Elegant Universe TV show streaming Video

[quantumcloud]

Download the movie

Hi,

Could anyone please tell me where I might download(not stream) those movies? The link posted above no more hosts them.

Thank you
quantumcloud

 

[laserblue]

Elegant Universe

Thanks for your reply Lubo and for being civil about it.
I understand the point Greene was trying to make with the dog.
The show was o.k. It was interesting. Thank you Mr. Greene and company!

It's just that I got bad vibes from the first part. Everyone knows Newton was wrong and Maxwell was wrong and Einstein was wrong. Planck even thought Einstein was wrong about quantizing the electromagnetic field and maybe he was. Some people consider that to be the very essence of science - Continually learning we were wrong, unlearning that and relearning something new. I was wrong about Einstein's doctoral dissertation which was entitled "A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions"."It shows how to calculate Avogadro's number and the size of molecules" (http://pup.princeton.edu/titles/6272.html. ).
There was a lot of emphasis on General Relativity in Elegant Universe and a very specific interpretation of it (which is popular but not the only possible one) but nothing about Einstein's contributions to Quantum Mechanics and atomic theory.He was clearly looking for a unified theory in several directions at once in his prime.
Anyway, saying so and so was wrong adds nothing constructive for me. It's amazing that men of creative genius could ever be so right in the first place!

 

[laserblue]

The first hour

I took another look at HOUR 1 to see if perhaps I was being too harsh towards McMaster's script.
What bothers me about the first hour is the melodramatic and confrontational tone of the script.Maybe this is a good thing to get the attention of modern young upstarts but it paints a picture that isn't very faithful to reality. It's a caricature at best. The first few minutes sound like some kind of murderous horror crime story about to be told, rather than a little chat between the host and audience. (O.K, so I looked at the back of the book first.)
The portrait of Albert Einstein that is presented to a first time viewer is a very sad one. He comes across as a deluded crackpot in the first section ( A THEORY OF EVERYTHING?). The phrases used such as "...relentlessly sought...", "...a notepad close at hand...,(as though he thought of nothing else), "FURIOUSLY trying to come up with the equations...", "convinced he was on the verge of the most important discovery in the history of science..." are the way most people would describe an obsessed crackpot.The scene of someone up late at night pacing reinforces this view. Don Pendleton wrote a fictional novel "CATACLYSM" with this kind of insomniac character that wrote equations down "that would choke a computer" and was dismissed as a unified theory crackpot by the other scientists who were not from Palomar Observatory.
In the other sections of The Elegant Universe, the phrases used are confrontational such as "...squaring off with the father of gravity...", "flew in the face", "the young upstart", and "still working his day job". It makes for good docudrama one has to admit but Einstein certainly never saw it this way.At most, he made a minor modification to Newtonian Mechanics just as Lorentz made minor modifications to Maxwell's theory.
Finally, he is "left behind". A tragically sad one hit wonder who came up with RELATIVITY and nothing after that as far as one is told. He apparently wasted the last half of his life chasing an impossible dream.There is no mention of his papers on the photoelectric effect (for which he won his Nobel Prize),brownian motion, specific heat,quantization of the action of electronic orbits,stimulated emission of radiation etc.
I might agree with the idea that Einstein hit a wall in his later years, but the same problems in the foundations of physics that he worked on are still with us after a good century and still not solved to everyone's satisfaction.(See Philippe LeCorbeiller's projection into the future in CRYSTALS AND THE FUTURE OF PHYSICS in Sci.Am. 1953). As a man of creative thought, Einstein did about as much as one man could possibly do in his day. If only he could have looked at the back of the book!

 

[Ilja]

Originally posted by lumidek
I disagree that Einstein had good reasons to be skeptical about quantum mechanics as formulated by Bohr, Heisenberg, Dirac, and others. Einstein was simply wrong, even though it is easy to share his mistaken point of view. In attempts to advocate his wrong opinion, he (co)discovered some interesting physics - namely the EPR effect - but this interesting physics eventually made it even more clear that Einstein's opinions were not correct. The current interpretation of quantum mechanics might be slightly more acceptable for Einstein, but it is conceivable that he would have problems even today.

