The TV Zone

(Annovi Frizio)

When Mariah Carey can (and does) name an album for Einstein's most famous declaration (E=MC squared) then you come to one insanely obvious conclusion - Einstein was very, very influential. So influential that the normal boundaries of that influence - science, after all - are so porous that someone named Mariah Carey can name her latest album after a paper he wrote/published one hundred and three years ago.

It's an obvious thing and a spectacular thing, this influence, but I wonder as I watch tonight's big two-hour History Channel doc, "Einstein" (at 9) whether this has escaped the network. "Einstein" comes by way of a very accomplished and talented History Channel production star, Susan Werbe (creator of the "Ten Days that Unexpectedly Changed America") but this one feels so placid and so measured that you can't help but wonder, or at least I can't help but wonder: Where's the drama and where's the excitement? I wait and I wait...

Perhaps here's the problem: Television has long had a whale of difficult time conveying not just Einsteinian discoveries but those of other great scientists who came before and - particularly - after, because the complexities are so mind-boggling that to reduce them for TV consumption transforms them to gibberish; there was one outstanding exception that I can think of, Brian Greene's incandescently brilliant "The Fabric of the Cosmos" on PBS several years ago. But that was a rare gem.

Where was the great excitement in the life of Einstein? The ideas, of course. Those difficult, knotty matters that even physicists once had trouble understanding (though, of course, are now as simple as one, two and three...) And yet History seems largely incapable or uninterested in explaining those in any great detail - so much so that it basically blips past the four great papers of the "miracle year" (1905) and just barely explains that particularly famous third one, on electrodynamics, which explained, or posited, "special relativity," or the structure of space/time and other goodies.

Mariah's "equivalency" paper (you know - E=mc squared?) That comes up in the second hour, and certainly had better insofar as it did establish the underpinnings for the atomic bomb.

There are some wonderful and hugely knowledgeable people quoted throughout - CUNY's Michio Kaku, and Walter Isaacson who wrote the lavishly praised bio and Neil Tyson DeGrasse who needs no introduction.

But for the doc itself? I'm afraid you're going to have to count me...bored.

Grade: C

(The above picture? Now that IS exciting; it was created by Annovi Frizio, an Italian design artist; here's the website for a closer look at his work.)