{"id":3165,"date":"2008-11-18T07:45:18","date_gmt":"2008-11-18T07:45:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/11\/18\/einstein-on-tv\/"},"modified":"2008-11-18T07:45:18","modified_gmt":"2008-11-18T07:45:18","slug":"einstein-on-tv","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/11\/18\/einstein-on-tv\/","title":{"rendered":"Einstein on TV"},"content":{"rendered":"

The History Channel ran a two-hour program on Einstein<\/a> last night. I had meant to plug this in advance, but got distracted by the Screamy Baby Fun-Time Hour yesterday, and didn’t have time to post.<\/p>\n

The show restricted itself more or less to the period from 1900, just before his “miracle year” in 1905, to 1922 or so, when Einstein received his Nobel Prize. This was his most fertile period, scientifically, and they did a fairly comprehensive job of covering his life during this time, including his struggles for acceptance and his complicated personal life.<\/p>\n

There were, of course, some distracting elements, as with any show of this type. On the whole, though, it was well done. I’m mostly going to complain about the parts that bugged me, though.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The show follows the standard conventions of the form, mixing talking-heads footage of modern scientists and historians with archival footage and photographs. Happily, Einstein is recent enough, historically, that they didn’t feel the need to do hokey re-enactments of important moments in his life, restricting themselves to the Ken Burns slow-pan thing until the story got to a point where it was reasonable to show newsreel footage of Einstein. The talking-heads segments had some inexplicable moments of hip and edgy odd-angle camera work, though, zooming in on odd parts of the speakers faces.<\/p>\n

They had a very good array of talking heads, including Walter Isaacson (author of last year’s highly regarded Einstein: His Life and Universe<\/cite>), Thomas Levenson (author of Einstein in Berlin<\/cite> on the history side, and blogdom’s own Clifford Johnson<\/a> and the ever-popular Neil deGrasse Tyson to help with the science. The talking of the heads was well done, but for me it was hampered by three distracting problems that might not affect anyone else:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Walter Isaacson looks and sounds exactly<\/strong> like Union’s lacrosse coach.<\/li>\n
  2. Thomas Levenson looks and sounds a bit like William Petersen of CSI<\/cite> fame<\/li>\n
  3. There was far too much Michio Kaku, something about whom annoys me to no end.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Scientifically, I thought they did a very good job, but they only told part of the story. They mentioned all four of the 1905 papers, but after that, they talked about nothing but Relativity. Now, granted, Relativity is Einstein’s greatest theoretical achievement, and I understand the need to pare things down to a single main thread for dramatic purposes, but it wasn’t the only thing he worked on, despite several direct statements to the contrary. In fact, at the very time when the show talks about him being totally obsessed with Relativity to the exclusion of all else, he was also writing pioneering papers on the physics of radiation, as discussed by Dan Kleppner in Physics Today<\/cite><\/a> a few years ago (illicit PDF available here<\/a>, for non-subscribers).<\/p>\n

    They also glossed over the story of the photoelectric effect, which is a shame for two reasons. First, they missed out on a good scientific story, in Millikan’s tests of the theory (which has some interesting parallels to the eclipse-picture story they did tell– I’ll say more in another post). More importantly, though, it makes for a really odd ending to the piece, when Einstein finally gets the 1921 Nobel Prize<\/a> (which, inexplicably, they put in 1922) for the photoelectric effect. They make it sounds as if this were some total afterthought, thrown in there as a snub to Relativity, but in fact, Einstein’s work on the photon theory of light was well worth a Nobel in its own right.<\/p>\n

    Anyway, those are quibbles that probably wouldn’t matter to most people (unless you, too, happen to work in quantum optics and know Union’s lacrosse coach). On the whole, it was a well-done program, and did a nice job of highlighting and explaining Einstein’s scientific accomplishments, and putting them in context. If you didn’t catch it last night, I recommend watching it in reruns.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The History Channel ran a two-hour program on Einstein last night. I had meant to plug this in advance, but got distracted by the Screamy Baby Fun-Time Hour yesterday, and didn’t have time to post. The show restricted itself more or less to the period from 1900, just before his “miracle year” in 1905, to… Continue reading Einstein on TV<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,7,37,11,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-physics","category-pop_culture","category-science","category-television","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3165"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3165\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}