Einstein has not questioned the correctness of the predictions of quantum theory, he has questioned the completeness. I see no evidence that this position is wrong. I see also no evidence that the EPR criterion of reality is wrong.

That a more complete description is possible is proven by Bohmian mechanics. You may like it or not, you cannot deny its existence.

The violation of Bell´s inequality proves that a realistic theory
cannot be Einstein-causal. For a realist, it simply means that violations of Bell´s inequality are indirect observations of violations of Einstein causality.

 

[Starsceed]

I am trying to watch the video but it is really small, does this have to do with my computer, or is the stream supposed to be that small.

I also can't get it to play now. When i try to use realplayer I get an error saying " cannot establish connection to server" and when i used quicktime my internet just closes asking me if i want to send a report or not.

 

[ZapperZ]

TOE?

I probably should have just let sleeping dogs lie, but against my better judgement, I will jump into this one... :)

The one major disappointment, but not surprising, of The Elegant Universe (both the book and the TV documentary) is the omission of the significant point of view of the Anderson-Laughlin-Pines (ALP) "axis". It appears that, at least in the documentary, the only dessenting view was presented by Sheldon Glashow (which, BTW, was one of the rumored reasons why he left Harvard for BU - that he thought most theorists at Harvard in that field have abandoned phenomenology in favor of String, Superstring, etc...)

The ALP axis (as I would like to call it) contradicts the popular views among particle/high energy physicists, championed by Steven Weinberg, that the unification of all the 4 basic forces that includes the varification of quantum gravity, signifies a "Theory of Everything" (TOE). This point of view was alluded to several times in the documentary - that getting GR and QM to mearge would mean a TOE.

ALP - who are all condensed matter theorists and who are well-known in their own rights (Anderson and Laughlin are both Nobel Laureates) - argues that what Weinberg is arguing is not a TOE for physics/universe, but a TOE for REDUCTIONISM. A grand unified theory (GUT) would only be a complete explanation of the behavior of the universe at the elementary, single-particle scale, but not does not necessary mean that we have a complete description of all the phenomena in the universe. ALP points out that there are so-called EMERGENT phenomena that can't be explained simply by knowing all the elementary interactions and by simply adding more and more interaction - i.e. this isn't simply a matter of higher complexities. As Anderson likes to say "More Is Different!"

In his Nobel speech, Laughlin described an exercise he once did onto his poor, unsuspecting students taking a graduate class in QM.[1] He gave the students a take-home exam in which he asked the students to derive superfluidity from First Principles - meaning knowing the full set of microscopic equation of motion, derive the phenomena of superfludity. Of course, the students could not, and no one can! Superfluidity, superconductivity, fractional quantum hall effect, magnetism, phase transition, etc, etc., are all "emergent" phenomena that occur as a collective effect. These phenomena disappear, as Laughlin points out, when you take the system apart and analyze each individual component within the system. These are many-body effects that simply can't be "derived" with the individual properties as the starting point.

Condensed matter physicists have long known of this, and various principles that came out of condensed matter, such as the Higgs mechanism and the principle of broken gauge symmetry, have now been adopted in various other fields of physics, including particle/high energy. However, the fact that these emergent phenomena are different and not simply just added complexities, seem to not have been heard by many camps, especially among popular views. I think it is why those who are working in the field of quantum gravity, string, etc, still may have an impression that such unification signifies a TOE. ALP have clearly pointed out why such notion may be a fallacy.[2,3] A unified theory doesn't not imply a theory of everything.

Anyway, didn't mean to throw a wrench into the whole thing, but I feel that it should be pointed out that eminent and large number of physicists do not share the same philosophical view on GUT=TOE thingy.

Zz.

