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.