Space is, of course, the final frontier, and not just for enterprisers and voyagers.
It’s also a stiff challenge for documentarians. You don’t, after all, just plant yourself next to a planet for a year and then edit the footage down.
“Stephen Hawking’s Universe,” the big new PBS look at the cosmos, meets the challenge by going after the very big questions during its six installments, attempting to become a modern-day follow-up to Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos.”
Its self-appointed mission is nothing less than to serve as a primer on what we know and when we knew it about space, a body of knowledge that is expanding almost as rapidly, relatively speaking, as we have come to learn the universe itself is.
It employs as tour guide through this continent of ideas Hawking, the mathematician who holds the same chair that Isaac Newton once did at Cambridge University, who predicted black holes and who wrote the best-selling “A Brief History of Time.”
Hawking states his credentials early: “I’ve sold more books on physics than Madonna has on sex,” he says in the digitally enhanced voice whose technological sound is fitting for a topic like this. Hawking’s physical presence, too, is a powerful one: His body ravaged by ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, diagnosed when he was a graduate student, Hawking gets about in a motorized wheelchair. It serves, strangely, as one more reminder of our insignificance in the universe and of the massiveness of the questions that Hawking treats.
For if the history of cosmological thinking is any one thing, it is about the journey of humankind from hubris to humility.
We have long recognized, of course, that our early belief in Earth as the center of the solar system is wrong. Successive blows to the ego have taught us that the sun is nothing special, that our solar system is not at the center of our galaxy, that our galaxy is not at the center of the universe, and that there are, to use a Saganism, “billions and billions” of galaxies.
We have moved, Hawking says in Monday’s hourlong Part 1 (9 p.m., WTTW-Ch. 11), “from the center of the universe to the outer suburbs.”
The documentary’s first part traces the history of thinking about our place in space, from the ancient Sumerians to the Greeks to Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Hubble and Einstein.
The follow-ups will air on successive Mondays.
Part 2 asks about the Big Bang, sifting through the evidence in support of this theory of the universe’s origin. Part 3 wonders where matter came from, looking at the relationship between matter and energy and what we are learning about it via such methods as today’s particle accelerators.
Part 4 poses one of the biggest mysteries of all: Galaxies and stars don’t account for much of the material in the universe; most of it is “dark matter,” and nobody knows what it is. In Part 5, Hawking’s black holes, and what they portend, are explored. And the final installment is about the search for the “theory of everything,” a unifying, and probably elegantly simple, notion that would take into account the enormous advances we have made in the past century in our knowledge of the universe.
The principal filmmakers are David Filkin, an ex-BBC documentarian, and Philip Martin, a rising director in British TV. Their method is to apply lavish production to help dress up what is, after all, a science lesson.
And it mostly works. Computer models, for instance, show us how Einstein’s theory of relativity modified our thinking about what gravity does; the planet models bob and weave around each other, not unlike the interstitial bits in the NBC sitcom “3rd Rock from the Sun.” If it doesn’t make the concept crystal clear, it does help.
Academics and astronomers, a bevy of whom chime in with their two cents, are lit dramatically, or shot while rowing to a beach to plant a couple of sticks in the ground to show how the ancient Greeks proved the Earth was round.
Photographs of old texts and early astronomical devices are woven in with the most modern, gorgeous and awesome space photography available.
And the narration takes care to lay its groundwork painstakingly, not taking for granted that viewers know anything. On a topic as big as this one, that is a smart notion.
Yet through all of Part 1, I kept thinking of young Alvy Singer, Woody Allen’s character in “Annie Hall.” He didn’t want to do his homework because the universe was expanding, so why bother.
Whether you want to take the time to watch and understand “Stephen Hawking’s Universe” probably depends in some measure on whether you view the burgeoning cosmos as an interesting thing or one that lends to everything we do a certain degree of futility.
