A few nights ago, Morgan Freeman was on The Daily Show promoting his new movie that comes out next week, “Now You See Me.” There’s a science-fiction part to the movie, but that’s not how we ended up with Morgan Freeman explaining physics to Jon Stewart. Morgan Freeman is also a narrator for “Through the Wormhole” on the Discovery Channel. As a result, Freeman knows (at least a little!) about science. I remember getting pretty psyched when I was watching the show live a few nights ago and Freeman says, “It’s easy, I’ll explain it to you,” when referring to concepts from physics. Anyhow, I tried to embed the clip below, but it seems you can’t embed Comedy Central clips on WordPress, so I found a version of the interview on YouTube. It’ll be here until it, invariably, gets taken down from YouTube.
I wanted to talk briefly about one of the examples that Freeman used: the balloon. Several years ago, I saw some videos of a physicist — Nassim Haramein — and they were captivating, to say the least. The way that he presents the material makes it seem very logical, but my scientific literacy isn’t such that I’d be able to say he was right or he was wrong. I know that Haramein’s partnered with one of the big names in science, but like I said, I don’t have the scientific literacy to debunk anything.
From looking on the internet, it seems that a number of people don’t think that Haramein has stumbled onto anything and a number of people do think that he’s stumbled onto something. Like I said, I really don’t know, but I do remember Haramein using the same balloon example that Freeman used in talking to Jon Stewart. You’ve seen the Freeman clip above, so I’ll embed a clip of Haramein talking about the balloon. This video has more in it than just the balloon, so I’ve set the video to start at the time when Haramein begins to talk about the balloon (short intro into it). You can probably stop watching around 37:30 to get the gist of the point I’m making.
Pretty cool, eh?
When I lived on Kauai, I did have the chance to meet with Haramein a few times and he certainly seems like a nice guy. We never chewed on science concepts, but I probably wouldn’t have been able to keep up for too long. If you’re interested in Haramein’s work, I’d urge you to look into his new website: The Resonance Project. It looks like he’s got a new movie coming out called: The Connected Universe. He also has a couple of other movies: Crossing the Event Horizon and Black Whole. If you watched the clip above, you saw a short snippet of Crossing the Event Horizon. There are 4 DVDs in the set. If you don’t have that kind of time, you might want to start with Black Whole — it’s only about an hour and a half.
Jeremiah Stanghini 
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