On PBS tonight: a show with powdered wigs, tight bodices, death by guillotine, unwanted pregnancies and a continuous stream of intrigue and romance. And it's not Masterpiece Theatre.
The movie Einstein's Big Idea, produced by the PBS series Nova and airing Tuesday at 8 p.m., is a grand experiment in science programming. In addition to the typical science-y stuff -- the talking heads and explanatory graphics -- this history of e=mc2 also deploys big-budget reenactments featuring professional actors, period costumes and elaborate sets.
Though it doesn't always play well as a movie, and the science sometimes takes a back seat to its melodramatic biographies, the whole of Einstein's Big Idea is greater than the sum of its parts.
By the time it's done, the two-hour Big Idea has scanned 300 years of the key moments that led to Einstein's revolutionary formula, offered an easy-to-understand flowchart of the central concepts, and provided a memorable portrait of the men and women. From Michael Faraday to Einstein, these visionaries were not afraid to poke at the boundaries of the visible world, and Big Idea demonstrates how, piece by piece, they put together a new theory about the way the universe works.
Not bad for prime-time TV.
Adapted from David Bodanis' book, e=mc2, Big Idea unfolds in chapters. We meet the determined Faraday, who was the first to describe electromagnetic forces; Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and his wife Marie Anne, who formulated the law of conservation of matter; and, briefly, James Clerk Maxwell, who determined that energy takes the shape of waves. Emile du Chatelet, one of Voltaire's lovers and the woman who brainstormed the "squared" part of Einstein's equation, makes an appearance, as does Lise Meitner, who, 33 years after e=mc2, helped develop the means to split the atom.
And we see Einstein, described here as "young, energetic, even sexy," playing violin for his girlfriend, swiveling to check out women on the street and, mostly, staring off into space.
We are supposed to imagine he's constructing big new concepts in his brain. Like most films about science, Big Idea struggles to dramatize the process of thinkers thinking. That's one of its downsides.
But, like the best science programming, Big Idea provides an overview of its subject that's clear enough for the layperson to understand. The experiments and research that served as the foundations for e=mc2 are neatly explained. As the science grows more complicated, Big Idea hustles to keep up.
As for the drama, Big Idea has its clumsy moments. Some of the reenactments are painful to watch. In Lavoisier's chapter, everyone speaks with hard-to-decipher French accents and a ghostly Lavoisier returns to his lab after being beheaded.
But even when it goes goofy, Big Idea remains provocative and effective. Its combination of science lesson and historical drama works, because the scientists' biographies are so fascinating and because the path to e=mc2 was such a dramatic one.
And, of course, the stakes were enormous. E=mc2, as science writer Peter Tyson writes at the Big Idea website, "provides the key to understanding the most basic natural processes of the universe, from microscopic radioactivity to the big bang itself."
And that's certainly a formula worth the big-budget treatment.
