| View Larger Image | Atom: Building Block of the Universe DVD | DVDStarring: Artist Not Provided
| List Price: | $59.95 | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | DVD | | Rating: |  | | Run Time: | 20 minutes | | Format: | Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC | | Studio: | Educational Video Network, Inc. | | Number of Discs: | 1 | | Aspect Ratio: | 1.33:1 | | Release Date: | August 06, 2004 | | Sales Rank: | 153,239rd |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Description
Exciting, computer graphic animation illustrates your cosmic journey...inside the atom! This is a basic look at the building blocks of the universe. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 3.5 based on 3 reviews)
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This is NOT the 2007 BBC documentary series! by daydreamin mommy (Northern Virginia)  3 Stars
August 10, 2009
Despite what other reviews have recently suggested, this dvd is almost certainly NOT the lovely 3 part documentary that Professor Jim Al-Khalili from the University of Surrey hosted & narrated. That series was originally done for BBC Four and showed most recently (to my review) in the US on the Science Channel on Saturday, August 8th, 2009. The BBC documentary series was done in 2007, and this 20 minute dvd has a date of 2004. I must be honest and admit that I know nothing of this particular dvd (the one for which I am writing this review), but want to caution others not to buy it believing that it is the 3-hour program with the same name. This is likely yet another 20 minute movie that teachers can use to help supplement their classroom instruction, and is most likely not the great 3 hour documentary that recently showed on TV. If you have actually spent sixty bucks on this 20 minute dvd please add a more useful review than my own!
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I have watched quite a few by Trust But Verify (too damn near a noisy highway)  5 Stars
August 08, 2009
I realize that this program for the book reading masses is slightly dated, but it is one of the best that I have ever seen on modern physics from the beginning. I did miss the first hour of the 3 hour program. I was doing my usual flip thru the history and science channels on Saturday morning looking for something better than the usual crap, and I stumbled onto the beginnng of the second hour of ATOM. The second and third hours filled many understanding and knowledge holes for me, and I watch a lot science and history TV. No other program I have seen has put as much into 2 hours as this one has. I took college physics for physics majors and engineers some 45 years ago, and I do try to keep up with at least the basic ideas on modern or so called "particle physics". And I have seen many more detailed and focused physics programs, but they never integrated it as well as this one did. Forget about the hyperbole, the program gets the job done quite well. And the program gives you an ever so slight glimpse of the look and feel of being in academic physics. I have roamed around Cal Tech a few times and marveled about what these guys and women are up to.
Right now I am scrambling around trying to figure out how to avoid paying $[...] for what I think what should be listed as a 180 minute (3 hour) program length, not 20 minutes as shown. If the 3 hour dvd were $29.95, I would buy it today and send it to a good friend. Of course I would watch it again first and then loan it.
If you are on the outside looking in "on modern physics", this is best start I have ever seen. Reality is wierd, and physics is just using poetic labels to organize our logical understanding of this weird stuff.
Even a federal judge might get the drift of what it is all about.
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Shocking, Scandalous, and Terrifying! by The Dilettante 3 Stars
September 27, 2008
The information here is interesting, but the presentation is a serious groan-fest, incorporating all of the worst cliches of the TV documentary medium. Our host, the well-meaning but hapless Jim Khalidi, should know better than to say corny things like "Q.E.D. was a LITERAL quantum leap!" He melodramatizes his subject to the point of embarrassment. Each new discovery is "shocking," "scandalous" or (my favorite) "terrifying." He suggests, without a hint of irony, that if you want to "terrify" a physicist, you should approach him or her with the Schoedinger's cat problem. (A much better way to do this is to tell them you just watched What the Bleep Do We Know!?: Discovering the Endless Possibilities for Altering Your Everyday Reality and you want to talk about it. Hehe.)
The problem is that, unlike marine biology (or even astrophysics), particle physics just can't be taught on television. (The only computer graphics are animated equations, rotating dramatically against a blue sky.) And, apparently, no one will watch science TV if it isn't somehow "terrifying." I was not frightened or scandalized. And, despite multiple viewings of this show, I lack even a glib understanding of quarks.
I get the sense that Khalidi would have gone on at length explaining these minutiae, but some hard head at BBC seems to have kept him on a short leash. Instead, he quickly passes over the physics, moving on to the human dramas of the physicists themselves. Fair enough. But these people didn't have wild sex or die violent deaths. Sometimes their squabbles were epics of scientific struggle; more often they were embarrassing symptoms of emotional immaturity.
The bottom line is that I should have known better than to think there was a Lazy Man's Guide to Quantum Mechanics. This is no free lunch. Still, if you can look past the cheese, it is one of the better narrative accounts of particle physics for the layperson.
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