OT: "Elegant Universe" on PBS Tonight

zoot wrote in news:h6sspv03p07l1hscqrv8f80qltpfkconqu@

4ax.com:

Already set it :)

Zoot,

Thanks for the heads up, set the timer on the VCR.

Rich Kroboth TRA#4148 L2 METRA (Northern New Jersey)

2 hours of nothing. Get a book and really learn somthing about strings. Gary Deaver

Glad to be of service. I saw the first hour and recorded the whole thing. Some of the special effects (i.e. jumping off the building) looked like Lionheart-Dr. Who stuff, but it was a good explanation for the general public.

On 24,

• the F150 commercial was hysterical.

• how the heck did I miss Jack's symptoms?

• DB Kim has a boyfriend who is either a bad guy or going to die horribly, or possibly both.

• DB Kim did not cause WWIII by spilling her Diet Coke on her computer. That may be next week.

• Didn't we see one plot thread on West Wing last season?

Zooty

agreed. too much gloss and not enough substance.

"instead of points, quarks are made of really tiny strings"

and what are the strings made of? Energy is a quantity, not an entity.

Mass (entities) and energy are interchangable. E=mc^2. Pretty fundamental.

Brett

Which book?

Alan

Alan,

I just finished watching The Elegant Universe (named after the book, which would be a good purchase) with my wife. My in-laws watched it last night.

The program was aimed at the non-physicist.

In a lot of ways, it was an advertisement for physics. There's just enough there to intrigue a 13 year-old mind. Notice the central-casting approach: The black physicist, the woman physicist, the young hip physicist-narrator.

The program was simplified and rather short on mathematics (did anyone else think the one equation was dx=2? Turns out what I thought was a derivative was actually a 2: i.e. x=1). On the other hand, it enables the non-physicist to understand what the "hullabaloo" is about and why someone would want to know about the ultimate TOE.

Much more than what they covered would have resulted in the vast majority of viewers saying "Huh?"

Zooty.

I have not viewed the second half yet. I agree that this program is for the general public and not for the physicist. I am an Aero. E. and I have taken a physics course on special relativity, about 26 years ago. I have some companion books to PBS science programs, but they are more like picture and history books. I don't really want to read a hard core String Theory Phd. thesis, and I suspect that a companion book to The Elegant Universe would be no more informative than the NOVA program. Something well written at about the Scientific American level might be a good read. OTOH, that book might be just right.

Alan

If you had, we'd all be in that "time travel" argument again. It will be on Nov. 8th, I think.

The Elegant Universe is the book that inspired the show, not a companion book. It's a little above the typical SciAm, but you should be able to read it.

Zooty

Alan Jones wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Victoria's Secret catalog?

Hmmm.. I meant that I have not viewed the second hour of the two hours broadcast Tuesday.

Thanks, I'll look for it. I suspect it will become a popular book like "A Breif History of Time".

Alan