Einstein's Universe

Based on Nigel Calder's best-selling book "Einstein's Universe", this fascinating documentary of the same name has been digitally re-mastered and restored to deliver Einstein's greatest achievement to home audiences like never before!

Narrated by the charismatic Peter Ustinov and hosted by author Calder, EINSTEIN'S UNIVERSE was first broadcast on the centenary of Albert Einstein's Birth; March 14th, 1979. In the joint BBC/WGBH-produced program, Ustinov gives home audiences front row seats to scientific theory and history at the renowned University of Texas-Austin McDonald Observatory. There, he is thoroughly enlightened on Einstein's greatest achievements, especially General Relativity, by a renowned team of scientists. Included are experiments to help understand gravity, warped space, how light responds to gravity, the "Doppler effect" and how radio waves, as used in police radar, are an unbeatable way of measuring speed. From these simpler experiments much larger concepts are drawn, such as the discovery of a Binary Pulsar, the nature of black holes and how they are created, and the ultimate theory of how the universe was formed. Other demonstrations measure the speed of light, how time passes more slowly for people traveling in an airplane, the incredible accuracy of the Atomic Clock in Washington, DC and how time itself would appear to stop at the surface of a black hole.