
A family, a crew, a ship's mind called PATCH, and a black hole that does not care what anyone believes about it. The STEM Program teaches physics through the novel. Volume One covers Chapters 1–31; the pilot includes Chapters 1–7. Chapters 32–52 are in development.
Leveled teaching guides
The same chapter worked out at Foundations, High School, and Advanced depth, with the physics named plainly and the derivations shown in full.
STEM Program guide
Plain-English explanations with complete answer keys, chapter by chapter. Written on the assumption that you may not have taught physics before and would rather not pretend otherwise.
Student workbook
Worksheets and concept checks tied to each chapter, at the level you have chosen. Problems drawn from the situations the crew is actually in.
Assessments
Chapter checks and longer assessments, with rubrics — usable as homework, as a co-op session, or graded for a transcript. Mapped to NGSS where it applies.
Glossary
Every term the book uses, defined at each level — so "geodesic" means something usable whether the reader is twelve or twenty.
Standards crosswalk
A chapter-by-chapter map to NGSS and AP Physics — which standards each chapter meets, and where the story carries students past the standard sequence into relativity and the physics of the black hole itself. The crosswalk shows alignment; the Advanced level is enrichment beyond AP Physics, not AP exam preparation.
Ask PATCH
It explains to your student. It answers you.
In the novel, PATCH is the ship's mind — the onboard artificial intelligence of the starship Odyssey, known formally as Predictive Adaptive Tendencies for Crew Harmony, a joke of Raj's during training that stuck. It learns the crew's habits, their stress patterns, even their silences. The book calls it a mechanical conscience and a sleepless sentinel.
In the STEM Program, PATCH is that same character turned into an AI assistant your student can ask anything — and it answers from the Program's own text, citing the chapter it drew from.
That scoping is the safety design. PATCH is a closed loop in the sense that matters: it retrieves from the Curved Horizons program itself and answers from that text, citing the chapter it drew from. It is instructed to decline anything outside the course and steer back — ask it who the 35th president was and it tells you that is outside the program and offers you a physics question instead. For an AI assistant a child uses on their own, that boundary is the point, and every answer is traceable to a chapter.
With a student, Ask PATCH explains. Ask it what a geodesic is, or why a clock near a black hole runs slower than one far away, and it answers properly and at your child's level straight away — then asks one question back, to check the idea landed. Ask it how to approach a problem and it teaches the method in full, works an example of its own numbers, and hands your child's problem back for them to try.
There is one thing it is built to hold back: the answer to a problem your child has been assigned, named by its number (Activity 7.2, problem 3), and it will not hand that over on the first ask. There it works the way a good tutor works — a question back, a hint, a step built from what they already know — and it gives the answer once they have genuinely tried — as soon as they have made a start and ask to be told, or, on an assigned problem, after two honest “I don’t know” replies. If your child says the work is for review or already handed in, that does not apply and PATCH walks the full solution. That is the whole of the withholding, and it is narrower than most people expect. During the pilot, a problem typed in without its number may be answered directly, so if you want PATCH to hold the answer back, have your child give the activity or problem number.
A student asks: “What's the answer to Activity 7.2?”
PATCH: “Let's get there together. Odyssey loses about 23 seconds a year — what would you multiply that by to cover the whole voyage?”
A teacher asks the same thing:
PATCH: “23 s/yr × 17 yr ≈ 391 s ≈ 6.5 minutes. The Instructor Note flags what students miss: 23 seconds is the loss for one year, and it adds up over every year of the voyage. A student who answers ‘23 seconds’ has read the yearly rate as the total.”
“Won’t this just make my child lazy?”
A fair concern is that an assistant that answers on demand will do a child’s thinking for them. We tackled this issue head-on, and the answer turns on the kind of question a child asks.
A question about an idea is answered at once and in full. Why does a clock near a black hole run slower than one far away? What is a geodesic? What happens three chapters ahead? PATCH explains at the child’s level, draws the figure, and asks one question back to check that the idea has landed. A practice problem your child makes up or finds elsewhere is treated the same way and worked in full. Curiosity is never rationed, and wanting to know more is never treated as cheating.
