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 year groups, 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."
Moving clocks run slow. 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 the difference between coming home to the people you left and coming home to people who have aged without you.
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 full-year thematic modern-physics sequence with standards mapping, assessments, and rubrics. 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 tutor, the workbook, and the answer keys — enough to get all the way through without a teacher.
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 and is what you receive today; 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 C, not AP exam preparation.
Ask PATCH
Socratic with your student. Direct with 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 physics tutor 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 — it works from the Curved Horizons program itself, not the open internet, so the only material it can draw on is the course. For a tutor a child uses on their own, that’s the point: there is nothing unrelated or unvetted for it to wander into, and every answer is traceable to a chapter.
With a student, Ask PATCH is Socratic by design. On a problem it works the way a good tutor works — a question back, a hint, a step built from what the student already knows — so it helps your child reason toward the answer rather than simply handing one over. It gives the answer only after three real attempts.
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 — the per-second rate is fixed, but it accumulates every second of the voyage. A student who answers ‘23 seconds’ has read the rate as the total.”
Teachers and parent-educators get two tutors in one. Your own code is a teacher code, and on it the Socratic gate lifts: 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 only after real attempts — 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 and draws a diagram when it helps. Conversations stay on the student's own device, and a Save chat button downloads the whole exchange so a parent or teacher can read it. 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 pilot gets both: one teacher code for the parent, and a student code for each child taking part.
No accounts, no names, no email. During the pilot, the Ask PATCH cohort — the participants using the tutor — are the ones given access: each household is sent a private link when they join, with its codes built in.
Read how PATCH handles what a student types →
Ask PATCH is not linked from this page. When the pilot begins, the Ask PATCH cohort taking part is sent a private link to it — that link is how they reach the tutor.
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.
- Foundations Grades 7–9 · ages 12–15
- Concepts and reasoning, no algebra required. Correct physics throughout — simplified in depth, never in truth.
- High School Ages 14+
- Algebra, square roots, and vectors. Formulas are derived rather than issued, and every symbol is defined where it first appears.
- 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.
The pilot
Try the first seven chapters, free
About seven weeks, one chapter a week. In return we ask you to tell us honestly what works and what doesn't — your feedback shapes the finished Program. Chapter 7 is where it earns its keep. If the approach works for your students, that is where you will see it.
Homeschool families join the measured pilot: a short assessment before you start and again at the end, a one-page log each week, and a survey at the close. That before-and-after is what lets us show the Program actually teaches relativity, so the places are limited and we ask you to finish what you start.
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 suits your term.
Co-ops can take either. Join the measured pilot if each participating family enrols 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 — and we'll write when there's a way to buy the rest.
Free · Chapters 1–7 · about 7 weeks · no physics background needed