The program gave a hint of what females might have been capable of had we not had to struggle under cultural practices that are still making it harder to publish important scientific thoughts than were we male.I believe there are psychological sex differences, but we can't settle on what they are. That which is statistically measured (e.g., responses to questionnaires) may be trivial. Or the difference may be of great and obvious universal significance (e.g. anatomical and motivational aspects of the sex act). Considering the obstacles to intellectual achievement and communication, that women were depicted in the program is a tribute to what may ultimately turn out to be a true statistical female intellectual superiority. There are some signs of it among school children. Or there may not be. It is hard to hold impinging variables constant. One thing is certain: women have been more capable than formerly they were almost universally believed to be.In addition to social obstacles there was our dangerous biological role (which is much safer today). But what is allowable or encouraged differs greatly in different parts of the world. It has also changed greatly during the seven decades of my lifetime in this culture.

In reference to tarmcgator's comment of December 2005, I have only to add to his generally excellent review of this production that while I fully agree that we should not rewrite history in order to delude young women into believing that our sex's role was more instrumental than it actually was in the scientific processes of history, I do commend Johnstone and Bodanis for mentioning some roles women did play in the development of this enormous scientific discovery. While I myself am not a scientist, I have long been interested in quantum physics, but had never heard of du Châtelet or Meitner before seeing this production. Bravo to Dr. Bodanis for bringing their names - and their work, however small a contribution it may have been in truth - into light in his book (and now this t.v. production).As for the problem of rewriting history in order to assuage minorities, well, I understand Mr. Tarmcgator's taking issue in this case with the (possibly) fallacious reinvention of female scientists' roles in order to encourage young women of today to go into the sciences. I think we would be far better to discuss the possible reasons that young women are not going into or staying in the sciences as readily as men. This, however, is the one of the "giant" questions that we so far cannot answer - just seeing the reaction to Harvard president Lawrence H. Summers' speech last year (http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/nber.html) is evidence of that (as an aside, I'm not about to say that he was horribly misguided in the questions he posed, which I think need badly to be discussed, but that perhaps - as has been widely suggested, in fact - he jumped to conclusions regarding the supposed greater weight of the role of genetics when comparing the sexes' abilities in mathematics).No, I do not want to be lied to about women's roles in history (however dreary and depressing they usually turn out to be), but to quote you: "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." One wonders indeed, sir; unfortunately, we will never know how great she would have been had she had the chance to attain the same education and encouragement as her male peers. All other things being equal, why couldn't she have been as great a mind as Newton or Liebniz? I, as a woman, was inspired by "E=mc²" to hope that she could have been. The authors seem to be attempting to give her this due, and perhaps in exaggerating the role that she did have, they are merely paying homage to the role she might have had, had she not been a prisoner to the time in which she lived. Can you honestly begrudge them this effort?

Maybe it had more substance to someone not educated in science, someone whose never heard of basic physics, or someone from America, but this was 6 minutes of material diluted into 2 hours of endless synthetic dialog, narration, and wide shots of grass. The 2 hour length seems only to boost publicity and could have easily been condensed in to NOVA's normal 60 minute length.The first 90 minutes are about the unknown scientists behind early physics. There is no mention of Newton, Gallileo, DaVinci, like you expect from these stories. Instead its all about unknown scientists behind things like uranium chemistry. The story is most useful not as a means of learning about Einstein but learning about how the business of science works. A lot of unknown scientists did a lot of hard work only to get wiped out of the history books by historical events and each tiny piece of modern physics represents the entire life work of most of these scientists.The only reason this movie is staying on the hard drive is because it pays a lot of attention to the heroines behind E=mc2. Heroines who today would be depending on men to win the bread while they drove their kids to soccer games in their husband's SUVs, were making huge discoveries in the 18th and 19th centuries. A good line is when Einstein tells his wife the connection between time and light. She replies, "I'll check your math". Pretty good stuff.The last 30 minutes switch to autopilot, recounting how E=MC2 was used and is used today. It seemed to overemphasize an insignificant branch of research in USA and neglect the truly mind blowing research being done in CERN.

i thought the movie was fascinating. the movie tells the story of famous scientist albert einstein and all of the other people that helped him achieve his famous equation E = mc^2 (all indirectly of course). i am a physics student right now and really learned a lot although i'm sure non-physics people will be interested just the same. although it does explain a lot of physics theory, it isn't so much information that it's boring or anything like that. the actors are great and so is the narration (john lithgow)... it also looks fantastic in hd! i highly recommend checking this movie out, it's playing now on pbs (under the title Nova) and i'm sure it will be replayed frequently.