Professor Ronald Mallett Wants to Build a Time Machine in this Century … and He’s Not Kidding
Time travel. Since Einstein formulated his special theory of relativity, we have known that it is theoretically possible, even if popular notions of time travel have deteriorated slightly from the august H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine to… well, Hot Tub Time Machine. Which is to say that few people—lay or professional—take the concept very seriously anymore. But University of Connecticut Professor Dr. Ronald Mallett still believes, and he has sought to realize his dream of making time travel possible in this century by infiltrating the scientific profession, becoming a respected theoretical physicist, then braving the ridicule and opprobrium, or at least disagreement, of his colleagues to begin work on a time machine.
In the video above, Dr. Mallett describes his experience of “risking professional suicide,” and physical pain, to work out his ideas. Since coming out, so to speak, as a proponent of time travel, Mallett published a memoir in 2006, Time Traveler: A Scientist’s Personal Mission to Make Time Travel a Reality. It’s both a description of his fifty years of scientific work toward his project Space-time Twisting by Light (STL) and a moving personal narrative of growing up under segregation, losing his father at a young age, and becoming one of the first African American theoretical physicists.
Spike Lee has acquired the film rights to his memoir (though the project seems to be stalled), and Mallett has told his story on This American Life, CNN, and in speaking tours around the country. Whether Mallett’s enthusiasm will translate into reality remains to be seen, but his passion for Einstein’s predictions is infectious and illuminating.
The video comes from a new series from THNKR called EPIPHANY, a “daily series inviting impassioned thought leaders across all disciplines to reveal the innovative, the improbable, and the unexpected of their worlds.” Each week is devoted to a new “thought leader.” Visit the EPIPHANY channel to view the rest of Dr. Mallett’s “revelations.”
Another online source for information, the Cassiopeia Project, claims to “make science simple.” In the video below, learn the basics of time travel and special relativity.
via BoingBoing
Read More...Saul Bass Gives Ma Bell a Complete Makeover, 1969
By the late sixties, the American Bell Telephone Company, colloquially known across America as “Ma Bell,” needed some spiffing up. Perhaps a vast, long-established telephone service monopoly doesn’t spring to mind as the ideal design client, but Saul Bass, the artist behind the title sequences for films like The Man with the Golden Arm, Spartacus, and Psycho, thought differently. If you recognize Bass’ name, you probably know he created the Bell logo used by the company from 1969 to its Justice Department-mandated divestiture in 1984. But the work cut out for Bass and his associates went well beyond figuring out how best to streamline and modernize an old-timey bell-in-a-circle graphic. As you can see above, they had to produce an entire half-hour film pitching their ideas for the corporation’s complete aesthetic redesign. They didn’t just make a new logo; they practically created a new world, encompassing signs, booths, vehicles, equipment, publications, uniforms, and executive cufflinks.
Bass presented all this to Bell in 1969, the year after Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 offered a vision of a near-future similarly unified by consistent, modern design. It marked the last era when you could propose such a top-down aesthetic program and not appear totalitarian — and, considering the earth-toned stylistic excesses the seventies would shortly bring, it was the last era when you would have wanted to. Viewers of certain generations will remember vividly the real-life versions of Bass’ proposed phone book, van, and hardhat designs. Other proposals seem slightly outlandish and, from the perspective of 2012, more than a little retro. Observe, for instance, the unrealized uniform designs for women working at Bell’s service centers: “More flattering than anything offered by the airlines [ … ] Ma Bell has gone Mod!” But the stock of retro-futurism has reached an all-time high in recent years, and Bass’ design work, as goofy as certain pieces of it may now seem, has retained a striking quality over the decades. He certainly impressed the right people at Bell: after the breakup, the new AT&T hired him to make them a logo of their own.
