The Mechanical Universe

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.[3][4] 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".[2] 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.[5][6]

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.[2]

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.[7] 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.[2] 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.[8]

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".[2] Footage featuring historical reenactment of Johannes Kepler was purchased from Carl Sagan's 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage.[9]

The series was originally planned to consist of 26 episodes.[10][11] This was later expanded to 60 episodes, a number then cut back to the eventual total of 52 for budget and production-schedule reasons.[2][12]

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.[10] 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".[13] 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.[2] After advising the production of The Mechanical Universe, Apostol decided that a similar series, geared to high-school mathematics, would be beneficial.[14] 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.[15]

The 1990 science-fiction action movie 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.[16]

In order to present detailed mathematical equation derivations, the show employed a technique its creators called the "algebraic ballet".[3] 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.[17] 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.[2] 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.[18]) One commenter deemed these animations "particularly useful in providing students with subjective insights into dynamic three-dimensional phenomena such as magnetic fields".[19]

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.[20] Blinn used the vertex coordinates of regular icosahedra and dodecahedra to determine the placement of electric field lines radiating away from point charges.[21]

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.[2]

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.[22] These videos were distributed alongside supplemental written material for teachers' benefit, and were intended to be employed in conjunction with existing textbooks.[9] Yorkshire Television later produced a version repackaged for the United Kingdom audience, which was released in April 1991.[23]

Annenberg/CPB provided the funding for the production of The Mechanical Universe.[24] 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.[1][2][25] The total cost of the project was roughly $10 million.[26]

In 1987, "The Lorentz Transformation" (episode 42) was awarded the sixteenth annual Japan Prize for educational television.[39] Other awards received by The Mechanical Universe include the 1986 Gold Award from the Birmingham International Film Festival, two "Cindy" awards from the International Association of Audio Visual Communicators (1987 and 1988), a Gold Award (1985) and a Silver Award (1987) from the International Film and TV Festival of New York, Silver (1986) and Gold Apple (1987) awards from the National Educational Film and Video Festival, and a Gold Plaque (1985) from the Chicago International Film Festival.[40][41]

Goodstein received the 1999 Oersted Medal for his work in physics education, including The Mechanical Universe.[42] For his contributions to the field of computer graphics, including his animations for Cosmos, The Mechanical Universe and Project Mathematics!, Blinn received a MacArthur fellowship in 1991, as well as the 1999 Steven A. Coons Award.[43][44]

Like many introductory physics texts, The Mechanical Universe cites the spectacular 1940 collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge as an example of resonance, using footage of the disaster in the "Resonance" episode. However, as more-recent expositions have emphasized, the catastrophic oscillations that destroyed the bridge were not due to simple mechanical resonance, but to a more complicated interaction between the bridge and the winds passing through it—a phenomenon known as aeroelastic flutter. This phenomenon is a kind of "self-sustaining vibration" that lies beyond the regime of applicability of the linear theory of the externally-driven simple harmonic oscillator.[45][46]

The opening sequence used for the first 26 episodes lists the show's title as The Mechanical Universe, whereas the latter 26 episodes are titled The Mechanical Universe ...and Beyond.[47][48] The reason for the addition is explained by Goodstein in the closing lecture segment of the final episode:

In the first scientific revolution, disputation over the interpretation of human or divine authority was replaced by observation, by measurement, by the testing of hypotheses, all of it with the powerful help of quantitative mathematical reasoning. And the result of all that was the mechanical universe, a universe that inexorably worked out its destiny according to precise, predictable, mechanical laws. Today, we no longer believe in that universe. If I know the precise position of some particle at some instant of time, I cannot have any idea of where it's going or how fast. And it doesn't make any difference at all if you say, "All right, you don't know where it's going, but where is it really going?" That is precisely the kind of question that is scientifically meaningless. That is the nature of the world we live in. That is the quantum mechanical universe.[49]

The series can be purchased from Caltech or streamed from online video sources, including Caltech's official YouTube channel.[50] Caltech also posted on YouTube a series of short videos made by Blinn to demonstrate the show's computer animation at SIGGRAPH conferences.

• R.P. Olenick, T.M. Apostol, and D.L. Goodstein (1986). The Mechanical Universe: Introduction to Mechanics and Heat (Cambridge University Press). ISBN 0-521-30429-6
• R.P. Olenick, T.M. Apostol, and D.L. Goodstein (1986). Beyond the Mechanical Universe: From Electricity to Modern Physics (Cambridge University Press). ISBN 0-521-30430-X

• The Mechanical Universe website at Caltech
• Corrected mirror of the Caltech website
• The Mechanical Universe at IMDb
• The Mechanical Universe on YouTube
• Episode descriptions from Annenberg Media