A problem your child has been assigned is different. When your child names an activity, worksheet or assessment problem from the Program (Activity 7.2, problem 3, for example), PATCH does not simply hand over the answer. It works the way a good tutor works: a question back, a hint, a step built from something your child already understands. It gives the answer once your child has genuinely tried: as soon as they have made a start and ask to be told, or after two honest “I don’t know” replies. Your child still reaches the answer, but reaches it by doing the work.
During the pilot, Ask PATCH goes only to the students offered it: half of the students will use the assistant.
What we can claim, and what we cannot. We can tell you how the assistant is built and what it will not do, and you can hold us to that. We cannot yet tell you what it does to a child’s curiosity over seven chapters because nobody has measured it. The January pilot is how we find out: half of the students use the assistant and half do not, and the comparison is reported whichever way it comes out.
And it draws. Ask about a geodesic, an orbit, a light cone or a pair of reference frames and PATCH answers with a labeled figure as well as words — it does this on its own, without being asked — and it will draw anything else on request, at any point in a conversation. In a subject whose ideas are literally shapes, being shown one is often the moment it lands.
Teachers and parent-educators get two assistants in one. Your own code is a teacher code, and on it the holding-back lifts entirely: direct answers, plus the Instructor Notes, worked solutions, pacing, and the Quick Teaching Plans — so the tool that makes a student think can also answer your own question at ten at night. A Viewing as button in the top bar drops that same code into the student view, and you get exactly what your child gets — the guiding questions, the hints, the answer once they have really tried — so you can preview a lesson, model how to ask a good question, or just watch the method work. The code sets the mode, not the conversation: a student code has no such button, and telling PATCH you are a teacher unlocks nothing. The switch only runs the one way.
It teaches at whichever level the student is working in. Where a parent has opted in, the running conversation is kept for thirty days so that a parent or teacher can review it. History will open in the assistant, to read the conversation there or download a copy of it. Each day’s record is deleted automatically thirty days after it is made. Codes can be issued to one student or to a whole class, and each one is issued as either a student code or a teacher code. A family in the Ask PATCH cohort gets both: one teacher code for the parent, and a student code for each child taking part. Review copies and at-home copies do not carry Ask PATCH access during the pilot.
No accounts, no names, no email. During the pilot, the Ask PATCH cohort — the participants using the assistant — are the ones given access: each household is given its codes when they join, and a code is typed once on each device the family uses.
Read how PATCH handles what a student types →
Ask PATCH is not linked from this page during the pilot.
A note on Leo
The student who sees it first is the one they wrote off
Leo Carter is ten, the youngest aboard the Odyssey, and autistic. He is not the comic relief and he is not a lesson in kindness. He is repeatedly the first person on the bridge to see the physics — not because he has been taught more, but because his own mind runs to shapes and paths more than to words.
Families who have been told their child is slow, or distractible, or not a science kid, tend to notice this quickly. So do the children.
Not a guess — he'd seen it in the bend of the line, the way he saw the things other people had to work at. On Earth they had called him slow and limited. They had put him in the back of rooms. None of them had ever watched him do this.
Choosing a level
Where your student starts
Pick by what a student can already do with mathematics, not by school year or grade placement. Moving up a level later means re-reading nothing — the story is the same. In a class or co-op, different students can sit at different levels in the same room. The three levels differ in how long they run and how much time they ask for. Foundations and High School run a full semester; Advanced runs a full year. The hours below are per week.
- Foundations Grades 7–9 · ages 12–15
- Concepts and reasoning, no algebra required. Correct physics throughout — simplified in depth, never in truth. A full semester, about 3 hours a week. Four sessions of roughly 45 minutes each week. Used alongside your existing science, not in place of it.
- High School Ages 14+
- Algebra, square roots, and vectors. Formulas are derived rather than issued, and every symbol is defined where it first appears. A full semester, about 4 hours a week. Five or six sessions each week — a daily elective. This level is the graded course spine.
