Einstein's Big Idea
(2005)

The story behind the world's most famous equation, E = mc2

Released: 2005-10-11

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Over 100 years ago, Albert Einstein grappled with the implications of his revolutionary special theory of relativity and came to a startling conclusion: mass and energy are one, related by the formula E = mc2. In "Einstein's Big Idea," NOVA dramatizes the remarkable story behind this equation. E = mc2 was just one of several extraordinary breakthroughs that Einstein made in 1905, including the completion of his special theory of relativity, his identification of proof that atoms exist, and his explanation of the nature of light, which would win him the Nobel Prize in Physics. Among Einstein's ideas, E = mc2 is by far the most famous. Yet how many people know what it really means? In a thought-provoking and engrossing docudrama, NOVA illuminates this deceptively simple formula by unraveling the story of how it came to be.

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Andrew Callaway

as Maupertuis

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Julian Rhind-Tutt

as Antoine Lavoisier

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Shirley Henderson

as Mileva Maric

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Ty Glaser

as Marie Anne Lavoisier

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Andy Crabbe

as Habicht

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Samuel West

as Humphry Davy

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Brendan Fleming

as Hermann Einstein

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Philip Herbert

as Count de Amerval

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George Layton

as Emilie’s Father

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Christopher Eccleston

as Narrator (voice)

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John Lithgow

as Narrator (voice) U.S. edition

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