Brian Greene's new TV show on your iDevice now

Your iGadget may show you "The Fabric of the Cosmos" acausally, 1 week before it is released

I have some great news for the owners of iPads, iPhones, and iPod Touches. As soon as now, you may watch the first of the four episodes of Brian Greene's new PBS/NOVA TV show called "The Fabric Of The Cosmos", much like his second major popular book. The only thing you need is a free app called PBS.

Once you launch it, you will be able to start the 53-minute video by one or two iClicks or iSwipes or whatever iMotion you will have to iPerform.




The PBS station – sponsored by foundations, corporations, and viewers like you, thank you – may be trying to promote itself and their iOS app. I am going to watch it right now. Ordinary people and mortals without any iDevices will have to wait through November. Starting on November 2nd, the episodes will be broadcast on four November Wednesdays.



The trailer for the "Fabric of the Cosmos". You have already seen it but here it is again.

After I have watched it, I can tell you that the first episode is about the empty space and time, their relationship in special relativity, constancy of the speed of light (video scenes include some realistic relativistic optical effects), spacetime curvature in general relativity, Gravity Probe B (including its glitches), virtual pairs and the Casimir force it causes, the LHC Higgs search, Higgs sweating, lecturing, and partying at Princeton, the Big Bang and the cosmological constant (the newest Nobel prize winners are on the show, probably before shot well before the award), a short bullshitting about the Big Rip, the holographic principle... Brian Greene's acting, the scientific content, as well as the video production is excellent.

The first TV show featuring Brian Greene – well, "The Elegant Universe" with the $3.5 million budget – was released in 2003 and I liked it a lot. It was also fun to watch the stars of the program, most of whom I know in person. Cumrun Vafa was really excited to be an actor in this show with abilities enhanced by computer/TV tricks. His sons were said to have loved it, too. It was also insightful to listen to amusing conspiracy theories explaining why Andy Strominger's scenes were ultimately omitted, especially because Andy's explanations were obviously true. ;-)

Unfortunately, I don't possess my copies of the DVDs: as far as I know, Hong Liu of MIT hasn't returned it but maybe I lost the disks after he did.

Brian Greene's second book is about many aspects of space and time that were clarified by modern physics. Among many things that are true and other things that could be true, there are also some wildly incorrect statements about the arrow of time. I guess that Brian Greene's third major book, "The Hidden Reality", could be partly incorporated into "The Fabric of the Cosmos" TV show as well.

The DVD and Blu-ray will be sold at amazon.com and elsewhere on November 22nd. It already has 4 reviews: one of them was written by Barack Obama who urged the other tthree reviewers to obey the laws of causality while reviewing DVDs.