I am a middle-aged scientific ignoramus but fairly knowledgeable about history. From that perspective, I found Gary Johnstone's film interpretation of David Bodanis's book engaging and enlightening.
I can imagine this film as an excellent introduction to modern physics and the history of science for middle school and high school students, as well as a basis for further reading by curious adults. I doubt that either Johnstone or Bodanis intended their work as an in-depth exploration of Einstein or his predecessors. This documentary shouldn't be held to that standard. It's for novices.
One quibble that probably will result in my hanging: The treatment of women in this documentary smacks of "women's studies" and the politically correct. Emilie du Châtelet was no doubt a brilliant woman who tried to make the most of the limited intellectual opportunities that women could pursue in early 18th-century France; but one wonders how much more influential she was on the course of the development of physics than, say, Newton or Leibniz. Marie-Anne Lavoisier was no doubt of great assistance to her husband, but his intellectual achievements in chemistry were essentially his own. Lise Meitner no doubt had to face a double whammy of being a woman in male-dominated academia as well as being Jewish in Hitler's Germany, and no doubt Otto Hahn didn't do enough after World War II to promote recognition of her achievements; but the depiction of their relationship in the film is, from what limited research I've done so far, open to dispute. (Yes, I need to do more research.) When Maleva Maric offers to check Einstein's math, I took it more as a wry commentary on her rather unimpressed attitude about being married to a genius, than any indication of an instrumental role in formulating Einstein's theories. No doubt (again!) he greatly benefited from her support, but does that make her a collaborator? With the exception of Meitner (who truly hasn't received enough credit for her work), the portrayals of the women in this film as somehow instrumental in the development of the ideas that would become the Theory of General Relativity and particle physics seem overstated, a sop to the current fashions of history and academia. The problem is not that there haven't been brilliant and talented women before the late 1900s; but that for all their brilliance and talent, the male-dominated cultures of their times prevented such women from having much opportunity to influence the development of science. Going back and recognizing them now is justice, but historians like Johnstone and Bodanis shouldn't overemphasize the significance of their work, as he does here, especially with Chatalet. Young women of today need all the encouragement they can get to go into intellectual and scientific occupations, but not at the price of distorting historical fact.
One other thing: I find the reference elsewhere among the other comments about this film having "more substance to ... someone from America" quite offensive. I'm sure everyone at the CERN (Western Europe's principal particle physics research facility) will be bored by this movie; of course, there were in 2003 more Americans working there than there were Europeans working at similar facilities in the United States. And of 129 Nobel physics laureates since World War II, only 55 percent were United States natives, or earned the prize for work done in the United States. Sorry, the United States has several things to answer for at present -- but a general slur on the intellect or education levels of U.S. residents is bigoted and inappropriate. This is not a film for physicists, but for those of us who would like to understand their passion for what they do.
ADDENDUM: Re: the comment by "mireillebelleau." I doubt that she and I have anything to disagree about, really. The point that I was trying to make (and may not have made clearly) is that in the context of THIS film -- which ostensibly deals with the development of Einstein's Theory of General Relativity and of modern physics generally -- the INFLUENCE of Emilie du Chatelet's work seems exaggerated. Emilie was undoubtedly a brilliant woman, and had she lived in a more enlightened Enlightenment, she would not have suffered the professional restrictions that her society imposed. But she did suffer those restrictions, and that meant that her accomplishments, however brilliant, were largely lost on the other scientists of her time. Later generations of scientists, in the late 18th,19th, and early 20th centuries, seem to have neglected her altogether -- until more recent scholars began making a conscious and conscientious effort to rediscover the work of Chatelet and women like her. Again, the issue is not the quality or originality of her work, but the impact she had on subsequent physicists, down to Einstein. I would argue that, in the context of this film, the case for her profound influence is not made.
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