lucasw's Journal: Elegant Universe

Couple highlights from the first one and 1/2 episodes (too tired to stay up later...):

Newton's face on a painting turning red in embarassment.

Greene's comment to the effect of 'How much stronger are these three forces than gravity? Billions and billions of times stronger...'. I haven't seen Carl Sagan's Cosmos, but have heard numerous references to the billions and billions line (refering to the number or stars or something). This link says that he never said that line at all, it was in a parody.

i watched some of it

[SolemnDragon]

and i've read the book. THe broadcast seems to do a good job of covering the book for people who wouldn't be able to think about it as clearly when trying to read it. Repetitious, but i think that it would need to be. Simple explanations of complex ideas. So i wasn't interested enough to want to watch it all, having read the book a lot and not being big on tv to start with. But i'd recommend it to some friends who would enjoy it and understand it better than i got the book.

sol

Re:i watched some of it

[lucasw]

In the interviews with non string theory scientists, a lot more criticism came across than I remember being present in the book, and there seemed to be more anecdotes and history in there as well.

I thought some of the concepts were poorly explained or not explained at all, everything in the Quantum Cafe segment for instance, while the bit on gravity (with the sun disappearing) was pretty good. There's this tendency to say something like 'Hey, quantum stuff is really weird, lets show something weird and be