[1] R.B. Laughlin, Rev. Mod. Phys. v.71, p.863 (1999).
[2] R.B. Laughlin and D. Pines, PNAS v.97, p.28 (2000) or get it at http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/97/1/28.pdf .
[3] R.B. Laughlin et al., PNAS v.97, p.32 (2000) or get it at http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/97/1/32.pdf .

 

[Mike2]

The ALP axis (as I would like to call it) contradicts the popular views among particle/high energy physicists, championed by Steven Weinberg, that the unification of all the 4 basic forces that includes the varification of quantum gravity, signifies a "Theory of Everything" (TOE). This point of view was alluded to several times in the documentary - that getting GR and QM to mearge would mean a TOE.

Just because a particle or interaction has not be observed in the lab yet does not mean that it does not exist. A TOE would have to go further than just uniting the forces and explaining the known particles. It would have to prove from first principles that there are no other forces or particles even possible. And to prove that something does not exist requires justifying the first principles that say is does not exist. That justification cannot rely on observations to date, for that would be circular reasoning. So the only thing you're left with is having to derive physics from logic itself.

 

[ZapperZ]

Just because a particle or interaction has not be observed in the lab yet does not mean that it does not exist. A TOE would have to go further than just uniting the forces and explaining the known particles. It would have to prove from first principles that there are no other forces or particles even possible. And to prove that something does not exist requires justifying the first principles that say is does not exist. That justification cannot rely on observations to date, for that would be circular reasoning. So the only thing you're left with is having to derive physics from logic itself.

I'm not even sure if the point you are bringing up has anything to do with what I posted. I certainly have no argument in the sense that there is a separate issue in terms of justifying that there are no other fundamental forces.

What the ALP axis promotes is that, even IF we know all the fundamental forces, even if we know all the interactions, we still do not have the ability to explain everything based on such knowledge. The higher-order emergent phoenomena can't be derived that way. Thus, even if the universe has 4, 5, 6, 7, etc fundamental forces, and if they are all unified into one consistent theory, this is still not a "theory of everything", because "everything" has to include the emergent phenomena and it has already been shown that there are no one-to-one derivation of such things.

My explanation here may not be as succinct as that already presented in the references I gave.

Zz.

 

[Mike2]

Could a reduction of entropy account for these "emergent phenomena"? For all the phenomena you mention represents emerging states of order. Does particle physics account for entropy?

 

[ZapperZ]

Could a reduction of entropy account for these "emergent phenomena"? For all the phenomena you mention represents emerging states of order. Does particle physics account for entropy?

I'm not sure what or why particle physics have anything to do with this, since the emerging phenomena that I cited are all in condensed matter physics. In many of the emergent phenomena, such as superconductivity and superfluidity, the transition into those phenomena is a phase transition, typically a 2nd order phase transition. In such cases, there need not be any change in the thermodynamics state variables, or equation of state.

Zz.

 

[Tom McCurdy]

s

This is a deliberate action for the observer in order to Understand 'M-Theory'..everybody is everybody else!..or we are all Ed Wittens!

It is about OBSERVER DEPENDENCE, from where you look from?

Will (not the will from Lost-In-Space )..the REAL Ed Witten please step forward?

Like others stated it was Paul Steinhardt, I rewatched the dvd last night and this morning, and it is correctly labeled... is for some reason it mislabed in the streaming version... how did you come up with paul = ed

 

[Olias]

Like others stated it was Paul Steinhardt, I rewatched the dvd last night and this morning, and it is correctly labeled... is for some reason it mislabed in the streaming version... how did you come up with paul = ed

Ah..this thread is way past its sell by date?..I have to watch the video again, but if I placed the above statement, then it relates to a context that was relevant at the time!