Related content:
Saul Bass’ Oscar-Winning Animated Short Ponders Why Man Creates
A Brief Visual Introduction to Saul Bass’ Celebrated Title Designs
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Tom Davis, Original Saturday Night Live Writer, “De-animates” at 59
Back in 1975, Tom Davis and Al Franken, two Minnesota-born comedians, joined the writing staff of Saturday Night Live, a new late-night comedy show. Together, Franken & Davis sketched out some unforgettable SNL characters — The Coneheads played by Dan Aykroyd, Jane Curtin and Laraine Newman. Nick The Lounge Singer, a character inhabited wonderfully by Bill Murray. Julia Child brought to life by Aykroyd again. 37 years later, Saturday Night Live is still going strong.
The Franken & Davis comedy team broke up in 1990. Time passed. And, in 2009, their lives went in very different directions. Al Franken was elected to the U.S. Senate. Tom Davis was diagnosed with throat and neck cancer — the disease that finally took his life yesterday. In recent months, Davis wrote openly about his journey with cancer. In a blog post called The Dark Side of Death, he joked about indulging in medical marijuana (“These days I get my marijuana through airport security by hiding it in the morphine”) and the day he’d “de-animate.” But he also talked movingly about the perspective the disease gave him, writing:
I wake up in the morning, delighted to be waking up, read, write, feed the birds, watch sports on TV, accepting the fact that in the foreseeable future I will be a dead person. I want to remind you that dead people are people too. There are good dead people and bad dead people. Some of my best friends are dead people. Dead people have fought in every war. We’re all going to try it sometime. Fortunately for me, I have always enjoyed mystery and solitude.
Many people in my situation say, “It’s been my worst and best year.” If that sounds like a cliché, you don’t have cancer. On the plus side, I am grateful to have gained real, not just intellectual empathy. I was prepared to go through life without having suffered, and I was doing a good job of it. Now I know what it’s like to starve. And to accept “that over which I have no control,” I had to turn inward. People from all over my life are reconnecting with me, and I’ve tried to take responsibility for my deeds, good and bad. As my friend Timothy Leary said in his book, Death by Design, “Even if you’ve been a complete slob your whole life, if you can end the last act with panache, that’s what they’ll remember.”
I think I’ve finally grown up.
When Davis said that “some of my best friends are dead people,” he was probably thinking of Timothy Leary and Jerry Garcia too. Here, you can watch Davis and the Grateful Dead frontman cook a meal together, and above we bring you Franken & Davis conducting a Grateful Dead trivia contest in 1980. Thanks to Tom for the memories and laughs.
via NYTimes
Read More...Claude Monet at Work in His Famous Garden at Giverny: Rare Film from 1915
Yesterday we showed you some startling footage of an elderly, arthritic Pierre-Auguste Renoir, painting with horribly deformed hands. Today we offer a more idyllic image of a French Impressionist painter in his golden years: Claude Monet on a sunny day in his beautiful garden at Giverny.
Once again, the footage was produced by Sacha Guitry for his project Ceux de Chez Nous, or “Those of Our Land.” It was shot in the summer of 1915, when Monet was 74 years old. It was not the best time in Monet’s life. His second wife and eldest son had both died in the previous few years, and his eyesight was getting progressively worse due to cataracts. But despite the emotional and physical setbacks, Monet would soon rebound, making the last decade of his life (he died in 1926 at the age of 86) an extremely productive period in which he painted many of his most famous studies of water lilies.
At the beginning of the film clip we see Guitry and Monet talking with each other. Then Monet paints on a large canvas beside a lily pond. It’s a shame the camera doesn’t show the painting Monet is working on, but it’s fascinating to see the great artist all clad in white, a cigarette dangling from his lips, painting in his lovely garden.
Related Content:
Impressionist Painter Edgar Degas Takes a Stroll in Paris, 1915
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Read More...
The Mathematics of Spiderman and the Physics of Superheroes
I have not seen the new Spiderman reboot, so I’ll have to reserve judgment on the virtues of the movie. But, in general, superhero movies succeed or fail for me based on how plausible and consistent the physics of the alternate universe they create are. In the above video from the “Emory [University] Looks at Hollywood” series, Skip Garibaldi, professor of mathematics (who previously examined the math of rock climbing) explains that the new Spiderman film does, with a minor exception, portray the feats of Spiderman in a mathematically possible way—granted that we’re willing to believe in superpowers. For example, Spiderman’s graceful swings through the city on long strands of webbing don’t just serve a cinematic purpose; they also keep him from possibly dislocating his shoulders while coming to a full-stop from a free-fall.
