5 Stars Documentaries (020)
The Elegant Universe (2003)
Produced by: PBS
One of the most ambitious and exciting theories ever proposed - one that may be the long-sought “theory of everything,” which eluded even Einstein - gets a masterful, lavishly computer-animated explanation from bestselling author-physicist Brian Greene, when NOVA presents the nuts, bolts, and sometimes outright nuttiness of string theory.
Also known as superstring theory, the startling idea proposes that the fundamental ingredients of nature are inconceivably tiny strings of energy, whose different modes of vibration underlie everything that happens in the universe. The theory successfully unites the laws of the large - general relativity - and the laws of the small - quantum mechanics - breaking a conceptual logjam that has frustrated the world’s smartest scientists for nearly a century.
Greene is professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, where he is one of the world’s foremost string theorists. He is also an unusually adept science explainer, whose book The Elegant Universe became a runaway bestseller and whose popular lectures pulse with string-like energy, not to mention infectious humor.*
>> List of episodes:
1. EINSTEIN’S DREAM
Program One introduces string theory and shows how modern physics - being composed of two theories that are ferociously incompatible - reached its schizophrenic impasse: one theory, known as general relativity, is fantastically successful in describing big things like stars and galaxies, and another, called quantum mechanics, is equally successful in describing small things like atoms and subatomic particles.
2. STRING’S THE THING
Program Two opens with a whimsical scene in a movie theater in which the history of the universe is run backwards to the big bang, the moment at which general relativity and quantum mechanics both come into play, and therefore the point at which our conventional model of reality breaks down.Then it’s string theory to the rescue as Greene describes the serendipitous steps that led from a forgotten 200-year-old mathematical formula to the first glimmerings of strings—quivering strands of energy whose different vibrations give rise to quarks, electrons, photons, and all other elementary particles.
3. WELCOME TO THE 11th DIMENSION
Program Three shows how in 1995 Edward Witten of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, aided by others, revolutionized string theory by successfully uniting the five different versions into a single theory that is cryptically named “M-theory,” a development which required a total of eleven dimensions.
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* Review by PBS
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