Stephen Hawking documentary

Errol Morris’ film about the life and work of Stephen Hawking.

Brilliant but unmotivated, Stephen Hawking was a 21-year-old PhD student at Cambridge when he first noticed something was wrong. He was falling down a lot, and dropping things. He went into the hospital for tests, and learned he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. The doctors told him he would gradually lose control of every muscle in his body.

“My dreams at that time were rather disturbed,” Hawking said. “Before my condition had been diagnosed, I had been very bored with life. There had not seemed to be anything worth doing. But shortly after I came out of hospital, I dreamt that I was going to be executed. I suddenly realized that there were a lot of worthwhile things I could do if I were reprieved.”

The doctors gave the young man two and a half years to live. That was in early 1963. Over the next half century, Hawking defied all odds and went on to become one of the most celebrated scientists of the era, making major contributions to quantum cosmology and the understanding of black holes. Along the way, the wheelchair-bound Hawking became a cultural icon, a symbol of disembodied intellect and indomitable spirit.

This coming Sunday, 49 years after his grim diagnosis, Hawking will turn 70. A scientific conference in his honor got underway today at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Theoretical Cosmology, and will culminate on Sunday with a public symposium, “The State of the Universe,” featuring some of the world’s greatest astronomers and physicists, including Martin Rees, Kip Thorne and Saul Perlmutter. You can watch live streaming video of the events at the official website.

To help celebrate, we present Errol Morris’s 1992 film of A Brief History of Time ..., Hawking’s bestselling book.  Morris weaves biography in with the science, interviewing members of Hawking’s family–his mother, sister and aunt–along with friends and colleagues, including Roger Penrose, Dennis Sciama and John Archibald Wheeler.

A Brief History of Time was Morris’s first film as a director-for-hire (he was recruited by Steven Spielberg for Amblin Entertainment), which created some difficulties, but Morris was pleased with the outcome. He later said, “It’s actually one of the most beautiful films I ever shot.” The film won the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary Filmmaking and the Documentary Filmmaker’s Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival.

In 1992 Morris told the New York Times Magazine that A Brief History of Time was “less cerebral and more moving” than anything he had worked on before. “This feeling of time, of aging, of mortality combined with this search for the most basic and deep questions about the world around us and ourselves,” Morris said, “is pretty persuasive stuff.”

"Einstein and Eddington"...BBC production

Andy Serkis plays Albert Einstein
and
David Tennant plays Sir Arthur Eddington

The real Albert Einstein and Sir Arthur Eddington

The BBC will air this comming Saturday a docudrama, Einstein and Eddington, on the interactive lives of Albert Einstein and Sir Arthur Eddington. This means that PBS will probably air it sometime next year--maybe...and the following review is rather glowing. It is significant that this docudrama garnered high rank for usually the docudrams are somewhat sappy and lack depth of character. I well remember the terrible one done on Einstein. The producers wish to emphasize that the focus will be on the characters and not the science. It will be interesting to see the development of the role of Eddington played by the current Doctor of Dr. Who--David Tennant.

"Einstein and Eddington film"

by

Margaret Harris

November 20th, 2008

physicsworld.com

Albert Einstein is certainly the most famous scientist of the 20th century, and probably one of the most important in all of human history. So great is Einstein’s reputation that it makes that of Arthur Stanley Eddington — a fine observational astronomer and a gifted popularizer of science — seem like footnote fodder. Yet without Eddington’s 1919 eclipse expedition, which provided early proof of general relativity, Einstein’s discoveries might have languished for years before becoming known outside the German-speaking scientific community, let alone amongst the general public.

The connections between Einstein and Eddington are the subject of a new film from the BBC, starring David Tennant of Doctor Who fame as a troubled, repressed Eddington and Andy Serkis (best known as the model for Gollum in the Lord of the Rings films) as a flawed but likeable Einstein. Einstein and Eddington airs on BBC2 on 22 November at 21:10 and is well worth a watch — if mostly for the human drama, rather than the scientific content.

For Einstein and Eddington is about physicists, not physics. True, there is a somewhat jarring attempt to explain special relativity early in the film using Einstein, his sons, and a boat, and a few passing references to Einstein inventing new symbols — much to the distress of his neglected first wife (and fellow physicist) Mileva, played by Lucy Cohu. But although the obligatory sheet-and-heavy-object explanation of general relativity (here starring Eddington’s tablecloth, a large loaf of bread, and an orbiting apple) is nicely done, the film’s main focus is the parallel lives of its protagonists during the First World War.

Both Einstein and Eddington were pacifists, and the latter was a devout Quaker. This caused both of them considerable difficulties, and their respective struggles to rise above the war’s bitterness make for some of the film’s most effective scenes. At the outset of the war, Einstein refuses to sign a letter aligning German science with the German army, despite pressure from Max Planck (played by Donald Sumpter). Eddington’s decision to correspond (surreptitiously) with Einstein despite officially-sanctioned xenophobia likewise took serious guts. Both Einstein and Eddington narrowly escaped imprisonment late in the war, although the film glosses over this bit of history.

It is difficult to fit a world war, a scientific revolution, and the complex personal lives of two protagonists into an hour and a half. There are moments when Einstein and Eddington struggles. Several minor characters are rather too obviously going to end up killed in the war, and one could, perhaps, wish for a more rounded depiction of Eddington’s establishment nemesis, Sir Oliver Lodge (Jim Broadbent).

On the other hand, the film does a fine job of depicting the ethical struggles of scientists in wartime. The use of poison gas — invented by Einstein’s Berlin colleague Fritz Haber — is a recurring theme, for example, and it is interesting to see this topic explored in the context of the First World War rather than the second.

Overall, Einstein and Eddington makes compelling drama. The parallels between Einstein overthrowing Newton and the war overthrowing pretty much everything else are finely drawn, and capable performances from Tennant, Serkis and several supporting actors should increase the film’s appeal to non-scientists. The result is a rare popularisation that brings out the human side of physicists while poking gentle fun at the popular image of Einstein as a wild-haired eccentric.

BBC Two