Analyzing the science of superheroes is a fun sideline for pop culture-minded scientists. In some cases, it can be an effective teaching tool as well. University of Minnesota physicist and comic book fan James Kakalios devotes an entire lecture to “The Uncanny Physics of Superhero Comic Books.” Kakalios, who has written a book called the Physics of Superheroes, worked as a science consultant on the Spiderman reboot and on Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Watchmen, which he discusses below.
Many great physics courses (some introductory, some advanced) can be found in the Physics section of our collection of 500 Free Online Courses.
Read More...Hours of Classic Crime and Mystery Movies. Discover Our Film Noir and Alfred Hitchcock Collections
Above you’ll find Alfred Hitchcock’s Number Seventeen, free to watch in its entirety. Released in 1932, the film finds a gang of jewel thieves desperate to hide their latest bounty, a diamond necklace. Just when they think they’ve found the perfect house in which to stash it — the Number Seventeen of the title — their plans begin to unravel when various outsiders (including but not limited to a sneaky police detective) turn up there. Hitchcock delivers this story with an odd mix of suspense and comedy, and, perhaps as a result, it hasn’t been one of his most widely seen pictures. But you can watch it with a click of a mouse, just as you can any of the films in our collection of 21 Free Hitchcock Movies Online. There you can experience many evenings of entertainment from the English-turned-American master of twentieth-century cinematic suspense. From his Daphne du Maurier adaptation Jamaica Inn to his early hit The 39 Steps to his British version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, Hitchcock delivers shipwrecks, conspiracies, paranoia, and uneasy romantic intrigue — all at no charge.
And if you watch all 21 free Hitchcock pictures, don’t worry; we’ve got more crime and mystery in store for you. Look no further than our collection of Free Film Noir Movies. Just above, we’ve embedded He Walked by Night, a gritty tale of postwar Los Angeles starring Dragnet’s Jack Webb. The film would go on to provide the basis for Dragnet itself. Or perhaps you’d prefer to watch The Lady from Shanghai, starring and directed by Orson Welles, which mixes film noir traditions with Welles’ own idiosyncratic, sometimes perfectionist and sometimes downright anti-perfection tendencies; “the weirdest great movie ever made,” critic Dave Kehr called it. If you’re looking for more noir Welles, our collection also contains The Stranger, his previous film. Starring Edward G. Robinson as a Nazi hunter, it came out as the first film after the Second World War to actually include footage of concentration camps. Both our noir and Hitchcock collections contain a great deal of history as well as a great deal of craft. They may not make movies like these anymore, but now it’s easier than ever to watch the ones they made back then.
Related content:
Alfred Hitchcock: A Rare Look Into the Filmmaker’s Creative Mind
François Truffaut’s Big Interview with Alfred Hitchcock (Free Audio)
Orson Welles Explains Why Ignorance Was the Genius Behind Citizen Kane
100 Greatest Posters of Film Noir
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Bob Dylan’s (In)Famous Electric Guitar From the Newport Folk Festival Discovered?
On July 25, 1965, Bob Dylan returned to the Newport Folk Festival, now the headline act. The purist audience expected to hear some Dylan classics played with an acoustic guitar — something like “Blowin’ In The Wind” and “Mr. Tambourine Man.” They got anything but. Dylan traded in his Gibson acoustic guitar for a Fender Stratocaster, and began to bang out electrified versions of “Maggie’s Farm” and “Like a Rolling Stone” (see above). Pete Seeger, the folk icon, lost his cool and famously threatened, “If I had an axe, I’d chop the microphone cable right now.” The crowd booed (for reasons that some now interpret differently). Dylan abruptly left the stage, only to return with an acoustic guitar in hand. Later, during his 1965–66 world tour, embittered fans called him “Judas!”
