The Mechanical Universe

Did You Know?

• The series was one of the first twelve projects funded by the initial $90 million pledge from the Annenberg Foundation to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
• In 1987, episode 42, 'The Lorentz Transformation', won the sixteenth annual Japan Prize for educational television.
• The series uses footage of the 1940 Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse as an example of resonance, though the actual cause was aeroelastic flutter, not simple mechanical resonance.

Overview

Production of the series began in 1982. The videos rely heavily on historical dramatizations and visual aids, including nearly eight hours of computer animation created by Jim Blinn 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 delivers explanations from a lecture hall. These segments were staged versions of actual freshman physics lectures from Caltech's Physics 1a and 1b courses. The organization and topic emphasis reflect a revision of Caltech's introductory physics curriculum, the first major overhaul since The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Episode 22 solved the Kepler problem—showing that an inverse-square law of gravity yields conic-section orbits—using a variant of the Laplace–Runge–Lenz vector.

Production details

The bookend segments were filmed in the Bridge lecture hall at Caltech. Many extras were students from other schools, and the front rows were deliberately filled with more women than typical for Caltech lectures. The production team added fake wood paneling to the hall to resemble the set of The Paper Chase; the physics department later installed permanent panels. Many seats were removed to accommodate camera tracks and studio lights, and additional reaction shots of a full lecture hall were filmed later to create the illusion of a complete audience.

For most footage of Goodstein, only two rows of students were present. Other segments were shot on location, such as at a Linde industrial plant producing liquid air. Historical scenes were made generic for reuse across episodes. Footage of Johannes Kepler was purchased from Carl Sagan's 1980 series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage.

The series was originally planned as 26 episodes, then expanded to 60, and finally cut to 52 for budget and schedule reasons.

Critical reception

PBS and The Learning Channel began broadcasting The Mechanical Universe in September 1985. By fall 1986, roughly 100 PBS stations carried it, and by fall 1987, over 600 higher-education institutions had purchased or licensed the episodes. In 1992, Goodstein noted that over 100 stations had broadcast the series, often at unusual hours. When broadcast in Miami on Saturday mornings, Nielsen ratings showed it came second in its time slot, beating kiddie cartoons on two network stations, with 18,000 faithful core households in Dade County, a median viewer age of 18, and half the viewers female.

Goodstein and assistant project director Richard Olenick reported considerable enthusiasm from users at all levels but also sharp disappointments, particularly when Instructional Television administrators treated it like a conventional telecourse. A 1988 Physics Today review suggested the programs would not function well alone as a telecourse but would work better as a supplement. Reviewers found the computer-animated equations too fast, comparing it to drinking from a fire hose.

Physicist Charles H. Holbrow told Olenick the materials would constitute the principal visual image of physics for decades. An Educational Technology reviewer found the animations fascinating and at least as effective as a traditional blackboard.

List of episodes

The opening sequence for the first 26 episodes lists the title as The Mechanical Universe, while the latter 26 episodes are titled The Mechanical Universe ...and Beyond. Goodstein explains the addition in the closing lecture of the final episode: the first scientific revolution replaced disputation over authority with observation, measurement, and hypothesis testing, resulting in the mechanical universe governed by predictable laws. Today, that universe is no longer believed in; the quantum mechanical universe, where precise knowledge of a particle's position precludes knowledge of its momentum, is the nature of the world we live in. The series can be purchased from Caltech or streamed from online sources, including Caltech's official YouTube channel, which also hosts short videos made by Blinn to demonstrate the show's computer animation at SIGGRAPH conferences.