- Advanced Calculus-based · invariants and four-vectors
- Calculus where the physics calls for it. Invariants, four-vectors, and the reasoning behind results rather than the results alone. A full year, about 6 hours a week. Advanced students work the High School spine and the calculus-based extension on top of it. This is the largest commitment of the three.
After the pilot
What the Program costs
The pilot is free. That does not change, and nothing below applies to it. The Program is estimated to go on sale in January 2027. Say how you teach and how many students you have, and the price works itself out.
Everything is a one-off purchase. Ask PATCH is included for the first year, and the figure beside it is what a further year would cost if you want one.
What every licence includes the same in all of them
- The novel, all fifty-two chapters
- The STEM Program, with answer keys and teaching notes
- The Student Edition
- The worksheets and the assessments
- The glossary and the standards crosswalk
- Ask PATCH, the AI assistant, for the first year
Volume One, chapters 1 to 31, arrives when you buy. Volume Two, chapters 32 to 52, is expected by the end of February 2027 and costs nothing further.
Volume One is finished and arrives when you buy it. Volume Two is expected by the end of February 2027 and costs nothing further.
Nothing expires. The course is yours to keep and to teach again, and no part of it depends on Ask PATCH. The assistant is the only thing that renews, and only if you want it.
Pilot families pay half, permanently, on whichever licence they need — from the same day as everyone else.
The Program can be reserved now. Put yourself on the list — no money, and no commitment of any kind. We write to you when it goes on sale.
The pilot
Try the first seven chapters, free
Your family keeps the first seven chapters of Curved Horizons — the novel, the Program with its answer keys and teaching notes, the Student Edition, the worksheets and the assessments. Free, and yours to keep whatever happens afterward. Chapter 7 is where it earns its keep. If the approach works for your students, that is where you will see it.
What it costs you. One chapter a week for seven weeks, then an assessment week. Three to six hours a week, depending on the level your student works at — the same hours you already spend on science, not extra ones. The same short assessment at the start and at the end — about 30 minutes each, closed book — a one-page log each week, and a short survey at the close. That is the whole of what we ask, and it is what lets us show whether the Program actually teaches relativity.
Why it is free. I spent a forty-year career building businesses rather than teaching, and this is the giving-back part of my life. I am the father of two adult children on the autism spectrum, and a good deal of what this Program does with different kinds of minds comes from home rather than from research. There is no company behind Curved Horizons looking for users, no advertising, and no subscription waiting at the end. I am paying for all of it myself.
Everything in the pilot is free of charge. All of it — the novel, the Program with its answer keys and teaching notes, the Student Edition, the worksheets, the assessments and Ask PATCH. Nothing is held back, and there is nothing to pay at any stage of the pilot.
What taking part earns you. The Program is estimated to go on sale in January 2027 at $249. Families who take part receive two things. The complete novel, at no cost, at the conclusion of the pilot — not the seven chapters of the pilot, the whole book. And the full STEM Program at half the published price, permanently, on whichever licence they need — $124.50 for a household — with Ask PATCH included, from the same day as everyone else and on the same terms.
The Program runs to fifty-two chapters. Volume One is finished and is delivered when you buy. Volume Two is in production and is expected by the end of February 2027, at no further cost to anyone who has bought the Program.
When it runs. The January pilot begins the week of January 11, 2027 and runs the seven chapters through to early March. It is a measured study: half of the students use the assistant and half do not, so the difference it makes can be measured. Applications close on November 30, 2026. Every family receives the novel, STEM Program, Student Edition, worksheets and assessments, and keeps them afterward. The October group is closed.
Classroom teachers get the same seven chapters as a review copy — the novel, the Program, the workbook, the worksheets and the assessments — with no logs and no testing. One short feedback form at the end, whenever it suits your semester.
Co-ops can take either. Join the measured pilot if each participating family enrolls separately; take the review copy if you would rather run it as one group.
Not homeschooling, but want to use it at home? Ask for the same seven chapters — nothing to report back. To buy the rest when it is published, put your name on the list — no money, no commitment.
Free · Chapters 1–7 · about 8 weeks · no physics background needed