Everything changed the moment Dylan went electric at Newport. Dylan’s own music, folk music, rock ’n’ roll — they all moved in new directions. And the guitar at the center of the controversy, it went silent for almost five decades … until now. This week, the PBS program History Detectives aired an episode that tried to determine whether Dylan’s electric axe may have wound up in the hands of Dawn Peterson, the daughter of a pilot who flew planes boarded by Dylan and other folk musicians. The forensic evidence suggests that it’s the real deal. But Dylan, through his lawyers, insists that he’s still in possession of the history-making guitar. It’s another layer of controversy that began 47 years ago.
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Making Fender Guitars, Then (1959) and Now (2012)
Jimmy Page Tells the Story of “Kashmir”
Here Comes The Sun: The Lost Guitar Solo by George Harrison
Read More...Astonishing Film of Arthritic Impressionist Painter, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1915)
You may never look at a painting by Pierre-August Renoir in quite the same way again after seeing this three-minute film. It didn’t show in his artwork, but Renoir suffered from severe rheumatoid arthritis during the last three decades of his life. He worked in constant pain, right up until the day he died.
In this rare footage from 1915 we see the 74-year-old master seated at his easel, applying paint to a canvas while his youngest son Claude, 14, stands by to arrange the palette and place the brush in his father’s permanently clenched hand. By the time the film was made Renoir could no longer walk, even with crutches. He depended on others to move him around in a wheelchair. His assistants would scroll large canvases across a custom-made easel, so that the seated painter could reach different areas with his limited arm movements.
But there were times when the pain was so bad he was essentially paralyzed. In the book Renoir, My Father, the painter’s famous filmmaker son Jean describes the shock his father’s wasted figure and gnarled hands gave to people who knew him only from his beautiful art:
His hands were terribly deformed. His rheumatism had made the joints stiff and caused the thumbs to turn inward towards the palms, and his fingers to bend towards the wrists. Visitors who were unprepared for this could not take their eyes off his deformity. Though they did not dare to mention it, their reaction would be expressed by some such phrase as “It isn’t possible! With hands like that, how can he paint those pictures? There’s some mystery somewhere.”
The film of Renoir was made by 30-year-old Sacha Guitry, who appears midway through the film sitting down and talking with the artist. Guitry was the son of the famous actor and theatre director Lucien Guitry, and would go on to even greater fame than his father as an actor, filmmaker and playwright. When a group of German intellectuals issued a manifesto after the outbreak of World War I bragging about the superiority of German culture, Guitry was infuriated. As an act of patriotism he decided to make a film of France’s great men and women of the arts. It would be released as Ceux de Chez Nous, or “Those of Our Land.” Guitry and Renoir were already friends, so when the young man embarked on his project he travelled to Renoir’s home at Cagnes-sur-Mer, in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region. The date was shortly after June 15, 1915, when Renoir’s wife Aline died. In Sacha Guitry: The Last Boulevardier, writer James Harding describes the scene:
The choice of time was unfortunate. That very day Renoir’s wife was to be buried. Sacha went to the old man who sat huddled arthritically in his wheel chair and murmured: ‘It must be terribly painful, Monsieur Renoir, and you have my deepest sympathy.’ ‘Painful?’ he replied, shifting his racked limbs, ‘you bet my foot is painful!’ They pushed him in his chair up to a canvas, and, while Sacha leaned watching over his shoulder, Renoir jabbed at the picture with brushes attached to hands which had captured so much beauty but which now were shrivelled like birds’ claws. The flattering reminder that he was being filmed for posterity had no effect on the man who, on being awarded the cravat of a Commandeur of the Légion d’Honneur, had said: ‘How can you expect me to wear a cravat when I never wear a collar?’
Renoir died four years after the film was made, on December 3, 1919. He lived long enough to see some of his paintings installed in the Louvre. When a young Henri Matisse asked the suffering old man why he kept painting, Renoir is said to have replied, “The pain passes, but the beauty remains.”
