Time Warp
Discovery Channel
8-9pm Wednesdays
MIT PhD student Jeff Lieberman is the star of the new Discovery Channel series Time Warp, which showcases everyday events in slow motion, then explains the science behind what we’re seeing. Lieberman is the science guy, revealing how everything works; his co-host Matt Kearney is the video guy, capturing activities in super slow motion. While the show covers many exciting occurrences, from car crashes to water balloons, it’s the motive behind the show—to motivate viewers to analyze what they observe—that’s even more enthralling, and Lieberman himself is clearly very invested in this motive.
Lieberman, who already holds two bachelor's and master's degrees, has always been interested in the scientific side of things. He laments, however, that most people don’t see themselves as capable of—or even interested in—understanding science and its ability to reveal how things work. He asserts with enthusiasm, “All of us are scientists automatically. The fact that you can walk means you’re doing one of the most difficult dynamic balancing systems in the world—it’s just that we don’t necessarily have the theoretical background to analyze it.”
And that theoretical background is often determined early on. Lieberman laments, “I think by the time you get into third grade you’ve decided whether you’re going to be a math/science person or not, and that’s because your teachers have kind of told you, and that’s a really sad failing.” Most of us who have ended up in literary careers can relate to this tale of tracking. A bad grade in fractions doomed us to a life of laptop-tapping; a lucky laboratory experiment put our friends in line for laboratory jobs. It’s a big gap.
Lieberman doesn’t expect everybody to become a scientist, but he does hope that his show, and others like it (such as Mythbusters and How It’s Made), will help people regain that fundamental scientific trait: curiosity. If we don’t wonder, we’ll never discover, and Lieberman is all about promoting that sense of wonder. He laments that most people don’t understand how objects around them really work, and they don’t even think about what they don’t understand. Science is not often at the forefront of our lives, but television is one way to put it there. And, as Lieberman puts it, “The power of showing someone something instead of telling someone something is amazing.”
Tune in tonight for Time Warp, and find more Lieberman after the jump.
And Lieberman shows us things in other ways beyond his television show. He’s been involved in complex robotic and mechanical art projects for years, not to mention more traditional photography endeavors. His most recent major undertaking, Absolut Quartet, is a musical-mechanical collaboration between Lieberman and Dan Paluska. Absolut Quartet takes in a user’s input of notes, then makes it into an entire symphony, reproducing the notes in sequence using various mechanical devices, mostly robot arms that fling rubber balls against keyboards to create the appropriate sound. Such an undertaking is obviously complex, but Lieberman is quick to note that it would have been even more so without help, saying the Quartet would have required “a million times as much work” if it had been just himself and Paluska.
In addition to promoting scientific curiosity, Lieberman wants to “try to make people realize how amazing it is to collaborate,” because there’s no way any of us can be as much alone as we are together. Even projects that Lieberman completed by himself—such as art projects like an electromagnetically suspended light bulb—aren’t meaningful without viewer response, something that Lieberman also finds important in his show. Instead of watching his show, he prefers to “watch people’s reactions” to it, learning from their behavior what they respond to and how the show could become better. Lieberman says, “The show is important because of the potential to reach so many people. It’s something that I don’t take lightly.” Likewise, of his work with robots, Lieberman emphasizes, “I’m much more concerned about people than I am about robots. The robots are a tool” to create devices that can help humanity. The question to ask is, not how great are these new technologies, but “What new things can happen with these technologies?”
In keeping with his desire to help others, Lieberman laments our inability to understand the scope of the global warming crisis, saying that we need to act quickly if we’re to redirect our future. He describes the difficulty humans have in understanding events on a large scale, saying that we can best understand measurements from 1mm to 100meters, making it difficult to comprehend the enormity of the environmental problems we face. Perhaps with a little more scientific curiosity and ingenuity, however, we could come to confront our situation head-on.
“The thing that I think about probably more than anything is that we have all the ability to stop all the problems we have right now in the world,” from the energy crisis to poverty and homelessness, “and it’s not our priority,” says Lieberman.
add to digg
add to stumble upon
add to reddit