You may have seen some discussion in the comments of other threads about a new PBS programme entitled “Einstein’s Big Idea”. JoAnne mentioned her thoughts about it in her post last week. It’s basically a docu-drama, in the sense that they’ve written scripts, designed sets, sprinkled in extras, and generally tried to make the settings, characters, and circumstances all seem more accessible than just having a bunch of talking heads. They spend a lot of time describing and dramatising the conversations and discoveries of several other pieces of physics (conservation of mass/energy, Faraday’s electromagnetism, Maxwell’s demonstration that light is electromagnetism, etc) that lead up to the famous E=mc^2 equation. I have to say that this is a very good way of presenting this material, and overall I think it is quite successful.
Well, I’m in the middle of watching the programme right now, and several of you have already finished watching it in other time zones. I was thinking of writing an extended commentary on this programme, but then I realized that it may be less important to hear on this blog what I think in any detail, as compared to hearing what you think. So I’m going to be brief. I do have issues here and there, but they’re mostly all minor in the face of what they are trying to achieve. (Like why on earth do they go to all the effort to get the costumes, the silly accents, and the other -mostly successful- attempts at making the settings seem accessible and realistic, but then keep quoting the speed of light in stupid units that no real scientist uses!?)
On the positive side, I have several scattered thoughts and I don’t know which to mention. I’ll just say that I like the fact that they are very careful about emphasizing the role of women in the science, and try to set the record straight (in the face of how so many of these presentations commonly ignore their role in the crucial parts of the physics) by using dramatic license. Since this sort of programme is targeted a lot to schools, and since they’ll repeat it a lot over the coming days and weeks, selling DVDs, etc, the programme will be seen a lot by young people, and so this single aspect of the programme may well have significant impact on a whole generation of young girls and women, with regards pursuing physics a lot further than they normally do, for whatever reasons.
So I’m throwing open the comment area to everyone: non-scientists and scientists; physicists and non-physicists, educators and non-educators, film-makers and non-film-makers, etc. I want to know what you think of the programme. All aspects: How well did they do on the science? If you were not familiar with the science before, how did you find the explanations and dramatizations? Did the dramatic aspects help or hinder? Did the characters seem well-drawn? The conversations natural or forced? Any other things you want to talk about? Writers and film-makers, I’d like to hear from you too on all aspects that you might have a view about.
On this blog, we talk a lot about the process of bringing science from the notebook/laboratory/textbook to the people. This PBS programme is one of the biggest ever recent efforts to do this through television for this particular area of science: Fundamental Physics. So let’s hear what you thought.
Cheers,
-cvj
October 12th, 2005 at 12:20 am
I loved it, I was thrilled to see the stories of science and scientists acted out with such lavish production values. But I do have a couple of comments. First, the film makers resorted to a lot of Hollywood science cliche’s - like the rapt scientist gazing into the light as he has his Big Idea, or the big-eyed, excited experimentalists watching their experiment work convincingly the very first time.
Second, I wonder whether the film over-emphasizes the role of the individual scientist. As I understand it from reading about current physics and other sciences, scientific work is all “corporate” now, and it is groups of hundreds or even thousands, all doing their small bit, that now work on research, rather than brilliant lone individuals. Or are there still individual contributions?
Even so the film made me wish I were 35 years younger, I would want to be a physicist if I were able to, which I wasn’t back then, if that makes any sense.
October 12th, 2005 at 12:48 am
Yes, there are still individual contributions. Very much so. What the media often miss is not that we’re all chipping away as part of some big corporate entity (that’s not really what it is like), it is instead that they play up the role of the individual at the expense of everyone else…not showing that what really happens is that there is a context and a community, and a lot of ideas buzzing around at any one time, and then individuals take turns poking their heads a little higher by standing on everyone else’s shoulders. This is the part that is usually missed a lot. The shoulders. They love instead the myth of the person just dreaming stuff up out of nothing. That is what is mostly myth.
-cvj
October 12th, 2005 at 2:51 am
They love instead the myth of the person just dreaming stuff up out of nothing.
Maybe this is what “scientists think” about society, and such a early display by Sean on this subject of mystery, is a case in point.
I read Bodanis book quite a while ago and really enjoyed it then.
A while ago I found momentus occasions of individuals very early on, triggered the “lifeplan” and open up the roads that one’s interest and motivation would spark.
