The Mechanical Universe...And Beyond is a 52-part telecourse, filmed at the California Institute of Technology, that introduces university level physics, covering topics from Copernicus to quantum mechanics. The 1985-86 series was produced by Caltech and INTELECOM, a nonprofit consortium of California community colleges now known as Intelecom Learning, with financial support from Annenberg/CPB. The series, which aired on PBS affiliate stations before being distributed on LaserDisc and eventually YouTube, is known for its use of computer animation.
Overview Produced starting in 1982, the videos make heavy use of historical dramatizations and visual aids to explain physics concepts. The latter were state of the art at the time, incorporating almost eight hours of computer animation created by computer graphics pioneer Jim Blinn along with assistants Sylvie Rueff and Tom Brown at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Each episode opens and closes with bookend segments in which Caltech professor David Goodstein, speaking in a lecture hall, delivers explanations "that can't quite be put into the mouth of our affable, faceless narrator". After more than a quarter century, the series is still often used as a supplemental teaching aid, for its clear explanation of fundamental concepts such as special relativity.
The bookend segments featuring Goodstein were specially staged versions of actual freshman physics lectures from Caltech's courses Physics 1a and 1b. The organization and the choice of topics to emphasize in the television show reflect a then-recent revision of Caltech's introductory physics curriculum, the first total overhaul since the one represented by The Feynman Lectures on Physics almost two decades earlier. While Feynman generally sought contemporary examples of topics, the later revision of the curriculum brought a more historical focus:In essence, the earlier Feynman course had sought to make physics exciting by relating each subject, wherever possible, to contemporary scientific problems. The new course took the opposite tack, of trying to recreate the historical excitement of the original discovery. For example, classical mechanics—a notoriously difficult and uninspiring subject for students—is treated as the discovery of "our place in the universe". Accordingly, celestial mechanics is the backbone of the subject and its climax is Newton's solution of the Kepler problem.Episode 22 solved the Kepler problem — that is, demonstrating that an inverse-square law of gravity implies that orbits are conic sections — using a variant of the Laplace–Runge–Lenz vector, though not by that name.
Production details The room seen in the bookend segments is the Bridge lecture hall at Caltech. Many of the extras were students from other schools, and the front rows of the lecture hall were deliberately filled with more women than would have typically been seen at Caltech lectures. The TV production team added fake wood paneling to the lecture hall so that it would more closely resemble that seen in the show The Paper Chase. Later, the Caltech physics department was sufficiently impressed by the result that panels were installed permanently. Many seats in the lecture hall had to be removed in order to make room for the camera track and studio lights. To cover this, additional reaction shots of a full lecture hall were filmed later, so that the illusion of a complete audience could be created in editing. For most of the footage of Goodstein himself, only two rows of students were present.
Many other video segments were shot on location, for example at a Linde industrial plant that produced liquid air. Historical scenes were often made to be generic, in order to facilitate their reuse across multiple episodes: "Young Newton strolls through an apple orchard, old Newton testily refuses a cup of tea from a servant, and so on". Footage featuring historical reenactment of Johannes Kepler was purchased from Carl Sagan's 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage.
The series was originally planned to consist of 26 episodes. This was later expanded to 60 episodes, a number then cut back to the eventual total of 52 for budget and production-schedule reasons.
The show was intended not to require previous experience with calculus. Instead, the basics of differential and integral calculus would both be taught early in the series itself. Caltech mathematician Tom M. Apostol joined the Mechanical Universe production staff in order to ensure that the series did not compromise on the quality of the mathematics it presented. Seeing an example of Blinn's computer animation for the first time convinced Apostol that the series could bring mathematics "to life in a way that cannot be done in a textbook or at the chalkboard". When test screenings to humanities students revealed that their greatest difficulty learning calculus was a weak background in trigonometry, Apostol wrote a primer on the subject to be distributed with the telecourse. After advising the production of The Mechanical Universe, Apostol decided that a similar series, geared to high-school mathematics, would be beneficial. This became the later Caltech series Project Mathematics!, which also featured computer animation by Blinn. Some of Blinn's animations for The Mechanical Universe were reused in the new series, in order to illustrate applications of algebra, geometry, and trigonometry.See, for example, the Project Mathematics! episode "Sines and Cosines, Part 1", 25:05 and following. (Accessed 2018-01-28.)
The 1990 science-fiction action film Total Recall used portions of the Mechanical Universe title sequence, in a scene where the protagonist (Douglas Quaid, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) is offered virtual vacations in locales around the Solar System. The animation was used without licensing, and consequently, Caltech and Intelecom sued Carolco Pictures for $3 million.
