Independent Study Movies
This video explores the
history behind the discovery of E=mc². Einstein's predecessors and
contemporaries--such as Michael Faraday, Antoine Lavoisier, and Lise
Meitner--played an important role in this scientific revolution. With Aidan
McArdle and Shirley Henderson as Albert Einstein and his first wife, this
docudrama shows how his theory fits into the grand scheme of science.
The Special Theory of Relativity
Additional Notes on the Video
This group of 12 computer-animated videos illustrates Einstein's monumental
contributions to the study of light. Showing how rudimentary ideas of
material wave motion yielded to more advanced concepts of electromagnetic
waves, the program details Einstein's conclusions about the speed of
light and his conception of time - which given his findings on mass energy,
proceeds according to variable frames of reference.
Relativistic thought experiments, conveyed through animation, demonstrate
simultaneity, time dilation, length contraction, and relatavistic mass.
This is the story of his decades-long battle to prove his Theory of General
Relativity amid the violence of war and his tumultuous personal life.
In 1907, Einstein
challenged two centuries of scientific belief and Sir Isaac Newton with a
mind-boggling theory: Gravity is not pulling you down. Instead, massive
bodies like the Sun and the Earth are bending space and time around you,
pushing you down. He then had to prove his theory to unconvinced scientists.
He figured that light from a distant star, as it passes right next to the
sun and the sun’s gravitational field, will be bent. And the only way to see
that would be to photograph a total solar eclipse.
Fiercely competitive
astronomers raced each other to exotic locations to see if Einstein was
right… or wrong. Hardships, weather, and war foiled their expeditions until
1922 when the photographic proof was clearly, and without a doubt, captured.
It launched Albert Einstein as a global icon celebrated around the world.
Stephen Hawking and the Theory of Everything
Brian Greene: The Elegant Universe, Part 1
Brian Greene: The Elegant Universe, Part 2
Leonard Suskind discusses his The Cosmic Landscape Book