I assume it to be part of an intentional 'trick' to see how observers (veiwers) perception matches their ability to take information in?..I do recall the part of the video in question was about 'Quantum-interpretations', but anyway give me a couple of hours so I can watch my video again, and I will get you the full quantified version that I was trying to convey, of course you could just e-mail the editors and find out why such an obvious mistake got past the cutting room floor?..my opinion is that it was intentional

You may incorporate this 'insight' into your lecture if you wish

 

[cronxeh]

It was so hoakey and cheesey. Not to mention that many of the things they say are completely stupid. There are plenty of intellegent people out there but no more great thinkers. Physicists have forgotten how to think and become obcessed with the math.

perhaps you should learn how to spell before you start criticizing those professionals in their respected fields?

 

[DirtyDan]

I thought the special was OK, and I personally learned a lot, but the repetitiveness did seem a little...______(fill in the blank) As for quicktime, if you had trouble watching it (I did, damn hard to get linux to cooperate with quicktime, esp. in a browser) Try downloading the videos from the posted link, they worked for me. I had trouble in windows with the video crashing my browser too, not sure what the cause. Hope that helps you

_-Dan

 

[Tom McCurdy]

Ah..this thread is way past its sell by date?..I have to watch the video again, but if I placed the above statement, then it relates to a context that was relevant at the time!

I assume it to be part of an intentional 'trick' to see how observers (veiwers) perception matches their ability to take information in?..I do recall the part of the video in question was about 'Quantum-interpretations', but anyway give me a couple of hours so I can watch my video again, and I will get you the full quantified version that I was trying to convey, of course you could just e-mail the editors and find out why such an obvious mistake got past the cutting room floor?..my opinion is that it was intentional

You may incorporate this 'insight' into your lecture if you wish

lol sorry i didn't see this earlier again my post past its due date anyway thanks for the response

 

[n0n]

Yea this is kind of a late post, but the movie was ... well wow, I thought I was watching an infomercial, 3 hours of selling a product called string theory only to be told its M-theory in the last hour. As is it's only somewhat informative, I think they could have done a better job explaining some of the ideas instead of repeating the name 100+ times (I think we got that its called string theory). Sequance is everything.

 

[DivineNathicana]

I thought that the special effects were really amazing, but there was not much information incorporated. One could pick up the gist of the theory, but it was nothing at all like the book. Plus, Greene got really annoying... I somehow got the impression that he is really conceited. Is it just me? haha

 

[misogynisticfeminist]

It indeed show us the intriguing possibilities of strings such as parellel universes and the like and I wished that it would have been a little more technical, but I think that its almost like a commercial selling ST.

 

[DivineNathicana]

Read the book - it's a lot better and a lot more technical.

- Alisa

 

[Tom McCurdy]

Indeed the book and movies only share the name in common. The movie is dumbed down quite a bit, but its effects are very trippy. Its fun to watch with friends who have minor interest in physics... although buy or rent the dvd don't huddle your friends around a streaming video. I really enjoyed talking to people about the movie, although usually their interest in string theory lasts about a week or so before they start running in fear of me mentioning membrane to them when they see me. The book is more technical and it can be read at a variety of paces. I was going snail's pace for the longest time... page/10 minutes or so taking careful notes... but I lost all them so I may finish the last bit sometime. Its very good book but right now i am streched thin speaking of which sleep would probably help me get better.

 

[Omid]

Execuse me experts may I ask what's spring theory ?

 

[mal4mac]

To see "the other side" check this resource site for Roger Penrose, it has links to a lecture of his (if you want video):

http://www.321books.co.uk/reviews/the-road-to-reality-by-roger-penrose.htm

 

[semiphor]

PBS = Public Broadcast System
It is the only commercial free, publically supported TV network in the US.

It does not offer the pablum shown on the big three commercial networks, but shows more esoteric subject matter. Yes, this show was broadcast on Tuesday night at 8:00 pm. Since I work a 6pm-6am graveyard shift I am not able to watch it live. This streaming video is great!

It's free of commercials, but not free of commercialism. They imply that they only live by what people donate - HA! They make 100's of millions on sales of their TV shows' merchandise as well as licensing rights.

