The beginning and end of the universe...BBC4

[Gordon]

Episode 2. The End. We started off with Fred Hoyle, a handsome tribute, really. Had Jim been reading this thread?

Just seen the second episode via iPlayer. For a general audience quite good but left a lot of questions. What was all that wandering around at the seaside and in woodland all about? Once upon a time it was anathema for cameramen to point directly into the sun. What happened to "production values"?

Good that he described Dark Energy and Dark Matter and that they are not the same thing. Overall if there isn't enough mass in the universe so it looks like it's the Big Dark Freeze then.

Very good that Fred got his recognition for a remakable piece of insight and then persistence to get strangers to do an experiment for him!! Fascinating to think that the heavy elements depended on a quirk of carbon 13. JK did waft the famous B2FH paper but didn't really give credit to the others - the Burbidges and Fowler, Fred's great friends - that co-authored it. Good that Slipher and a couple more ladies got a mention too!

Why isn't there more science on the tele? [Don't answer that we know why].

[Bryn]

A complement?

As to Fred Hoyle, what a pity so little of the original A for Andromeda was saved for posterity.

[Gordon]

A complement?

As to Fred Hoyle, what a pity so little of the original A for Andromeda was saved for posterity.

Thanks for that pointer to Horizon it was certianly timely with the JK pairing and might help some non techies with the ideas. Good to hear scientists saying they don't know what's going on and good to see a number of ladies presenting ideas! What a lovely speaking voice and delivery Tamsin Greig has.

And yes those of the original AfA episodes is a bit sad. But then the BBC has a habit of wiping programmes. Back then in 1961 [Black and White!!] a lot more was live with recording on tape that was 2" wide running at 15ips on a huge monster machine that needed a source of vacuum! A pig to edit - no electronics back then only razor blades and stuff called EdiView. Every time an edit went through the machine it made a characteristic noise and you held your breath that it would hold and not come undone. Alternative was film but then the scanning machine to show that on TV was also a monster.

[Daniel]

Thanks for that pointer to Horizon it was certianly timely with the JK pairing and might help some non techies with the ideas.

It's the techies that need help with their ideas, according to that programme , as demonstrated tellingly by Einstein's Relativity theory saying that although Newton was empirically correct in most cases, he was just conceptually wrong. Many scientists seemed to be searching for the right way of seeing the data, as much as for data itself.

Although obviously cosmology is littered with extraordinary feats of observation as well as interpretation, it's very exciting to think that the answer to what dark energy is could be a bit of information already lying in one's brain, just waiting to be seen through the right lense. 'World is suddener than we fancy it.'

[ardcarp]

It's sad that producers' opinions of their audiences are so low that they slot in the walking-and-talking-on-location and the driving-along-from-place-to-place shots as a matter of course. I am just glad that the two episodes of The beginning and end of the universe were not as bad in that respect as they might have been. Most Horizon programmes these days include all the above plus un-related whizz-bang animations of (a) the solar system, (b) the universe and (c) the atom. Furthermore they take an hour to impart one small piece of information. By comparison the Alkhalili programme was restrained and got through quite a lot of info.

[Jazzrook]

No, nothing new, but I felt JA explained things clearly to a general audience. I missed the very start...did he even mention Fred Hoyle and the Steady State Theory?



I've long admired Jocelyn Bell, who discovered pulsars as a young researcher....and her (male) boss got the Nobel Prize for it, if I remember correctly. She does pop up occasonally on In our Time.

They called it the No-Bell Prize when Jocelyn unfairly missed out!