The Universe Tomorrow

Over on Correlations, I talked a bit about the History Channel’s science show “The Universe” (as I have here), and pointed out that the new season (season two) has already begun being broadcast. Here’s hoping that it’s a good series of programmes that will be enjoyable and informative. The show’s website is here.

Well, I’ve learned that the second episode, tomorrow’s (showing at 9:00pm), is one of those that i did some shooting for over the last two months at a number of places around LA. Rather than repeat, here’s what I said:

The next one, to air on Tuesday the 4th December, is called “Cosmic Holes” (yeah, I know), and the subject matter will be right on the edge of the known and the unknown, talking about black holes, white holes, and wormholes. While we know that the first are out there, the second two, while also solutions of Einstein’s General Relativity, are still theoretical constructs (and not without problems). The show explores some of the ideas and the prospects for the ideas surrounding them (including things like rapid travel to other parts of the universe, which I blogged about here earlier, and even time machines – what’s the science vs the science fiction there?), and explores things we’d like to know about black holes too. I know all this because I contribute to this episode too (see image on left). In fact, you can read a post I did some time ago which was a bit of a diary of one of the shoots we did for this episode, along with my thoughts on the making of science programs and reflections on future prospects.

(I should also mention that the Brompton gets a little look in, on the show…!)

So I’ve learned that they had a bit of a rush on the post-production to get it ready on a short schedule, and as a result, their graphics company did not get to complete all the graphics they wanted to do for it (I’d outlined some things that would have been useful to do to help the explanations, you see), and so this aspect will not be so great, apparently. But I hope the whole thing works out ok.

Anyway, I had a lot of fun working on this one, and i think that they tried to tell an interesting story and give a sense of some of the research, ideas, and so forth. I hope it works. Have a look if you’re inclined to.

Oh! There’s an excellent joke in the show (I hope they use it) that I’m really pleased about. I’ll tell you about it in another post.

Enjoy the series!

-cvj