ARTE – SATURDAY MARCH 14 AT 8:50 p.m. – DOCUMENTARY
Allergic to mathematics, traumatized by physics, scum of science, do not zap! If you never understood anything about this story of relativity, if Einstein is for you only a face sticking out its tongue on a T-shirt, if you have never dared to open A brief history of time ((Stephen Hawking, 1988), this two-part documentary directed by Michael Lachmann and produced by the BBC is for you. Ambitious in its form and its means, learned but not boring, Einstein-Hawking, the Universe unveiled is concerned with the well-stocked brain of these two scientists and how the work of the former has been brilliantly exploited by the latter.
In the beginning there were two gifted children, one born in Ulm (Germany) in 1879, the other in Oxford (United Kingdom) in 1942. The German, who first studied physics on the fringes of food work, published in 1905 a revolutionary article: the theory of relativity deeply shakes the scientific community. We will be careful not to try to explain it: the documentary, which aims to be educational, does so in a simple and fun way, by showing bullets thrown from a stationary car, then in motion. The bullet curve seen from the outside of the car is not the same. Einstein simply discovered that time can speed up or slow down, depending on how fast you move in the Universe, and that this dilation could be felt if you travel fast enough.
Source of inspiration
Dizzying, this theory will become an inexhaustible source of inspiration for the scientific community (and obviously for fiction: Interstellar is just one of the most recent examples). Founding, this theory will not only be used by Einstein to describe the Universe and its “4 moving dimensions”, but also to write his story.
The documentary thus explains how Stephen Hawking took over the theory of relativity on the one hand, to popularize it – that is the whole purpose ofA brief history of time – on the other hand, to verify it, and thus enrich our knowledge of the Universe. And there is no shortage of concrete applications for Einstein’s work. We will learn why and how the stars die, why we say that the Universe is expanding, or what it is like a pulsar. “Fun fact”, as Sheldon Cooper would say (The Big Bang Theory), they were discovered by a young PhD student in the 1960s : It was a major event, because it made the existence of black holes, theorized by … Einstein, credible. These black holes, which continue to fascinate, are the starting point of the fascinating, but a bit more difficult, the second part of the documentary, which highlights Hawking’s work on quantum mechanics and the detection of gravitational waves.
“Revolutionary, counter-intuitive, brilliant”, the ideas of these now missing physicists continue to spur research into the cosmos. Dotted with archives, illustrated with stunning images, but above all nourished by rich, clear and sometimes moving testimonies and explanations, this film will delight science enthusiasts as novices, Cartesians as dreamers, and all those who see in the starry sky an inexhaustible source of knowledge.
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