History Channel gets another one right...

[onager]

In between non-history crap like Ax Men and Ass Road Truckers, and all the woo-woo shows...

This (Sunday) morning, History Channel ran a 2-hour show simply called Einstein. I checked and did not see any repeats coming up, so I guess HC just used this as filler in the Sunday morning programming graveyard.

I was expecting a general bio-for-dummies-like-me, but it was less (and more) than that. It only dealt with Einstein's early life, then his work on the the Special and General Theories of Relativity.

Jebus. That even sounds boring to me.

Trust me, this is NOT boring. A good bit of time is spent on the astronomical expeditions that tried to prove Einstein's theories...which required a total eclipse of the sun, and a lot of Indiana Jones type exploring.

One expedition scooted off to the Crimea in the spring of 1914, and missed a fairly big news story a few weeks later - the outbreak of World War I. This was a team of German astronomers, now stuck in enemy territory. With BIG telescopes and cameras. They were promptly arrested by the Russian army.

Nope, not boring at all.

You also get a lot of academics expressing that "wonder of science" we talk about so much in this forum. One woman looks absolutely rapturous as she describes seeing her first total eclipse. "My breath stopped..."

It's also noted that Einstein became a huge popular celebrity (who had several beers named after him, for one thing). Even though only a few people on Earth could understand WTF he was talking about. (Those academics do a great, Feynmann-type job of explaining his theories. They are also a very multi-disciplinal bunch - physicists, astronomers, science historians, etc.)

Oh, and he came up with one of the most creative divorce settlements in history. If you don't already know about it, track down the show and you'll see what it was. :-)

[lazarus]

1. I saw that a while back

great show. It's a shame History Channel can't do that all the time.

[SkyDaddy7]

2. Next week the "Life" series starts on the Science Channel

...Looks like it will be good. Especially if you have an HD set-up!!

[lazarus]

3. Oh yeah

We're getting Planet Earth in blu-ray.

[SkyDaddy7]

4. You should really like it...

I could watch it over and over!

[Orrex]

5. I'm always amazed when these networks air the programming that they're supposed to air

There's one called, I believe, the "Science Channel." It might be the Discovery Science Channel or maybe not, because they all kind of blur together. Anyway, the one I'm thinking of is the font of wisdom currently bringing us "Mantracker," in the name of science.

However, they've been running a number of really excellent, in-depth programs about the solar system and the respective planets, with nary a mention of UFOs or government conspiracies, and they aren't even dwelling on disasters or cataclysms any more than necessary (as contrasted with every episode of The Universe that I've ever seen, each of which involves "stellar explosions" or "black hole doom" or the like).


Of course, it would be better if shows like these were the norm, and we had to track down rare programs about pyramid-building aliens, but in the brain-dead wasteland of cable programming, I'll welcome them when I find them.

[Warpy]

6. Right, it was a fascinating program

I hope it airs sometime I can give it my full attention, sometime outside that Sunday morning graveyard of Nostradumbass, the babble, and the 2012 end of the world.

Odd, I never think to check History on weekends any more.