BEFORE: So my reward for making through the first half of Movie Year 14 AND having an intact chain (so far, anyway) for the fourth year in a row was a trip to the RibKing event in Staten Island today. Memorial Day is all about the BBQ, right? (Really, though, what holiday isn't? Fourth of July BBQ, Labor Day BBQ, Thanksgiving BBQ...we'd probably have Christmas BBQ if it weren't so dang cold in December.). So I tried to get up early, OK, so not as early as I would have liked, but I was out the door by 10:15 to meet a friend down by the Staten Island Ferry, so subway, ferry, bus to the Snug Harbor Cultural Center, where Food Karma's Ribfest was being held today. The event was supposed to run from 12 pm to 4 pm, and we actually had VIP tickets that would have let us in at 11 am, except by the time we got there, it was 12:30. No matter, I spent the next two hours eating ribs from 9 different stations, plus there was grilled shrimp and unlimited beer samples. The ribs turned out to be limited, however, as some stands started running out at 2 pm, and they were all out of ribs by 3. No matter, by that time I'd eaten my fair share, I did two laps around the event, so that was at least 18 ribs I ate (gee, I can't imagine why they ran out...) and so I think I can skip dinner tonight, I'm still quite full. OK, so that should power me up for a while, that and some Mountain Dew will keep me going as I enter the second half of the Movie Year.
Jim Broadbent carries over again from "The Gathering Storm".
THE PLOT: Drama about the development of Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity and Einstein's relationship with British scientist Sir Arthur Eddington, the first physicist to experimentally prove his ideas.
AFTER: This wasn't my first choice, obviously, not with the sequel to last night's film available via HBO Max, I wish I could have just moved right on to "Into the Storm", keeping the World War II theme going, but the linking just isn't there. A different actor played Churchill in the second BBC TV movie about him, and despite both films having sizable casts, there just isn't anyone who crossed over. I keep looking, thinking that I missed somebody, but it's not going to change - so if I can't watch those movies one right after the other, than I can at least connect them with just ONE movie, not several.
I thought that maybe this film would keep the World War II theme alive, because of Einstein's scientific connection to the principles that led to the development of the atomic bomb, but that's not happening either - this film is set during World War I. Well, at least that's a war, so I've still got nearly a week of films that set up Memorial Day. The two scientists have connections - rather forced ones, but whatever - to the war. Eddington's friend, who he loved (platonic, or more, it's tough to say?) got drafted to fight for England and died in one of the early battles, while Einstein witnesses some of the early experiments Germany does with poison gas, and realizes how ruthless they are.
I've gone deep into Einstein before, not in this blog, but on season one of the TV series "Genius", which focused on Einstein, I found it quite fascinating. (The second season about Picasso was less enthralling, and the third season about Aretha Franklin, well, they lost me there. Sorry Aretha, but you were no Albert Einstein.). So I already know something about Einstein's relationships, how he first married Milena Maric, a Serbian woman he met in a Swiss polytechnic school, and they had two sons, but the marriage was on the rocks when Milena realized Albert was more married to his work, and more attracted to his cousin, Elsa. Elsa became his second wife, and they emigrated to the U.S. together in 1933.
"Einstein and Eddington" shows that Albert Einstein's marriage was already in trouble due to Albert moving to Berlin to work at a university with Max Planck, while Mileva remained in Zurich with their sons. The film does have a character named Elsa, who Albert has an affair with, but I think it conveniently fails to mention that she's his cousin. Geez, if a very intelligent man like Albert Einstein can't figure out how to keep the romance in marriage, or how to stay faithful to one person, what chance do the rest of us have, honestly?
Meanwhile, in England, Eddington is named chief astronomer at Cambridge, and is expected to maintain the measurement of heavenly bodies, according to the principles of Sir Isaac Newton, who is not to be questioned. Newton had very strict rules about how the universe worked, scientifically speaking - but the problem is that he basically just made them up, according to how he thought everything SHOULD work. And then this upstart German named Einstein comes along and proposes the theory of relativity, which says that objects that are in motion bend the rules just a bit, like how a train's bells and whistles sound different when it's coming toward you than when it's going away (I know, that's the Doppler Effect, but bear with me.). By the same token, a clock on a moving object ticks more slowly than a stationary one, and two events that are simultaneous may not appear simultaneous to an observer in motion (because of the speeds at which sound and light travel). Also, the speed of light is absolute, so if you had a car traveling at 100 mph, and you turn the headlights on, the speed of those headlight beams is not the speed of light plus the speed of the car, it's just the speed of light. Nothing can travel faster than light, not even light.
