Einstein and Eddington

Einstein and Eddington
BBC DVD cover, featuring Andy Serkis as Einstein (top) and David Tennant as Eddington (bottom)
Written by	Peter Moffat
Directed by	Philip Martin
Starring	Andy Serkis David Tennant Lucy Cohu Jim Broadbent Rebecca Hall
Theme music composer	Nicholas Hooper
Country of origin	United Kingdom
Original language(s)	English
Production
Producer(s)	Mark Pybus
Running time	89 minutes
Release
Original network	BBC Two
Original release	22 November 2008

Einstein and Eddington is a British single drama produced by Company Pictures and the BBC, in association with HBO. It featured David Tennant as British scientist Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, and Andy Serkis as Albert Einstein. This is the story of Einstein's general theory of relativity, his relationship with Eddington and the introduction of this theory to the world, against the backdrop of the Great War.

It was first broadcast on BBC Two on 22 November 2008.

The prelude is set in 1919 on Eddington's expedition in Príncipe to observe the solar eclipse that year, before moving back in time to 1914. At the outbreak of the First World War, Eddington is appointed chief astronomer at Cambridge by Sir Oliver Lodge and instructed to research Einstein's work and defend the Newtonian status quo. Meanwhile, Einstein is lured back from Zurich to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin in an attempt to aid the war effort by embarrassing Britain by disproving the work of its great scientist Isaac Newton. In Berlin, with his marriage already under tension, Einstein falls in love with his cousin Elsa.

A Quaker and therefore unable to go to war, Eddington sets out to bid farewell to his friend William Marston, as the latter goes off to war as an officer, but just misses Marston's train. He then presents his lecture to his fellow astronomers at the university — defending Newton, but still thinking Einstein might be right — and takes the German Müller family into his home after saving them from a violent anti-German mob. When Einstein's wife arrives in Berlin, she discovers Einstein's affair and leaves him, whilst Eddington faces down protesters who despise his status as a conscientious objector. Einstein arrives late at a demonstration of Fritz Haber's poison gas and is so disgusted by this application of science to murder that he rejects an offer to convert his citizenship back from Swiss to German and refuses to sign the "Manifesto to the Civilized World", a list of prominent German scientists, artists and academics supporting the war.