• Home
  • About the Author
  • About the Blog
  • About the Book

Posts Tagged ‘interview’

Who Flung the Moon?

Thursday, August 27th, 2009

I did, that’s who! And on national TV, no less. But let me back up and tell the story from the beginning.

As regular readers of this blog know, I recorded an interview in June for a program on the History Channel called “The Universe.” Here are links to my previous blog posts about the interview:

  • History Channel, Part 1
  • History Channel, Part 2
  • History Channel and “This Week’s Finds”
  • History Channel Appearance — Next Tuesday!

The episode, called, “The Day the Moon was Gone,” debuted Tuesday night. Kay and I both thought that this was one of the best episodes of “The Universe” that we have seen. In my previous posts, I expressed some apprehension — about errors of fact that seemed to be creeping into the script, and about the general tendency of the program to exaggerate things. However, I am happy to report that most of the concerns I had did not materialize.

There were lots of good things about the episode. I was very interested to hear what the other scientists would say, and I thought that for the most part they had interesting ideas, including some that I would never have thought of myself. I really enjoyed seeing Bill Hartmann again. Everything he says just sounds so cogent and well thought-out. To me, he has the same sort of avuncular, “That’s the way it is,” presence that Walter Cronkite did.

I got quite a bit more camera time than I expected, and that was nice in a vain sort of way. The coolest thing was that they added some CGI effects to a couple of my clips. One time, when I was explaining tidal friction, I made some hand gestures to pantomime the moon moving outward from Earth. They dubbed in a little moon graphic to move along with my hands, so that it looked as if I was swinging the moon around in a circle and then flinging it away. What a feeling of omnipotence! I told Kay, “I should have called my blog, ‘Who Flung the Moon’!”

Other good points about the program: The pacing was not as frenetic as some episodes of “The Universe.” There was much less repetition than there often is. Most, though not all, of the topics were presented in logical sequence. Fundamentally, I think the concept worked. And that was a surprise to me.

When I first heard about the topic, a program about how Earth would be different if we had no moon, I was very skeptical. How, I wondered, could scientists answer a question with a fundamentally unscientific premise? The moon cannot disappear. So in some sense, you can make any statement you want, and no one can really prove or disprove it.

Nevertheless, I think that the episode worked because it got the scientists to think in unfamiliar and unexpected ways about the moon, and to bring out facts that they knew that maybe the average person doesn’t. Case in point: When I tell you that the solar tide is about 1/2 the size of the lunar tide, you yawn and say who cares? But when I tell you that if the moon went away you would suddenly have a huge tsunami as the water redistributes itself, all of a sudden it’s kind of interesting.

There was one minor disappointment for me. The narration did, on three or four occasions, try to argue that the giant impact that formed the moon is also responsible for Earth’s plate tectonics. I have previously discussed in this blog why I do not think that conclusion is correct. However, in the context of the whole episode it really was not that big a deal. I think that 95 percent of the audience probably did not even notice or care. I’m afraid that I lectured Adrian, the director, on this point so many times that by the end I was sounding pedantic even to myself. So I’m letting it go. Don’t let it spoil your enjoyment of the episode!

If you missed “The Day the Moon was Gone,” according to the History Channel website the episode will air again on September 8 at 8:00 Eastern time. I suspect it will also air at least a couple more times this week, but the website did not have those times listed.

Tags: giant impact, History Channel, interview, tides, Universe, William Hartmann
Posted in Media, Science | 1 Comment »

History Channel, Part 1

Saturday, July 11th, 2009

 

One of the coolest perks of publishing a book about the moon was the chance to talk on television about it. My first interview on the History Channel aired in 2007, and just a month ago I had a chance to film a second one. For readers of my chess blog, this is already old news, because I wrote about it last month. I would have written about it here, but I had not created this blog yet! In fact, my upcoming appearance on the History Channel was one of the things that motivated me to start this blog.

In my next entry I will write about what has happened with respect to the History Channel episode since my interview. But first things first — here is the story of the interview itself (copied and pasted from my June 15 post in “dana blogs chess”).