But all this messed with the rules of Isaac Newton, who, remember, made a bunch of stuff up. Basically, Newton's work is B.S. - this is the guy who claimed to have "discovered" gravity, which a bunch of crap because it was always there, like everybody already knew that if you drop something, it falls to the floor, but they just didn't CALL it gravity, it was just common sense. Newton also believed that if our sun suddenly vanished, or stopped working gravitationally, it would be eight minutes before we SAW that there was no sun, because that's how long it takes light from the sun to reach Earth, but we would FEEL the lack of gravity right away. Einstein said, "No way, nothing can be faster than light, not even gravity." (I'm paraphrasing...)
Einstein is right, and Newton was a fraud, there, I said it. This should have called all of Newton's other theories into question, but for some reason it didn't - like the one about how for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. Well, how do I know he didn't just make this up, too? What if, for every action, there's an opposite reaction equal to about 90% of the first one? Or half? You can't just say, "This is how I think the universe works..." and not back that up, right?
Anyway, Eddington thought there might be something to Einstein's theory, because there's something about Mercury's orbit that can't be completely explained - it's got something to do with the gravity of the sun, I'll wager, but the film didn't really break this down quite thoroughly enough. But Eddington set out on an experiment to figure out which scientist was right, Newton or Einstein - he traveled to Africa with a telescope and camera to take photos of the stars during a solar eclipse. Einstein's theories stated that gravity could bend light, even though light is fast it's not absolute, so during the eclipse they took photos of the stars, and compared them to other photos taken before. If any of the stars near the sun were out of position, even slightly, it meant that the gravity of the sun was bending the light, and making the stars appear out of place, and thus everything is relative, what you see is determined by where you're standing, light is affected by gravity, space and time are curved, Isaac Newton's theories are a bunch of B.S. and it's OK to marry your cousin.
And that's what happened, an Englishman proved Einstein's calculations were correct, then people started to take him seriously, and then physics was a whole new ball game. The ultimate proof of gravity bending light, time and space is the existence of black holes, which we've known about for some time, but we only JUST got some photos of the one at the center of our galaxy last month. This kind of freaked me out when I was a kid, to think there's a black hole in the Milky Way's center (not nougat and caramel, sorry) and I feared that maybe the whole Earth was circling the drain. But for all we know, this is completely normal, there might be a black hole at the center of every galaxy, and anyway, it's 26,000 light-years away, so it's going to be a while before Earth gets sucked in. Whew, we've got enough problems as it is. Anyway, Einstein eventually reasoned that black holes might be wormholes, aka Einstein-Rosen bridges. Which means they may lead SOMEWHERE, we just don't know where. But then Hawking came along and said that something that goes into a black hole both DOES and DOESN'T get destroyed, that's the quantum level, though, and have fun figuring that one out.
Eddington, however, somehow also finds his religious faith again, while proving that Einstein's science is better than Newton's science. Oh, sweet, misguided Eddington, there's just no room for religion and science in the same conversation! Here this same guy who discovered that Newton was wrong to factor God into the structure of the universe went and made the same mistake, he just re-adjusted the new equation to put God back into the picture, just because he wanted to. That was very un-scientific of him, because science should only be about what you can observe and prove to be true, it should never be about what you WANT to be true. Sure, Einstein was Jewish, but he called himself an agnostic, or a "religious nonbeliever", he kept faith out of science, and became a successful celebrity scientist. Eddington, who was raised as a Quaker, couldn't help but mix the two up, and faded into obscurity. Just saying.
EDIT: I accidentally programmed this film for May 28, and the famous solar eclipse during which Eddington proved Einstein's theory of relativity corrected happened on May 29, 1919. Ooh, so very close...but we'll celebrate this anniversary and near-coincidence anyway, OK?
Also starring Andy Serkis (last seen in "The Batman"), David Tennant (last heard in "Ferdinand"), Rebecca Hall (last seen in "A Rainy Day in New York"), Richard McCabe (last seen in "The Constant Gardener"), Lucy Briers (last seen in "Genius"), Paul Brooke, Patrick Kennedy (last seen in "A Good Year"), Christopher Campbell, Caroline Gruber, Eleanor Tomlinson (last heard in "Loving Vincent"), Ben Uttley, Richard Graham (last seen in "Phantom Thread"), Lucy Cohu (last seen in "Becoming Jane"), Jodhi May (last seen in "Defiance"), Donald Sumpter (last seen in "The Man Who Invented Christmas"), Callum Williams, Jacob Theato, Anton Lesser (last seen in "Allied"), John Bowe, Kika Markham, Philip Whitchurch, Peter J. Morton.
RATING: 5 out of 10 photographic plates
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