Read More...Google Street View Opens Up a Look at Shackleton’s Antarctic
The discovery of the South Pole is a story whose hero seems to change with every telling. Sometimes it’s Robert Scott, sometimes Norwegian Roald Amundsen, and, most recently, Scott’s protégé, Sir Ernest Shackleton. All three—and geologist Sir Douglas Mawson—are essential characters in a series of early 20th century expeditions to a forbidding territory nearly inaccessible to the average human being. Now, Google has opened up the Antarctic for everyone to explore from the safety of padded office chairs, comfy couches, and coffee-shop seating. Google Street View was launched in May 2007 and has since expanded its scope to give the average user visual access to some fairly remote and exotic locations. Google’s World Wonders Project provides astonishing views of an ancient Zen Temple in Kyoto and the coasts of Dorset and East Devon in England, among many other stunning sites. Most recently, Google Street View has made available 360-degree views of the wooden huts used by Robert Scott and Ernest Shackleton a century ago during their Antarctic expeditions. (Start your tour here.)
Both Scott’s and Shackleton’s huts have been preserved intact as historical sites by New Zealand’s Antarctic Heritage Trust. The explorers’ tools and supplies, in their original arrangement, are on full display in detailed panoramic images of the huts’ interiors—a departure from the typical exterior perspectives of Street View. Also viewable in the Antarctic series of views is the Cape Royds Adelie Penguin Rookery, the world’s southernmost penguin colony and home to many thousands of Adelie penguins. Like all Street View images, including the Scott and Shackleton huts, the Rookery views are static—images of bygone moments frozen in time—but they are no less breathtaking for it.
The image below shows the interior of Shackleton’s hut and all of its belongings.
Related Content:
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Google Art Project Expands, Bringing 30,000 Works of Art from 151 Museums to the Web
Josh Jones is currently a doctoral student in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.
Read More...Philip Glass, Seen and Heard Through the Cinematic Mind of Peter Greenaway (1983)
Longtime Simpsons-watchers surely remember Homer’s weakly feigned enthusiasm for an evening with Philip Glass: “Just an evening?” Yet for some enthusiasts of the composer’s repetitive, mesmerizing music, just an evening really wouldn’t satisfy. Running over five hours, Glass’ opera Einstein on the Beach arguably requires more than an evening by itself. If you don’t feel up to so extensive a listening experience, rest assured that you’ve most likely heard, and may well have enjoyed, his compositions before. A prolific craftsman of film scores, Glass has made music to accompany, among many other pictures, Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War; Godfrey Reggio’s trilogy of Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi, and Naqoyqatsi; and the horror favorite Candyman as well as its sequel, Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh. You can learn more about what exactly goes on in Glass’ music and how he thinks about it in Philip Glass, which comes directed by Peter Greenaway as one of four 1983 portraits of American composers.
If you watch Greenaway’s films, you might find yourself surprised at the relative straightforwardness of this project: no elaborate set design, no fixation on lists and systems, few grimly dry wisecracks, and nobody more eccentric than Glass himself. Between extended segments of Glass and his ensemble in concert, we see interviews with Glass and his players. (A simple setup, yes, but not without its points of strangeness: each interviewee appears with a different, always nearly silent interviewer, sometimes separated by a highly conspicuous camera reflection.) We learn about how transcribing Ravi Shankar’s music gave Glass the idea of “working in a rhythmic structure, not a harmonic or narrative one,” how hiring the sound man from the Fillmore East granted his music a new technological dimension, and the kind of heckling he endures even after becoming famous. (“We get screamers,” he admits, quoting their shouts of “This isn’t music!” and “Why are you doing this to me?”) To the best of my knowledge, Glass has never scored any of Greenaway’s features. But watching this documentary and noticing their shared fascination with form and repetition, their lack of enthusiasm for narrative, their freedom from “clearly populist intentions,” and their tendency to attract predictable disapproval, I wonder why not.
Related content:
A Minimal Glimpse of Philip Glass
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Koyaanisqatsi at 1552% Speed
Philip Glass & Lou Reed at Occupy Lincoln Center: An Artful View
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
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