This mind-boggling, controversial idea is just one of the ideas presented through a combination of storytelling, clever video editing, and computer animation in a new, four-part “Nova’’ series, “The Fabric of the Cosmos,’’ that kicks off tonight on Channel 2 at 9 p.m. The series, based on the book of the same name by Columbia University physicist Brian Greene, zooms in on a different topic in each episode. Tonight’s show deals with the nature of space itself. Then, Greene takes us on an increasingly weird tour, digging into time before zooming into the tiniest quantum realm, where the rules of nature get freaky. The final episode highlights the strangest idea yet - that there are multiple universes out there.
In the world of popularizing science, this series is a big, splashy event. Greene, a veteran popularizer of science, has experience in ably demystifying very complicated physics for a general audience. A natural showman, he’s aided in the series by top-notch computer animation and a cadre of top scientists, who help him introduce everything from Einstein’s initial insights into the nature of space and time, to the discovery that won the Nobel prize in physics this year - the surprising and initially hard-to-swallow finding that the universe’s expansion is speeding up.
The show is teeming with easy-to-grasp analogies that strip away most of what people find hard about science, with physicists not only explaining ideas, but also why they are exciting, delightful, or strange. Tonight’s episode in particular ends on an unsettling note, bringing up the possibility that our world, our reality, is merely a holographic projection.
