Broadcast: Wednesday 8 August 2007 10.05pm-11.35pm BBC 4
Recorded: Thursday 16 August 1am-2.30am
In this one-off documentary, David Malone looks at four brilliant mathematicians - Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing - whose genius has profoundly affected us, but which tragically drove them insane and eventually led to them all committing suicide.
The film also talks to the latest in the line of thinkers who have continued to pursue the question of whether there are things that mathematics and the human mind cannot know. They include Greg Chaitin, mathematician at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center, New York, and Roger Penrose.
Dangerous Knowledge tackles some of the profound questions about the true nature of reality that mathematical thinkers are still trying to answer today.
see notes below:1 documentary, only split for technical reasons. broadcast in 1, watch in 1, get both parts, don't start to watch pt2 before pt1.

BBC - Dangerous Knowledge (2007)




Information

Broadcast: Wednesday 8 August 2007 10.05pm-11.35pm BBC 4
Recorded: Thursday 16 August 1am-2.30am

In this one-off documentary, David Malone looks at four brilliant mathematicians - Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt G?del and Alan Turing - whose genius has profoundly affected us, but which tragically drove them insane and eventually led to them all committing suicide.

The film also talks to the latest in the line of thinkers who have continued to pursue the question of whether there are things that mathematics and the human mind cannot know. They include Greg Chaitin, mathematician at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center, New York, and Roger Penrose. 

Dangerous Knowledge tackles some of the profound questions about the true nature of reality that mathematical thinkers are still trying to answer today.


see notes below:1 documentary, only split for technical reasons. broadcast in 1, watch in 1, get both parts, don't start to watch pt2 before pt1.

Part 1: God's messenger
The film begins with Georg Cantor, the great mathematician whose work proved to be the foundation for much of the 20th-century mathematics. He believed he was God's messenger and was eventually driven insane trying to prove his theories of infinity. 

Ludwig Boltzmann's struggle to prove the existence of atoms and probability eventually drove him to suicide.


Part 2: The Enigma
Kurt G?del, the introverted confidant of Einstein, proved that there would always be problems which were outside human logic. His life ended in a sanatorium where he starved himself to death. 

Finally, Alan Turing, the great Bletchley Park code breaker, father of computer science and homosexual, died trying to prove that some things are fundamentally unprovable.












Technical Specs

GSpot v2.70a avi file details:
------------------------------
Filename.....:
Filesize.....: 585,075,498 bytes (2 parts of 560MB each)
Runtime......: 44:43.000 (67075 frames)

Video Codec..: XviD ISO MPEG-4 (B-VOP//)
Video Bitrate: 1603 kbps
Aspect Ratio.: 672x384 (1.750)
Framerate....: 25.000 fps
Bitstream....: Unpacked

Audio Codec..: 0x0055 MPEG-1 Layer 3
Audio Bitrate: 127kbps 2ch VBR 48000Hz
Language.....: English

Release Notes

Because I don't rls files over 1024MB because my standalone doesn't like them, I split this doc.
Although it covers 4 parts with titles at each start (see screenshots), there wasn't a nice place to cut right there, so I ended up cutting on a fade-out/in without any music, which happened to be right in the middle as well. It's near the end of Boltzman's section. Result is 2 files of 560MB, which are 1/8th dvd size.

Related Documentaries
Absolute Zero [1] [2] [3] 
Atom [1] [2] 
Elegant Universe [1] [2] [3]