In order to present detailed mathematical equation derivations, the show employed a technique its creators called the "algebraic ballet". Computer animation presented derivations in step-by-step detail, but rapidly and with touches of whimsy, such as algebraic terms being canceled by a Monty Python-esque stomping foot or the hand of God from Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam. Blinn felt that Cosmos had taken itself "too seriously", and so he aimed to include more humor in the Mechanical Universe animations. The goal was to avoid putting the viewers' "brains into a 60-cycle hum", without sacrificing rigor; the creators intended that students could learn the overall gist of each derivation from the animation, and then study the details using the accompanying textbook. Computer animation was also used to portray idealizations of physical systems, like simulated billiard balls illustrating Newton's laws of motion. Blinn had used some of the same software earlier to visualize the interaction of DNA and DNA polymerase for Cosmos. One commenter deemed these animations "particularly useful in providing students with subjective insights into dynamic three-dimensional phenomena such as magnetic fields".
Creating the computer graphics necessary to visualize physics concepts led Blinn to invent new techniques for simulating clouds, as well as the virtual "blobby objects" known as metaballs. Blinn used the vertex coordinates of regular icosahedra and dodecahedra to determine the placement of electric field lines radiating away from point charges.
Most of the narration was voiced by actor Aaron Fletcher, who also played Galileo Galilei in the historical segments. Some portions, such as explanations of particular technical details, were narrated by Sally Beaty, the show's executive producer.
Shorter versions of Mechanical Universe episodes, 10 to 20 minutes in length, were created for use in high schools. This adaptation, for which a dozen high-school teachers and administrators were consultants, was supported by a $650,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. These videos were distributed alongside supplemental written material for teachers' benefit, and were intended to be employed in conjunction with existing textbooks. Yorkshire Television later produced a version repackaged for the United Kingdom audience, which was released in April 1991.
Funding Annenberg/CPB provided the funding for the production of The Mechanical Universe. The show was one of the first twelve projects funded by the initial $90 million pledge the Annenberg Foundation gave to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the early 1980s. The total cost of the project was roughly $10 million.
Critical reception Initial responses PBS and The Learning Channel began broadcasting The Mechanical Universe in September 1985. During the fall of 1986, roughly 100 PBS stations carried The Mechanical Universe, and by the fall of 1987, over 600 higher-education institutions had purchased it or licensed the episodes for use. In 1992, Goodstein noted that the series had been broadcast, via PBS, by over 100 stations, "usually at peculiar hours when innocent people were unlikely to tune in accidentally on a differential equation in the act of being solved". He observed that detailed viewership figures were difficult to obtain, but when the show had been broadcast in Miami during Saturday mornings, the producers were able to obtain Nielsen ratings.In fact, it came in second in its time slot, beating the kiddie cartoons on two network stations. There were 18,000 faithful core households in Dade County alone, the median age of the viewers was 18, and half were female. However, we seldom get that kind of detailed information.Goodstein and assistant project director Richard Olenick noted:Anecdotal information in the form of letters and phone calls indicates very considerable enthusiasm among users at all levels from casual viewers to high-school students to research university professors, but there have also been a number of sharp disappointments, particularly when Instructional Television administrators have tried to handle TMU like a conventional telecourse.Similarly, a 1988 review in Physics Today suggested that the programs would not function well on their own as a telecourse, but would work much better as a supplement to a traditional classroom or a more standard distance-learning course such as Open University. The reviewers also found the "algebraic ballet" of computer-animated equations too fast to follow: "After a short time, one yearns for a live professor filling the blackboard with equations". Similarly, a review in the American Journal of Physics, while praising the "technical proficiency of the films", wrote of the animated equation manipulations: "As the MIT students say, this is like trying to take a drink of water out of a fire hose". A considerably more enthusiastic evaluation came from physicist Charles H. Holbrow, who told Olenick: "These materials will constitute the principal visual image of physics for decades". A reviewer writing for Educational Technology found the animations "fascinating to watch" and opined that they were at least as effective as what many instructors could manage at a traditional blackboard. An editorial in the Los Angeles Times called the show "extraordinary" and the animations "splendid", quipping that "if differential calculus is not television's Supreme Test, it would certainly make the semifinals in any competition". Goodstein and Olenick reported that younger viewers tended to enjoy the "algebraic ballet" style "much more than older viewers, who are made uncomfortable by the algebraic manipulations they cannot quite follow".
Classroom use In 1986, The Mechanical Universe was used as part of a summer program for gifted children, to overall success.