Back Through the Wormhole

Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, the hit (as these things go) show from the Science Channel, has commenced with its second season. It shows Wednesdays at 8 p.m. Eastern/Pacific time. If you watch tomorrow night’s episode, “Is Time an Illusion?”, there’s a good chance you will see me in a bar fight. Or at least in a bar, with fighting going on around me. And I’m pretty sure that if you wait until July 27th’s “Can We Travel Faster Than Light?”, you’ll see me throwing a Slurpee out of the window of a car to demonstrate addition of velocities. (What you won’t see is the long discussion we had about whether we should call it a “Slurpee” or a “Slushee.”)

I appeared on one episode of the show last year, and I’ve been on a few other science documentaries. But I don’t usually plug them ahead of time; not, as anyone who reads the blog will attest, out of any general reluctance to plug my stuff, but because you typically don’t get to see these shows before they air. And I’d just as soon not be associated with a complete piece of garbage.

But on the basis of what I’ve seen so far — last week’s episode, and several from last year — as well as talking to the show’s creators, I genuinely think that Through the Wormhole is well above the usual standard of quality one expects for these endeavors. Not that anything is perfect — there are one or two times when you’ll be thinking “how in the world did that person get interviewed here?” But there’s clearly been a lot of effort made to get the science largely right, and more importantly to take on big topics and tell something approaching a coherent story about them. Programming like this is growing thin, even on Discovery and the Science Channel, so when it appears and succeeds it should be applauded.

Also? Morgan Freeman read my book. So I at least owe him this much of a plug.

24 Comments

24 thoughts on “Back Through the Wormhole”

  1. Freeman did an interview on the Daily Show during which he claimed that scientists think that dark matter has something to do with God. It was awful to watch. Can you set him straight, Sean?

  2. Freeman was also on the Jimmy Fallon show recently and said something about how the universe can’t expand. Maybe he was saying something that was essentially true but just worded it poorly, or not, I’m not really sure what he was going for.

    It is too bad that, no disrespect to Morgan Freeman, it’s almost impossible (outside of the Colbert Report) to get real scientists talking about real science in understandable yet accurate language on national popular television. Johnny Carson at least had the Amazing Randi and Carl Sagan on regularly.

  3. Through the Wormhole is one of the few shows on the “Science” channel or any Discovery channel that is even remotely scientific. At least they didn’t have you on that pumpkin tossing show that Discovery attempts to pass off as science.

  4. Well, except that I had my parents call me after the show to tell me about how it explained why most cosmologists think the universe is finite.

  5. I started watching this show (1) because I want to know more about the nature of the universe and life (2) because Morgan Freeman hitched his horse to it.

    I was disappointed.

    I don’t want to blame Morgan Freeman for the writing, but I do want to blame him for parroting such obvious malarkey.

    In the style of so many disappointing “documentaries” today, the narrator asks deep, probing, philosophical questions that the show doesn’t even attempt to answer.

    This style of “ask a deep question” but don’t answer it is the same kind of hogwash passed off as “facts” in the documentary called Pyramid Code.

    A lot of effort is put into CGI that then doesn’t yield an understandable answer to the question.

    This show proves my premise that most TV shows should be 15 minutes long. Fewer commercials, less wasted time.

  6. I’m still hoping Morgan Freeman manages to get the proposed film “Rendezvous with Rama” off the ground [ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0134933/combined ].

    At one point it was reported that he’d had to pull out, due to a dodgy ticker; but quoting from that IMDB page “Morgan Freeman says, “We’re still pushing for ‘Rendezvous With Rama.’ That’s a got-to-be-done movie. Just have to figure out how to do it. I’ve been trying for — I don’t know — 15 years now to get a script.”

    For flip’s sake, surely _someone_ in Hollywood can come up with a decent script!

    I agree his “Through the Wormhole” is far better than some recent cosmology documentaries, not least because it isn’t intolerably flashy (literally). The other month I started watching some documentary on the Solar System, and after incessantly repeated images of planets and spacecraft zipping past one after the other I started feeling queezy and getting a migraine. Had to change channels and watch a program on leaf cutter ants to recover!

  7. Brian Cox’s Wonder of the Universe does what this sounds like it’s trying to do but is hosted by a scientist and is really good!

  8. John R Ramsden

    In his documentaries, Brian Cox seems to utter each sentence from the top of a different mountain in a different continent. Each episode must cost about a million dollars in travel expenses! But he is good, although I find his window licking grin somewhat irritating and disconcerting.

  9. So true, on every other episode, I ask myself “Why the f*** is this guy on here?!”, but it’s pretty good apart from that. Stuart Hameroff with his “quantum consciousness” pisses me off every time, and he was on the show! I will definitely watch the episodes!

