Want to sound smart at your next cocktail party? PBS’ “Genius by Stephen Hawking” can help.
In the new series, airing two episodes Wednesdays at 9 p.m., the famous professor/astrophysicict is out to prove that average Joes have the ability to think like the greatest scientific minds in history.
The six-part series features Hawking (via video message) giving three contestants a series of physical and mental challenges designed to answer a big scientific question like “Where did the universe come from?” by breaking it down into a series of “aha moments.”
“[The premise was] could we take ordinary people and get them to have the first idea and then the second idea without ever feeling like we were telling them the ideas? As much as possible, we tried to let them work it out themselves,” executive producer Ben Bowie tells The Post. “We tried not to have anybody with real science background. These are just curious, intelligent people.”
Each episode starts with a challenge based on a historical genius (the show is based on Hawking’s book “On the Shoulders of Giants,” about the history of ideas). In last week’s premiere, participants took on the question “Is time travel possible?” by using the New York City street grid system to explain Descartes’ cartesian coordinates, and learn that time is the fourth dimension. Subsequent exercises used three DeLoreans to explain the space-time continuum and a model black hole to demonstrate Einstein’s theory of relativity.
And in the end, the three participants did travel forward in time — 20.485 nanoseconds, that is — with the help of a 5,000-foot elevation change and two atomic clocks.
Future episodes will look to do the same for complex topics like evolution, why human life exists and our place in the cosmos.
“We tried to always come up with something amazing at the end and change the way you see the world forever,” Bowie says. “People are going ‘I can’t believe it,’ with their head in their hands. We did want to try to blow people’s minds with the reality of what science has.”