Last Friday (June 12) I had my second interview with the History Channel for their program “The Universe.” If you have visited my static web page, you might know that I appeared in an episode from season one of this program, back in 2007, called “The Moon.” They are now recording episodes for the fourth season, which will air this fall, and interviewed me for another episode about the moon. I’m probably not supposed to say anything in detail about it (for example, the tentative title), so I’ll leave it at that.

The producer, cameraman and sound engineer came up to Santa Cruz to film an interview with me and one other person. They asked me to suggest a location and I picked Natural Bridges State Beach. I went to scout out the location on Thursday and wondered if I might regret it, because it was kind of windy.

As it turned out, it was even windier on Friday, and the shoot was quite an adventure! Here is the film crew and me, setting up:

Dan, the sound guy, is on the left. I’m in the center; the producer, Adrian, is right next to me, and the video guy, Ken, is on the right. By the way, I might have Dan and Ken backwards. If so, I apologize!! Adrian really liked this location. As you can see, there is an estuary in the background that meanders out to sea. You can’t see the ocean in this shot (it’s behind the bluff), but from the spot where Ken is setting up the camera you could easily see the ocean with some nice breakers in the background.

The adventures started right away, when the wind blew their reflector off its tripod and into the estuary! The reflector is a piece of white foam board that is supposed to reflect the sunlight onto the dark side of my face, thereby softening the shadows. Here is Dan, after fishing the reflector out of the estuary:

Fortunately they had a backup. But with the wind gusting at around 30 mph, it didn’t look as if it would last long, either. What to do? Well, as luck would have it, my wife, Kay, had come along to watch the interview and take photographs. I suggested that she could hold the reflector to keep it from blowing away, and eventually they agreed with me. Adrian said that when he earns an Emmy for this show, Kay can come up and accept the award with him!

Here Kay shows why they call the production assistants “grips”:

That wasn’t the only adventure. I brought a prop with me, a gyroscope to illustrate the principles of angular momentum. We shot a couple of takes where I would start the gyroscope spinning, hand it to Kay, then stretch a string between my hands, and then Kay would put the gyroscope onto the string. Notice that a key ingredient in this procedure was that I had to hold onto the string after using it to start the gyroscope spinning. Well, the third time we did it, I accidentally let go of the string, and when I looked down to see where it had landed, it was nowhere to be found. By then I’m sure the wind had taken it and blown it halfway to San Jose. So I’ll just have to hope that takes one and two were good enough.

(Sigh.)

Aside from that, the interview went pretty well. As always, I loved talking about the moon, and I hope that they will pick moments from the interview where that love and enthusiasm comes out.

Tags: angular momentum, History Channel, interview, The Universe, wind
Posted in Media, Science | 2 Comments »

  • Categories

    • Arrive (2)
    • Future exploration (6)
    • Just for Fun (10)
    • Media (18)
    • Meetings (7)
    • Missions (17)
    • Movies (1)
    • NASA (13)
    • Popular culture (4)
    • Science (29)
    • Survive (1)
    • Thrive (1)
    • websites (5)
  • Subscribe

    Subscribe in a reader
    Subscribe by email
  • Earthly links

    • dana blogs chess
    • Dana's website
  • Lunar links

    • Bad Astronomy
    • Emily Lakdawalla – Planetary Society Blog
    • Lunar Picture of the Day
    • Moon-Wiki
    • Paul Spudis – The Once and Future Moon
    • Space.com
    • The Big Splat, or How Our Moon Came to Be
    • Wandering Space
  • Recent posts

    • Hiatus
    • Obama’s Speech — Some Cheers, Some Jeers
    • Discover article on the Moon
    • New Scientist article
    • The Moon and Easter
    • Lunar water update
    • Change of Pace — and Puzzle
  • Previous posts

    • June 2010 (1)
    • April 2010 (3)
    • March 2010 (2)
    • February 2010 (1)
    • January 2010 (3)
    • December 2009 (3)
    • November 2009 (4)
    • October 2009 (2)
    • September 2009 (4)
    • August 2009 (5)
    • July 2009 (11)

Copyright © 2023 - Who Hung the Moon? | Entries (RSS) | Comments (RSS)

WordPress theme based on 9ths Current designed by web design