Film

The theory of everything.

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Tomorrow a new film which chronicles the personal life of astrophysicist Stephen Hawking is released to US audiences. The Theory of Everything is an adaptation of a memoir by Hawking’s first wife, Jane Wilde, and centers around their time together in Cambridge during the 1960s as Hawking begins his PhD research and struggles against the onset of ALS (i.e. Lou Gehrig’s disease).

The movie is reportedly first and foremost a personal story between Stephen Hawking and Jane, and the groundbreaking physics for which Hawking is famous takes a back seat.

Simulated black hole.

Stephen Hawking is one of the most recognizable theoretical physicists, both in academic corridors and in popular media. Within the field of astrophysics, he has greatly advanced our understanding of black holes and the singularity known as the Big Bang at the beginning of our universe. By weaving together the complex theories of general relativity (important for very massive objects) and quantum mechanics (which describes very very small objects), Hawking was the first to predict that black holes can lose small amounts energy, or radiation, over time. This theory, now known as Hawking radiation, is most likely the work for which he could win a Nobel prize.

Stephen Hawking is director of research at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge.

Dennis Overbye (New York Times) has had a chance to review the film and praises its heart and the performance by leading actor Eddie Redmayne for personifying the crippling effects of ALS.

But Overbye notes that the process of actually doing science could have been portrayed a bit more accurately. He correctly emphasizes that science is not advanced by isolated and magical flashes of genius granted to a privileged few, but rather by shear perseverance in collaboration with others, building incrementally on the knowledge within a field. To suggest otherwise is to negate the years of effort, uncertainty, false starts, and collaborative work that goes into a revolutionary idea.
Many famous scientists have also stressed this.

“Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.”

— Thomson Edison, Inventor

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

— Isaac Newton, Physicist and Mathematician

“What a deep faith in the rationality of the structure of the world and what a longing to understand even a small glimpse of the reason revealed in the world there must have been in Kepler and Newton to enable them to unravel the mechanism of the heavens in long years of lonely work!”

— Albert Einstein, Physicist
Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge, where Stephen Hawking completed his PhD work.

Nevertheless, it is undeniable that Stephen Hawking is one of the most brilliant physicists alive today, despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles in his life, and I very much look forward to watching The Theory of Everything. I’m also anticipating some familiar scenes — many of the scenes were filmed in my college, St. John’s, while I was a graduate student in Cambridge.

And Hawking himself has lent a personal touch to the film. His computerized voice helps narrate the film and he even met with actor Redmayne on occasion, lending approval to what must have been a strange thing to witness — a film about yourself played by someone else.

Tomorrow is a big day for black holes in movies: Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar is also being released and we look forward to bringing you a review of the physics next week!

Tired? Troubled love life? Try banning the gadgets from the bedroom.

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Late-night fiddling with devices stimulates your brain and invades what should be a quiet space. Time to turn off

Man on mobile in bed

‘The ill effects of poor sleep on relationships is well documented.’ Photograph: Justin Pumfrey/Getty Images

Two films I watched at the London Film Festival this month jarred with me in an unexpected way. Drinking Buddies and Afternoon Delight are what might be called mumblecore movies – all improvised dialogue and plots that home in on relatively minor events in the emotional lives of their protagonists. I’ll spare you my reviews, but an incidental aspect of these self-consciously naturalistic portrayals of contemporary urban life depressed me. Namely, the proliferation of gadgetry in the bedroom, by which I do not mean sex toys.

In a scene from Drinking Buddies, for example, one half of a couple sits in bed one evening, catching up with her emails on a MacBook, while her boyfriend conducts a text conversation on his smartphone, thus rudely inviting interlopers into their intimate space. Technology similarly seeps into the bedroom in Afternoon Delight, with post-coital stressy business texting rendered as quotidian as brushing your teeth.

There is nothing unusual about this set-up these days – it’s just that these films held a mirror up to a facet of my life that I already didn’t really approve of, and projected it on to a giant screen. My bedside table usually has a phone and an iPad lying on it, as well as paper books; sometimes there’s even a laptop too, although I do try to put that out for the night with the cat, the tiny pulsating “sleep mode” light is just too obviously anathema to actual human sleep.

Is nowhere sacred? Must the ability to text, tweet or post images be at our fingertips while we’re sleeping? The fact that our books, films and alarm clocks often live in the same devices as our various inboxes and social network apps lazily justifies our need to take them to bed with us, but I am not alone in checking my emails, or catching up with current affairs last thing before lights out. I know this is not conducive to proper, satisfying sleep but I do it anyway, and wake up with a headache.

I’m just as bad when I wake up. The first thing I do in the morning is pick up my phone to check the time. Then I compulsively unlock it to “check the weather”. But as soon as my eyes fix on the screen, my attention scatters a thousand different ways, taking me down all sorts of rabbit holes until I finally set it back down, with a twitchy brain and still no idea whether it’s going to rain because it’s the one thing I forgot to check.

Another justification for taking these devices to bed is that there simply isn’t enough time to keep up with the continuous tidal wave of computer-related chores and correspondences, and therefore any quiet moment is fair game for a quick holiday-planning/sock-buying/online-banking session. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that, if the Top five regrets of the dying article (which serially returns to the most-read list on this website) were to be updated in 2033, an item about never allowing yourself a break from screen-based life to daydream or properly rest, even when ill in bed, makes an appearance.

The actor, Daniel Craig, recently credited banning technology from the bedroom as key to his keeping his marriage to Rachel Weisz a happy one. I see his point. Aside from all of this gadgetry allowing friends, colleagues and chores to gatecrash the marital bed, the ill-effects of poor sleep on relationships is well documented. One study, which chimed with me, demonstrating the positive effects of gratitude on overall wellbeing, found that poor sleepers were more selfish and less likely to feel gratitude.

Poor sleep, of course, has countless other negative effects on health, happiness and productivity. And insomnia may predict Alzheimer’s. It is not uncommon for people to tweet or update their Facebook status in the middle of the night when they have insomnia. Aside from the brain-scrambling stimulation of the internet, there is evidence that staring at backlit screens keeps brains more alert and suppresses melatonin levels (although the jury’s out on whether it scrambles melatonin production enough to disrupt sleep .)

I read this fact in an article reporting that Arianna Huffington, the doyenne of digital publishing herself, has banned phones and computers from her bedroom in the name of a good night’s sleep. This reminded me of how I felt when I read that many senior staff at Silicon Valley behemoths including Apple, eBay and Yahoo send their kids to schools based on the Steiner approach, that ban screens from their classrooms and frown upon their use at home: suckered. Could it be that these guys know better than to get high on their own supply?