Einstein's Legacy: Modern Physics All Around You
Introducing the latest in my ever-growing list of side projects
I’ve talked a few times over the last couple of years about taking trips down to the DC area to work on something, but have been a little cagey about what exactly I was doing there. The actual finished product of that is now out in the world, though: A twelve-lecture course called Einstein’s Legacy: Modern Physics All Around You, from the Great Courses (formerly by the Teaching Company, recently rebranded as Wondrium).
The content of this, as you can probably guess from the title, is basically the same as my book Breakfast With Einstein, with the addition of a couple of topics about relativity (one each for Special Relativity and General Relativity). These are half-hour(-ish) lectures, picking up some relatively mundane feature of modern life, and discussing how it connects to exotic physics. The red glow of a heating element in a toaster is an example of the black-body radiation that led Max Planck to introduce quantum physics. The Internet-connected smartphones so many of us carry are made possible by lasers, which require the stimulated emission of photons introduced by Einstein in 1916. The smoke detectors that protect us from fire work in part using radioactive sources whose decay was first explained by a colorful physicist from Ukraine. And so on.
As with every new project, this was a different experience than anything I’ve done in the past. I’ve obviously given a lot of lectures, and I’ve done brief talking-head spots for TV shows (I find it highly amusing that this qualifies me for an IMDB page), but these are a very different format than a regular class— for which I tend to have notes, but improvise the exact words as I go, with a lot of ad-libbing— and being the only person on camera for a half-hour is a lot different than trying to generate punchy sound bites that will be edited together with other people later on.
In the end, both of these challenging aspects ended up being kind of fun (which also happens a lot with new projects). Getting the right feel for the lecture scripts was a little tricky, but once I had it, they weren’t that hard to write (it helped that I was basically adapting a book that I had already written…). And the actual recording was done reading the script off a teleprompter, which turns out to be surprisingly easy. The hardest part of the recording was remembering to speak at a measured pace— my normal conversational style runs kind of fast, and for in-person classes I compensate by stopping frequently and repeating myself a lot. Here, I had to get a smooth slowed-down take, which took a bit of effort (and frequent reminders from the director). It was also super weird when I had to review the videos— I ended up playing them back at 1.25x speed, which made me sound more like myself.
(The teleprompter also introduced a failure mode that obviously doesn’t come up with normal lectures, because it meant I didn’t have to have the whole thing down in my head before we started recording. so I would occasionally be going along and then hit a passage with a word I wasn’t ready to pronounce— for example, “…he recognized this as similar to work done by his colleagues—whoa, Russian name and Russian name. Sorry, let’s do that again.” It was really easy to back up and re-do the relevant passages, though.)
There’s a ton of design and production work in these— they had animators and designers put together some really nice visuals to go along with the text, and were very responsive to my extremely fiddly complaints with some of them. The end result came out really well, I think; if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be enthusiastic about plugging it here…
The two trips to DC were to record a pilot in the summer of 2020, and then last fall to bang out the actual lectures over the course of three days. If you watch all twelve, you’ll see I have three different shirt-and-jacket combinations, which correspond to the different days of filming. Then there were a few months of video editing and review, and now it’s finally out in the world.
Full disclosure, here, this is obviously a commercial product, and I was paid for making these. They’re obviously hoping that people will sign up for their services to see these, and so am I, because I enjoyed the process and want these to do well enough that they’ll ask me (and pay me) to do more. It’s pitched at a slightly different audience than the original book, or the kinds of things I write online, so it’s not just a “play the hits” kind of thing; and they have a lot of other very interesting video content, too. The days I was there, for example, they were recording a history series in the other studio, and I caught some really interesting bits and pieces about JFK.
Anyway, that’s the latest entry in my growing collection of projects meant to convey a bit of the excitement of physics to various audiences of non-scientists. It’s also the last of the fully realized projects in the pipeline, which means it’s time for me to really buckle down and figure out what the next thing is going to be…
There’ll be some more about this over the next week or two, as the Wondrium folks will be doing promotion, and at the very least, I’ll link to that in week-in-review posts. Here are some buttons:
And if you’d like to embrace your inner Gen X by calling me a sell-out, the comments will be open: