the triplets of belleville
by John at 3/11/2004 02:45:00 PM
Yuris writes:
Remember the equation in the early scenes of The Triplets of Belleville -- right under the stage... where the naked black girl with the bananas was dancing... (among other things) ??
It was, as we suspected, Einstein's Field Equation. It describes how matter creates gravity and, conversely, how gravity affects matter. It reduces to Newton's Law of Gravity in the non-relativistic limit (low velocities, weak gravitational fields).
It reads (as it showed up in the movie)
where Rik is the Ricci curvature tensor and R the Ricci curvature scalar. Tik is the stress-energy tensor. K is a gravitational constant. You will find the equation in short form (introducing the Einstein stress tensor Gik) as
This started me thinking about the possible relationship between general relativity and the theme of the film. The first thing I came up with was that the grandmother, Madame Souza, is stuck in her grandson Champion's gravity well, so her life revolves around his. Similarly, the dog Bruno's life revolves around his dislike of / fascination with trains. Both situations are due to unfortunate events in Champion's childhood (at which point I should make some comment about space-time and overlapping lightcones).
Other ideas?
Remember the equation in the early scenes of The Triplets of Belleville -- right under the stage... where the naked black girl with the bananas was dancing... (among other things) ??
It was, as we suspected, Einstein's Field Equation. It describes how matter creates gravity and, conversely, how gravity affects matter. It reduces to Newton's Law of Gravity in the non-relativistic limit (low velocities, weak gravitational fields).
It reads (as it showed up in the movie)
where Rik is the Ricci curvature tensor and R the Ricci curvature scalar. Tik is the stress-energy tensor. K is a gravitational constant. You will find the equation in short form (introducing the Einstein stress tensor Gik) as
This started me thinking about the possible relationship between general relativity and the theme of the film. The first thing I came up with was that the grandmother, Madame Souza, is stuck in her grandson Champion's gravity well, so her life revolves around his. Similarly, the dog Bruno's life revolves around his dislike of / fascination with trains. Both situations are due to unfortunate events in Champion's childhood (at which point I should make some comment about space-time and overlapping lightcones).
Other ideas?
