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The Man Who Knew Infinity (2015)
A Movie Worth Watching
At last, a mentally stimulating movie in the intellectual desert of today's world of entertainment. Although it deals with the achievements of a genius along with a glimpse of his personal life, it highlights the extraordinariness of the mind behind them with simple examples without going too much into the intricacies of higher mathematics which makes it particularly enjoyable to mathematically-minded lay persons.
Some perceptive reviewer has mentioned Galois in this context which was highly interesting. Galois was a young prodigy who had the habit of writing the answers next to mathematical problems without showing the intermediate steps. Unfortunately it also resulted in his being twice denied admission to Ecole Polytechnique, the prestigious French university. Although his answers to the questions in the admission test were all correct, he was baffled when the examiners insisted that he show the steps because to him the answer itself was the next step.
In the words of Ovid - In this place I am a barbarian, because men do not understand me.
However, the main difference between Galois and Ramanujan seems to have been that while Galois would work out the answers to problems in his head at lightning speed, Ramanujan would come up with formulas to solve problems entirely in his head without showing their step-by-step derivation and, if the movie is correct, when he was challenged by the Cambridge faculty to show their derivations in a systematic manner, he retorted why he would have to do that because he could "see" them.
Cambridge even appointed a professor named Hardy to "teach" Ramanujan the "proper" way to derive the formulas although according to Hardy's own admission, those sessions always left him wondering who learned more from whom.
And that was the crux of the matter. An analogy could be the difference between a blind and a sighted man of comparable intelligence. While the blind man could detect the presence of a wall only by walking up to it until he actually touched it, the sighted man could tell its presence from a distance because he could see it. In fact, he could also see other things like the clouds, the sky, the sun , the moon, the planets, the stars and the galaxies which the blind man would have no idea about.
Which also makes one wonder whether such gifted people have higher levels of perception that enable them to "see" things that the rest of us can only find after painstaking effort or perhaps not at all and when we are unable to understand their special power, we label it as "intuition".
Incidentally Galois too, like Ramanujan, had suffered an untimely death.
The Theory of Everything (2014)
Totally Disappointing
This type of movie must be factually correct above everything else. Instead it is a hodgepodge of 50% theatrics, 49% personal life drama and 1% science and even that of questionable accuracy.
For example, it seems to imply that the theory of singularity was developed by Hawking and it was immediately hailed by the scientific world which is totally at odds with the account given by Hawking himself in his own book.
The theory of stellar collapse was developed by Subrahmanyam Chandrasekhar on board a ship on his way to England for higher studies at Cambridge. It was based on his flash of insight that while Pauli Exclusion Principle is limited by Relativity, Gravity is not and therefore when a star above a certain mass (later named Chandrasekhar Limit) begins to collapse, it completely disappears into a mathematical abstraction called singularity. This shockingly alien concept was hotly contested by the scientific orthodoxy and ferociously attacked by his supervisor Sir Arthur Eddington and opposed by Einstein himself even though the mathematics was irrefutable ("A Brief History of Time", P. 83-85).
In fact, Eddington's hostility was so vicious that Chandrasekhar had to switch his field of study although it later formed the foundation of the theory of Black Holes which was built upon by others like Oppenheimer. Arthur I. Miller's "Empire of the Stars" gives a detailed account of Chandrasekhar's scientific career and his rivalry with Eddington.
Hawking is unquestionably one of the most brilliant minds of our time but to credit him with the achievement of another brilliant mind and to totally distort history does grave injustice to both of them and misguides the viewers.
Countdown to Zero (2010)
Then, on the other hand ...
While the movie goes into great details about the dangers of nuclear weapons, it neglects to mention an important possible beneficial aspect of them.
There are massive objects traveling in the space called NEO (near-Earth object) which come dangerously close to the Earth from time to time. Then there are those called Earth-Crossers whose orbits actually intersect that of the Earth. Astronomers tell us that a collision with such an object is inevitable some time in the future and it could be catastrophic for all life on our planet.
If such an object is ever spotted coming at us (Jupiter had such an event only a few years ago) then those much-maligned nukes and ICBMs may be the only weapons in our arsenal with which to defend ourselves and we will not have a whole lot of time to manufacture them from scratch if we do not have some already on hand. While it may not be possible (or even desirable) to destroy such an object altogether, its trajectory may be deflected just enough to make it miss the Earth.
Therefore it might be wise for us to think things through before taking any drastic measures for their total elimination.
W. (2008)
Very disappointing
Plenty of theatrics and fluff and flashbacks galore but very little in the way of facts. It might satisfy those looking for just another work of fiction spun around a well-known personality but the serious viewer interested in a biography, documentary or satire will be disappointed. As for me, it was a total wastage of time and money and I had a feeling of reprieve when it thankfully came to an almost abrupt end.
Although the movie attempts to create the impression that Bush was merely a simpleton who was misled into the Iraq war after 9/11 by the evil Cheney-Rumsfeld-Tenet gang, it is in stark contradiction to the real events as evidenced from the following quote from someone in the know:
Those present who had attended the NSC meetings of the previous administration - and there were several - noticed a material shift. "In the Clinton administration, there was an enormous reluctance to use American forces on the ground; it was almost a prohibition," one of them recalled. "That prohibition was clearly gone, and that opened options, options that hadn't been opened before."
The hour almost up, Bush had assignments for everyone. Powell and his team would look to draw up a new sanctions regime. Rumsfeld and Shelton, he said, "should examine our military options." That included rebuilding the military coalition from the 1991 Gulf War, examining "how it might look" to use U.S. ground forces in the north and the south of Iraq and how the armed forces could support groups inside the country who could help challenge Saddam Hussein. Tenet would report on improving our current intelligence. O'Neill would investigate how to financially squeeze the regime.
Meeting adjourned. Ten days in, and it was about Iraq.
- "The Price of Loyalty" (p.75) - Paul O'Neill, Bush's first Treasury Secretary and Chairman of Alcoa.
Since this meeting took place just ten days into the Presidency and way before 9/11, it clearly shows that Bush was determined to attack Iraq from day one and was calling all the shots and 9/11 was only a convenient excuse for public consumption unlike what this movie seemingly wants its viewers to believe.