What do I mean here.
Well, the gift of the compass given to Einstein very early on. The mystery here, was the nature of needle in the compass and what we had seen of Faraday was enough for any of us to imagine? Did a young boy imagine it too?
No it was indeed “hidden from view” yet we know now don’t we? I used entanglement previously in Seans one liner, and the predecessor of spooky. We know better “now” don’t we?:)
So if we look back to each of our own lives what motivation lies in our experieience, that had set the course for what we shall do today? Was it whimsical, or was there some order?:)
October 12th, 2005 at 3:01 am
another “Ode” to one liner’s?
Isaac Newton famously remarked in a letter to Robert Hooke, dated 5 February 1676:
“If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
Newton was perhaps making a more personal point than the mere expression of modesty seeing that Hooke was a man of remarkably short stature.
See Clifford, it was about short people:) Even Good scientist’s of heart, perpetuate:)
October 12th, 2005 at 4:16 am
Clifford, regarding “speed of light in stupid units”, I suspect natural units weren’t quite so ubiquitous back in 1905…
October 12th, 2005 at 6:55 am
I had to check the credits at the end to see whether the show was directed by Edward D. Wood Jr.
October 12th, 2005 at 7:07 am
“keep quoting the speed of light in stupid units that no real scientist uses!?”
I haven’t seen the show, but you touch on one of my pet peeves. Isn’t things members of a group of a large and longlived profession do sort of a subculture? Why is it then that so called cultural media can not take an interest in describing it correctly?
October 12th, 2005 at 8:16 am
Dissident, we can debate that…but I’m also talking about the talking heads in the studio. The speed of light in miles per hour is just silly. But I don’t want to overstress the point.
Plato: Sure, Newton’s apparent intent is well known. It does not change the power of the analogy.
-cvj
October 12th, 2005 at 9:26 am
I tuned in right at the beginning, and the science explanations seemed pretty good. I couldn’t really take the dramatic recreations of the life of Antoine Lavoisier, though, so I switched over to the World Series of Poker on ESPN, and toggled back and forth between them for the remainder of the program.
The acting in the other sections wasn’t that bad (I liked the portrayal of a charismatic young Einstein– as one of my students put it on seeing the pciture of Einstein in 1905, “He was a pimp!”), but something about the Lavoisier bits was just horribly overdone.
October 12th, 2005 at 9:49 am
While I understand their desire to put women farther forward into the scientific picture, I think they overstated Emilie du Chatelet’s position. She agreed with Leibniz, but he is scarcely mentioned. They mention nothing of the rivalry between Newton and Leibniz over the invention of Calculus (which Leibniz published first.) This division isolated England as most of the rest of the world used the easier to understand Leibniz version of Calculus. Thus, most of France would have been on Leibniz’s side during this period. (Perhaps not in Physics, but certainly in mathematics.) Thus, many scientists would have agreed with Leibniz. It wasn’t until later was Newton given more respect for his work. Further, Willem ’sGravesande performed the experiment verifying Leibniz. Thus, all she did was publish the findings and gather together some French minds (which included Voltaire). Don’t get me wrong, she was an extraordinary person and helpful in distributing scientific knowledge, but she was a synthesizer not a creator. She was a translator and disseminator, but how far would this dissemination go?
October 12th, 2005 at 9:51 am
I _used_ to be a theoretical physicist, but now I’m a government bureaucrat also “paid to think”. I actually didn’t like it all that much, and my wife, a musician, liked it even less.
The dramatisations were _way_ over the top we thought. It was also, like your typical science-on-TV show, excruciatingly slow moving and repetitious: it could all have been said in half the time.
Also, the entire 2 hours (minus about 25 minutes for the commercials) were devoted to Einstein’s “afterthought”, E=mc^2. Nothing at all about the other great discoveries of 1905: Brownian motion, SToR, or the photoelectric effect. Just E=mc^2.
And the implication that ordinary KE (E ~ v^2) somehow “presaged” Einstein to some extent was just wierd.
Ergo, disappointing.
My 2p worth.
October 12th, 2005 at 10:08 am
[…] Read what others thought of the program at CosmicVariance. […]
October 12th, 2005 at 10:30 am
Aristotle,
I am sure if they could fit more in they would, but that probably is the future in terms of what will come out in more dramatization.
