Having read Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time and watched Erol Morris's fine documentary by the same name--which featured the two protagonists, Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, of this filmed 1994 lecture series--I felt reasonably cosmologically comfortable dipping into The Nature of Space and Time. It took about 20 minutes of the first tape to disabuse me of this notion, right about the time Hawking was using transparencies to discuss "minimal geodesics without conjugate points." The opening video, which contains Hawking's lecture on "Classical Theory" and Penrose's response "Structure of Spacetime Singularities" is, theoretically speaking, a debate, although initially only graduate level cosmology students will be able to see precisely where they differ. As the lectures continue, however, the varying approaches to reconciling quantum mechanics with Einstein's theory of relativity become apparent. On a technical note, the series is recorded in SLP mode (making this--let's alert Guinness--the most expensive slow-speed recorded video series in existence). Occasional glitches (common in SLP recorded tapes) are evident and the video quality itself is merely passable. This becomes a real problem during Penrose's lectures, as he uses handwritten as opposed to nicely printed transparencies. The combination of Penrose's notable clumsiness in using AV equipment (Roger, get PowerPoint--your students will thank you) and the fact that the viewer can barely read some transparencies, doesn't help to make the arcane subject matter more accessible. Still, even with these limitations (and the fact that the material is nearly three years old), university libraries will want to consider; all others should stick with Morris's documentary. Aud: C. (R. Pitman)
The Nature of Space and Time
(1996) 3 videocassettes. 445 min. $295. Princeton University Press. Color cover. ISBN: 0-691-02609-2. Vol. 12, Issue 3
The Nature of Space and Time
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