That's ok - free market enterprise is what the US is about also, but it's the facade of acting like they need constant donations b/c they are a "poor" station thereby they live solely on public donations is a laugh. Greedy is as greedy does... or "Greed is good if your a socialist."

 

[semiphor]

It was so hoakey and cheesey. Not to mention that many of the things they say are completely stupid. There are plenty of intellegent people out there but no more great thinkers. Physicists have forgotten how to think and become obcessed with the math.

...totally agree with you. I thought the show was written for a 3 year old.

But they are obsessed with the math b/c they have no insight into quantum mechanics... as does no one - even Einstein was lost in the fuzz. So math is a crutch that every theorist is going to use until a spark occurs that points them in the right direction. In Einstein's day there was the ether drift, Planck's constant, and wave mechanics (J.J. Thompson noted that the cathode rays emitted in his vacuum tube behaved as if they had a mass - so he called them electrons).

So the show was cheesey, yes, but the theorists are indeed struggling with the best information they have (aka 'nothing' :) about the underlying structure of reality.

 

[Engineering_Lo]

Read the book - it's a lot better and a lot more technical.

- Alisa

I finally after an eternity, got the book and so far. It's so much more involved than what I've been watching. *sighs* makes having the dvd seem quite dissapointing now.

 

[Alex]

I have the same problems as some of the other users in this forum with watching the videos - the quicktime stream (both the regular and full-screen versions) keep crashing my browser (tried in firefox as well as ie) and the realtime stream is itsy bitsy. How are you guys viewing the quicktime version??

 

[p_branes]

Isnt a sequel to the elegant universe coming or has it already arrived?

 

[selfAdjoint]

Greene has pubished The Fabric of Reality. It isn't a sequel, exactly... It has been discussed a couple of times on PF. Do a search on the title.

 

[polyb]

Greene has pubished The Fabric of Reality. It isn't a sequel, exactly... It has been discussed a couple of times on PF. Do a search on the title.

Actually that was written a few years back by a UK physicist named David Deutsch.

 

[Alex]

I have the same problems as some of the other users in this forum with watching the videos - the quicktime stream (both the regular and full-screen versions) keep crashing my browser (tried in firefox as well as ie) and the realtime stream is itsy bitsy. How are you guys viewing the quicktime version??

Well never mind, the quicktime version only works with older versions of quicktime.

 

[selfAdjoint]

What kind of connection do you have? I use ie with cable access, and it works.

Added: I have Firefox on my home computer, to read the String Cofeetable equations. I haven't tried to view videos with it.

 

[DivineNathicana]

Actually that was written a few years back by a UK physicist named David Deutsch.

He meant The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene, and that's already out. I have it, but haven't started it yet. It looks promising.

- Alisa

 

[Magneto]

Hello everyone, I just joined the forum, it looks like it will be fun. I'm an average Joe interested in why everything in the universe is like it is.

It was nice to see the movie over the net on my own schedule (and free) since I just started reading the book. I had to view using Realplayer also since the Quicktime crashed on my PC too. It would be nice to see more programs like this available to public without someone trying to make a greedy profit from it.
A friend recommended reading The Fabric of the Cosmos as well. He said he enjoyed it more the The Elegant Universe
Maybe since the The Fabric of the Cosmos doesn't go as much into Quantum Mechanics, it won't make my head ache trying to visualize what the author is stating!

 

[Hyperreality]

Quicktime Bug

The reason why Quicktime crashes on the program is because the newest version Quicktime 6.5 has a bug.

Download any verion of Quicktime older than 6.5 will work nicely.

P.S. I don't think Apple website provide older version of Quicktime anymore, older version can be found easily using Google.

 

[peephole]

I didn't really understand what to do with what you gave us KERNELCRACKER.
I am have the same problem, and i really want to watch these. So please could u tell me what to do with what you gave us. tkx.