The Language of Television by Albert Hunt

Author:Albert Hunt [Hunt, Albert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138997943
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2016-01-21T00:00:00+00:00

Project Two: Sam Spade meets Johann Kepler

We'd committed ourselves in the Open Night project to making a videotape in response to an educational television series. In the second project we were committed to taking a subject that would be acceptable in terms of conventional education and to exploring what would happen if we tried to present that subject in the language of popular entertainment.

We selected an episode in the history of science. We chose it because we already had an image in mind that was drawn from old movies — the kind of old movies that continue to attract large TV audiences.

We took, as a basic text, Arthur Koestler's account in The Sleepwalkers of Kepler's discovery of the laws which laid the foundation of modern physics. Koestler rejects the conventional image of the scientist as a cool, rational man, working his way logically from one hypothesis to another. Koestler sees the true innovator in science as a man driven by passion for an idea. Both passion and idea may be irrational. The discoverer moves from one guess to another in a trance-like state, stumbling on the laws of nature like a sleepwalker in a dream.

To Koestler, the 16th century scientist, Johann Kepler, is a perfect example of the sleepwalker. Consumed by a passion for proving that the universe is the embodiment of a divine harmony, Kepler stumbles, in his search for that harmony, on the laws governing planetary motion. Even the details of his search offer Koestler evidence of sleepwalking. Kepler himself describes how, at the beginning of a series of calculations about the orbit of the planet Mars, he makes a simple mathematical error. Towards the end of the calculations, he makes another error: and “these two errors — it is like a miracle — cancel out in the most precise manner”. When, after a seven-year battle with the orbit of Mars, he stumbles “entirely by chance” on two figures that relate to each other, he writes, “I felt as if I had been awakened from a deep sleep!” adding, “Oh, what a foolish bird I had been!”

We intended to offer, as an image of the sleepwalker, Raymond Chandler's popular detective, Philip Marlowe. For Marlowe also contradicted a conventional image. According to the conventional image, a detective, rationally and logically, gathers together clues, examines them carefully, and comes up with a reasonable solution. But Marlowe operates much more like one of Koestler's sleepwalkers. He stumbles from one guess to another. We intended to present Kepler as Philip Marlowe. But when we began working on the videotape, we, too, stumbled on an idea.

Kepler's passion for discovering the truth about planetary orbits came from a conviction that the distances between the planets were in some way related to the special relationships of the five perfect solids when they were fitted one inside the other. He devised a drinking cup, made up of the five perfect solids, “which would then be a true and genuine likeness of the world and model of creation in so far as human reason may fathom.

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