  10. This link from “Through The Wormhole” is fascinating, especially considering the condition of this academic neurosurgeon’s brain – very clear experience which changed his view on NDEs.

    http://science.discovery.com/videos/through-the-wormhole-2-near-death-experience.html

    I once had a vivid dream of Richard Feynman giving me a kind of disembodied tour around space and various galaxies, saying “Hey, isn’t this all wonderful!”, in his inimitable style. Not sure if that counts though.

    This link here is also really powerful stuff, which I’ll bet nobody here knows about – and a British investigation! (by the well known UK investigative journalist, Donal MacIntyre) – strong data on actual PHYSICAL evidence for life after death.
    Moving spectacular lights, detailed messages on unopened films in plastic tubs, levitating crystals and much more – all multiply witnessed by many observers, including scientists from the UK and US.

    I think Morgan Freeman should definitely include this on his hit list!

    http://www.theafterlifeinvestigations.com/

  11. Sean, are you really promoting this series? First ep is about the soul, near-death experience (!), quantum entangled neurons (?!), etc.
    PS. I bought your book and found it hugely interesting. YOU should have a documentary series.

  12. Panini

    …the soul… – but if true?

    “…to man’s experience a body has been given, a body which is his body – a fragment of ambiguous space…

    …whose peculiar and irreducible spatiality is never­theless articulated upon the space of things…”

    Michel Foucault, The Order of Things

    Now I do not think Foucault explicitly knew about the quantum vacuum or whatever – but a tantalising comment, no?

  13. Hey Morons quit with the Orthodoxy. The kids here are already making their own Prototypes of Engines..Getting ready to go to Moon for stuff..OH? Fallon NV 5-6th Aug 2011, Announcement, but we submitted this to News agencies months ago…Most are now using it in the know, the Cotterell/Engleman Model of Space/Time is all the rage…

  14. Alan, I’m not dismissing all that. I’m just saying that this series gives too much credit to pure fantasy. Then, only then, they get in a lab and show some real research.
    I find it difficult to listen to two sides of a story where one is reasonable and testable and the other is bonkers. That’s all 🙂

  15. Liberalism's A Sickness

    Um, why did they choose Morgan Freeman to do this show? What are his credentials? No legitimate scientists out there with good speaking voices?

  16. Panini

    If something taboo challenges Man’s position of authority, what does he do? Below is a study on a similarly difficult subject.

    “Modern sovereignty is anthropocentric, constituted and organized by reference to
    human beings alone. Although a metaphysical assumption, anthropocentrism is
    of immense practical import, enabling modern states to command loyalty and
    resources from their subjects in pursuit of political projects…”

    http://ptx.sagepub.com/content/36/4/607.full.pdf+html

    And with stuff like this from senior scientists:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_the_Universe

    http://arxiv.org/abs/0704.0646

    I wonder whether the kinds of phenomena I mention above are actually less strange ! ; – )

  17. Matter – with space as the kind of deep ground for all matter, this energy, and matter as a kind of ripple on it – us in particular – ripples on a deep energy, can this tie in to what the true nature of the “self” may be?
    Take say the Dirac equation, so precise as a description of electrons, but with this description in fields, then QED etc. of the important physics which describes us, I am interested in asking the question, “does this get really to what we are?” even when you go beyond nuclear physics.
    Because you have this energy you see, which is beyond even this above known physics description and may be infinitely subtle, having undiscovered properties – and I don’t think this is a cop out statement, simply because there is a vast range of scale between matter as described within the distances covered by QED physics and the Planck scale, 10 power (-33) cm. So there could be structure and properties there. Now our body, this “fragment of ambiguous space” a la Foucault, derives from it, sort of IS it and may have properties to do with this vast range of distance structure.

    I just think something may be being missed here, as to our true nature. David Bohm made this comment once about a guy who works in a bank and that is all he thinks that he is. And then you’ve got this idea about his actual structure deriving from this almost infinitely subtle ground of existence and with hidden properties. In this way maybe the self could actually be revealed through possible exploration, if possible, of this subtle structure, rather than being something fixed. Unlike this poor fellow’s fixed idea of himself as just a bank clerk.

    Maybe, though, in his quiet moments he suspects something else? Anyway, some ideas.

  18. I watched the first couple of episodes of this show, then couldn’t stand any more. The science is generally not very good and sometimes just embarassing. ANYTHING done by Brian Cox, including appearances on Graham Norton’s chat show, beats this for both science content and entertainment value.

  19. Populist science is like software documentation, and also like sex.
    When its good, its very very good, and when its bad, its still better than nothing.

  20. I had my first encounter with this series last night with “Is Time an Illusion?” Once again, I was left feeling that physicists are, by and large, an ornery bunch.

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