What a disappointment! I didn't expect this to be a documentary, but this film just gets one thing wrong after another, and generally for no good reason, all while wasting much of it's limited run time on useless, if not insulting, subplots. The number of errors would take hours to compile, but here are just a few that jumped out (in no particular order)
* Chlorine gas is yellow-green, it doesn't look like smoke. A simple Google search by the effects guy would have gotten it right. * On a related note, at Second Ypres the German chlorine gas attack was committed against French Colonial troops, not the British, so that whole plot point was nonsense. * There is no way Arthur Eddington would not have known who Albert Einstein was, as during Einstein's "miraculous year" of 1905 he had written four of the most important papers in physics ever published, including a resolution of the photoelectric effect for which he would win the Nobel Prize in 1921. Einstein had been a comet streaking across the physics world, and rather than being unknown in 1914, he was considered "over the hill" because he had withdrawn to spend 6-8 years trying to reconcile relativity with gravity. * There is no evidence Max Planck ever helped Einstein on the General Theory. * There is, as far as I know, no proof that Eddington was a homosexual. Not that I care personally, but losing 10-15 minutes of run time that could have been used to improve the story seems quite the waste. * Small thing, but as a former theoretical physicist you don't lie on a rug, or lie in bed, and scrawl equations on a sheet of paper. You sit at a desk and work in an orderly way (I was never much of one for notebooks, and in that was a disorganized outlier). * There is no way any scientist would assemble all of his peers to witness him finding out if an experiment was true or false. These things are so delicate you need to understand the answer before sharing it. (I can accept the dramatic license here, but after so many other errors...)
In short, this was the science history equivalent of a Lifetime or Hallmark movie. Really disappointing because the actual story is so compelling. For anyone interested in a good take on the subject I strongly recommend the book, The Hunt for Vulcan by Thomas Levenson, which traces the history of both this story AND the 50 year search by astronomers to resolve the anomalies in Mercury's orbit by finding a "hidden" planet even closer to the sun.
* Chlorine gas is yellow-green, it doesn't look like smoke. A simple Google search by the effects guy would have gotten it right. * On a related note, at Second Ypres the German chlorine gas attack was committed against French Colonial troops, not the British, so that whole plot point was nonsense. * There is no way Arthur Eddington would not have known who Albert Einstein was, as during Einstein's "miraculous year" of 1905 he had written four of the most important papers in physics ever published, including a resolution of the photoelectric effect for which he would win the Nobel Prize in 1921. Einstein had been a comet streaking across the physics world, and rather than being unknown in 1914, he was considered "over the hill" because he had withdrawn to spend 6-8 years trying to reconcile relativity with gravity. * There is no evidence Max Planck ever helped Einstein on the General Theory. * There is, as far as I know, no proof that Eddington was a homosexual. Not that I care personally, but losing 10-15 minutes of run time that could have been used to improve the story seems quite the waste. * Small thing, but as a former theoretical physicist you don't lie on a rug, or lie in bed, and scrawl equations on a sheet of paper. You sit at a desk and work in an orderly way (I was never much of one for notebooks, and in that was a disorganized outlier). * There is no way any scientist would assemble all of his peers to witness him finding out if an experiment was true or false. These things are so delicate you need to understand the answer before sharing it. (I can accept the dramatic license here, but after so many other errors...)
In short, this was the science history equivalent of a Lifetime or Hallmark movie. Really disappointing because the actual story is so compelling. For anyone interested in a good take on the subject I strongly recommend the book, The Hunt for Vulcan by Thomas Levenson, which traces the history of both this story AND the 50 year search by astronomers to resolve the anomalies in Mercury's orbit by finding a "hidden" planet even closer to the sun.