Chad, Dissident
Of course, it brought to light issues on women and I like this fact(even though I would like to kill the issue and men’s observance even in day’s “cultural” and in what I see of older men beyond baby boomers) we are reminded about men’s attitudes.
Second, it leads to a better comprehension I think on what Lavoisier was doing in terms of comparative relations “rust and decay” between the ideas of mass and energy “contained” could actually represent views established in how we see gravitational issues of events in the cosmo. What was released in the bulk. It’s presence?
Gravitational waves and the theoretcial implication of defining this energy mass, as two parts of the same thing. Just further defined, and pointing in refinement literature of reductionistic idealizations. Missing energy?
Having this historical overlay in today’s understanding is a powerful metaphor.
October 12th, 2005 at 12:28 pm
What did folks think of SLAC’s part in the show, or of our young scientists staring out in deep thought?
October 12th, 2005 at 1:09 pm
Am I the only Monty Python fan who was continuously reminded of the Mongolfier Brothers? (”Finally, we will take our place in history — just after Montesqueiu, and just before Mozart!”)
October 12th, 2005 at 8:52 pm
I will reserve most of my critique until i see the teaching guides that will be forthcoming with the classroom DVD packages. I suspect that Clifford’s comments regarding this “film’s” usage are correct in relation to motivating and stimulating classroom discussions regarding the history of scientific ideas and roles of those who created and developed them. I didn’t particularly like it as an adult viewer, finding it repetitive and, as others have said, overly dramatic without real intent and purposes. It would provide opportunities in classrooms however for students to investigate the various social and historical relations within which much of this science took place. If i were not retired i would choose to use this program with classes of soon-to-be middle school teachers; the audience for which i think this film best serves. I could see a number of lesson plans built on it, at the middle school level as well as elementary; but i just don’t think you could show it to a high school physics class without eliciting snarky and dysphemic remarks.
Overall it seemed to have been created through the same vision that brought us Jane Austen mini-series, and all those Merchant/Ivory films. It was more BBC/PBS than the crisper NOVA documentaries and dramas with which we are more accustomed. Maybe this is the intent of the new CPB, to ascribe these sort of “miracles” of scientific revelation to the ephemera of life (where in the hell were the abject and complete failures of experiments?). If that is the case we should all feel a touch of despair.
October 12th, 2005 at 9:34 pm
DouglasG,
Wasn’t it Margaret Somerville who helped bring Leibniz and his continental successor’s calculus to England with her famous translation of the text? She was more than just a translator, but her impact on the English speaking world of math users is still felt today.
October 12th, 2005 at 10:34 pm
97% drama (lavishly produced), 3% science. Not the ideal proportions.
Young Einstein casting and makeup seemed dead on.
I liked that it pointed out the greatest manifestation of Einstein’s genius — his ability to simply ignore the pressures of bourgeois life (finances, marriage, career, family) in order to fully focus on physics.
October 13th, 2005 at 9:17 am
Kaleberg,
I think you’re thinking of Mary Fairfax Somerville. She did write several mathematical books, but I don’t believe she brought Leibniz’s Calculus to England. The English believing that Leibniz plagerized Newton’s work, refused to recognize it. Since Newton’s work was a bit more esoteric and didn’t lend itself to further study, England fell mathematically behind the rest of Europe. That is why most of the big names in Mathematics of the time, Euler, Cauchy, the Bernoullis are from the continent rather than England. This was true for more than 100 years after the death of both men. She did bring some continental math to England, but nothing with Leibniz’s name on it. Physical Geography was her most influencial book, and it was used as a text book for nearly 100 years. She did translate Laplace’s Celestial Mechanics which was an important book in astronomy.
Don’t get me wrong, systhesis is a very important job. Bringing together ideas from varying sources helps spur other ideas. Thus, the publishing and translation of works is an important task. However, in context with this show, they put more emphasis on her putting things together than the people who actually did the work. Further, was there any evidence that Einstein had access to her work? Wouldn’t he have gotten Leibniz’s work directly? Wouldn’t he have access to the experimenter’s published articles? I think she had little if any roll, but they wanted to put her in.
Also, they totally undercut Einstein’s wife’s roll. She had a huge influence on Enstein’s work, but they didn’t want to lessen his achievements by giving partial credit to her. They robbed Peter to pay Paul.