{"id":511,"date":"2017-06-24T08:34:05","date_gmt":"2017-06-24T13:34:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/?p=511"},"modified":"2017-06-24T08:34:05","modified_gmt":"2017-06-24T13:34:05","slug":"national-geographic-channels-genius-a-biography-of-albert-einstein","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/2017\/06\/24\/national-geographic-channels-genius-a-biography-of-albert-einstein\/","title":{"rendered":"National Geographic Channel’s Genius: A Biography of Albert Einstein."},"content":{"rendered":"

This week the final 2-hour installment of the first season of the new National Geographic Channel’s Series Genius was broadcast. The first season was a biography of the most famous scientist of the twentieth century, Albert Einstein.<\/p>\n

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Nat Geo’s Genius: A biography of Albert Einstein (Credit : National Geographic)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The\u00a0series was produced by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer through their company Imagine Entertainment. Starring Geoffrey Rush as the older Einstein and Johnny Flynn as young Einstein the 10 part series gives an account of Einstein’s life based on the Book ‘Einstein: His Life and Universe’ by Walter Isaacson.<\/p>\n

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Two Einstein’s for the Price on One. Geoffrey Rush on the Left and Johnny Flynn on the Right (Credit National Geographic)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The first half of the of biography dealt with Einstein’s relationship with his first wife and fellow scientist Mileva Maric’. Now\u00a0just how much\u00a0Mileva contributed to Albert’s development of Relativity and his other achievements is a very controversial question. There are many people that believe that if Mileva had not been a woman\u00a0she would have achieved much as a scientist and that\u00a0she probably deserved a share of Albert’s Nobel Prize. In Genius they show how Mileva worked with Albert, and was treated as little more than a resource by him. Nevertheless the great insights, the famous thought experiments are portrayed as Albert’s only. This may be as accurate a description\u00a0of the truth as\u00a0we can\u00a0manage\u00a0after the passing of so many years.<\/p>\n

The second half of Genius\u00a0contrasts\u00a0Einstein’s strong pacifism against the lives of two of\u00a0his colleagues at the Kaiser William II institute, Fritz Haber and Phillip Lenard. Haber was a chemist\u00a0who was born a Jew like Einstein but throughout his life he always considered himself more German than Jewish and converted to Christianity. Haber greatest scientific achievement, for which he received the Nobel Chemistry\u00a0Prize,\u00a0was his development of a process to produce ammonia gas out of nitrogen in the atmosphere and hydrogen gas. Although few people know about Haber’s work it this is really one of the greatest discoveries in all of history. The commercial production of ammonia\u00a0is the foundation of the development of all artificial fertilizers!\u00a0Half of the people alive today\u00a0eat food that is grown with\u00a0fertilizer based on Haber’s discovery!<\/p>\n

During World\u00a0War I Haber also used his discovery to manufacture explosives and more than that he became Germany’s expert\u00a0in the development of poison gas as a weapon of\u00a0war! (In Genius Haber is depicted as supervising the first poison gas attack whereas most historical sources have him witnessing it) Neither of these two services to Germany did him any good though, for when the Nazi’s came to power all anyone remembered was that he was born a Jew!<\/p>\n

Phillip Lenard, on the other hand may have been a\u00a0great scientist, his work was instrumental in the later development of vacuum tube amplifiers and the Cathode ray picture tube, but he was a vicious anti-Semite throughout his life. (In Genius Lenard despises Einstein from the moment he hears the name)\u00a0During Hitler’s reign Lenard was made the head of ‘German \/ Aryan Science’ and worked hard to prevent the teaching of relativity in Germany.\u00a0After Hitler’s fall Lenard was a broken man who died only two years later, his reputation today is still that of a racist not a scientist.<\/p>\n

But Einstein’s strong pacifisms got him in a lot of trouble as well. In Germany during WWI he was criticized from not helping to defend the fatherland and when the Nazi’s came to power he got out as quick as he could. Even in\u00a0the US however his outspoken views got him in continual trouble with J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Einstein never actually worked on the atomic bomb project because he was never trusted with a security clearance.<\/p>\n

I guess the lesson to be learned is just that war never really does anyone any good! Now there’s a revolutionary theory!<\/p>\n

I do have a few criticisms of Genius. Two physicists who do not appear at all but WHO SHOULD are Karl Schwarzschild and Satyendra Nath Bose both of whom did important work related to Einstein’s.\u00a0And let’s not forget Hendrik Antoon Lorentz\u00a0whose work gave Einstein the foundation on which relativity is built! He definitely deserved greater mention.<\/p>\n

National Geographic has just announced that there will be a second season of Genius. The subject of next season will be the artist Pablo Picasso. I suppose I’ll watch, at least the first episode but since he’s not a scientist I may not comment on it. We’ll have to see.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week the final 2-hour installment of the first season of the new National Geographic Channel’s Series Genius was broadcast. The first season was a biography of the most famous scientist of the twentieth century, Albert Einstein. The\u00a0series was produced by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer through their company Imagine Entertainment. Starring Geoffrey Rush as … Continue reading “National Geographic Channel’s Genius: A Biography of Albert Einstein.”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[160,197],"class_list":["post-511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science","tag-albert-einstein","tag-national-geographics-genius"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=511"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":518,"href":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511\/revisions\/518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}