Moving at the Speed of Creativity - The Elegant Universe

The Elegant Universe

Published by Wesley Fryer in movies, philosophy, science on October 9th, 2005

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I watched part 1 of Brian Green’s NOVA special “The Elegant Universe” last night. What an amazing film and an engaging topic.

I have an admission to make. I love physics. I did not major in science in college– but some of my favorite courses in high school were Engineering Physics, Atmosphere & Space Science, and Physical Geology. I didn’t care much for chemistry, mainly because in high school my teacher should have retired about 10 years before I took his class– and in college I knew enough about the subject to qualify for the “one year in one semester” version of chemistry that was too much content too fast for me at the time– but the ideas of special relativity and quantum mechanics have still always intrigued me. Later in college I read most of both “The Tao of Physics” by Fritjof Capra and “The Dancing Wu Li Masters : An Overview of the New Physics” by Gary Zukav. These ideas were and are complex and BIG, but very exciting and intriguing to me, despite my status as a declared “fuzzy major” in academe.

This film is based on Brian Green’s book “The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory,” which I have not read yet. I may pick up a copy.

The film does a superb job of helping viewers understand the life work of Albert Einstein in context. I knew a bit about both relativity and quantum mechanics, but did not know how relativity relates to “space-time” or how later in life, Einstein basically ignored the work of the quantum mechanics physicists who were painting a picture of the world much less “elegant” and simply probabilistic which Einstein did not want to accept.

String theory is something I had heard about before watching “The Elegant Universe,” but not really understood. And I still just understand a bit– but references from past physics courses to multi-dimensions and space-time make a lot more sense now. From what I perceive so far, it sounds like string theory is not testable by observations and experimentation. So the line between philosophy and physics is very thin here.

Great stuff! I highly commend this film to anyone interested in better understanding theories about the ultimate nature of the universe.

The PBS website for “The Elegant Universe” actually includes all 3 hours of the show video online for viewing. Very cool. The interactive animations and demonstrations are also superb.