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Me & Isaac Newton
A Michael Apted Film
Monday, October 05, 1998
ME & ISAAC NEWTON is a feature length documentary - a journey into the hearts and minds of seven scientists who have solved mysteries that are centuries old, revealing the creative side of the scientific endeavor. Scientists, like artists, think “outside the box.” In Michael Apted’s hands, the personal adventure of notable scientists becomes accessible and intriguing. ME & ISAAC NEWTON unearths the motivations of some of the most distinguished scientists of our time, from ages 38 to 81. From Madagascar lemurs and a unified theory of everything to language disorders and robotic communities, our scientists talk about their inspirations. From their earliest scientific questions in childhood to their most personal ponderings, these scientists reveal their histories and professional obligations to affect the world.
Patricia Wright was a biology major, a former teacher and housewife when she got her husband an owl monkey as a pet. Fascinated with the animal, she soon carted her family off to study monkeys in South America, later started a unique lemur preserve in Madagascar, and in the process saved a rainforest and mobilized a village to become self-sufficient – all seeded by a MacArthur “genius” grant she received.
Michio Kaku is a theoretical physicist and the co-founder of string theory; he explores hyperspace and parallel universes, saying, “I believe in this cosmic order…My goal in life is to try to find that question, no more than an inch long…a unified theory of all creation that would allow us to read the mind of God." From simple unified theories to complex ones, Steven Pinker, Director of MIT’s McDonnell-Pew Center for Cognitive Neurosciences, studies the human mind by looking at how language is used. “What is fear, what is color, what is disgust? The more we understand about the brain, the more we realize the brain is an exquisitely complex material object and that everything is going to be increasingly understood in terms of the physiological process of the brain,” Pinker believes.
The film asks whether science is a field mostly for the young. Gertrud Elion, 81, thinks not. She had her greatest ideas after she turned 60. One of only ten women to win the Nobel Prize in Medicine, she is drawn to science by a religious respect for nature. Elion says that discovering things that have been unknown for centuries is “a union, if you like, with nature, which says, I’ve gotten some of your secrets and hopefully nature doesn’t object.” Maja Mataric is the Yugoslavian born Co-Director of Robotics Research Lab at USC. Her work is at the frontier of artificial intelligence and side steps the natural world. “We’re not bound by biology,” Mataric says, and they can program anything, “so we have the freedom to really say ‘here’s uncharted territory; let’s go there.’” Ashok Gadgil, the inventor of a water purification device that brings purified water to villages in developing countries says, “I sense no divine purpose in the universe at all…the issue to me is, what good does the science do…[if none,] I don’t find it interesting, cause I don’t think we have a whole lot of time left.”
Directed by Michael Apted · Produced by Jody Patton & Eileen Gregory · Cinematography by Maryse Aberti Edited by Susanne Rostock · Presented by Paul G. Allen
ME & ISAAC NEWTON will premiere at the 1999 Toronto International Film Festival.
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Jason J. Hunke,
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