James puts a lighthearted slant on Einstein's genius
Anyone who found schooling a trial will be encouraged to know that Albert Einstein did too. In fact this German-born Nobel Prize winner, whose name has become synonymous with genius, felt so out of place in an academic institution that he left at 15 with no formal qualifications.
August 14, 2012
By thisiscornwall.co.uk
Considered one of the great scientific brains of the modern world, young Albert didn't talk until he was five either – but suddenly burst out into full sentences as if waiting until he had something weighty to say. He did. Einstein's most singular talent was cogitating upon the big questions – time,
space and gravity – and coming up with simple theories that could be proved by experimentation.
In this quirky documentary directed and produced by historian David Starkey, presenter James May employed a healthy tongue-in-cheek attitude to walk us through Einstein's private life as well as some of more significant thought processes, including his most famous equation – E=mc2 – the mass energy equivalence formula.I fear my physics teacher tried vainly to explain this theory to me before I was encouraged to drop the subject, and I'm still none the wiser; but the name and the face of its creator managed to stick.
As James acknowledged, most of us know Einstein best for iconic images of his wild, white hair and staring eyes – the inspiration for the classic "mad scientist" look employed in many a pictorial context over the last half century.As a viewer it really didn't matter whether you understood any of the science or not; the Python-esque animation and motion graphics were enough to entertain, with atom bombs and speeding trains colliding with photons and monkeys' earwax. Oh, and we learned that Einstein turned down the offer to be president of Israel and that examination of his brain after death revealed a congenital enlargement of the lobe controlling all things mathematic. Now, that, I can understand.
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