MovieChat Forums > I.Q. (1994) Discussion > How much is real?

How much is real?

posted 20 years ago by sarahalyse
9 replies | jump to latest

After watching this movie, I was left wondering how much of it is real? Obviously a number of the characters were real people; Einstein, Eisenhower, etc. But how much else was true? Did Einstein have a mathematician niece, did her father have a comet named after him, etc etc.
Obviously the storyline itself can't be very realistic, considering that Louis Bamberger died in 1944 and Eisenhower didn't become president until
1952...so how much IS real?

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If you were me...you'd be good-looking.

[–] sutcal 20 years ago

Are you serious..the only truth to movie was Einstein existed.

This was a fictional story.

[–] sarahalyse 20 years ago

Oh, so President Eisenhower was a fictional character too?
How silly of me!

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If you were me...you'd be good-looking.

[–] sutcal 20 years ago

I was purely referring to the romantic interaction and Einstein :)

[–] myropod 20 years ago

wow you didn't even read the post, did you?

[–] MigsDC 17 years ago

I just watched this, and was amused that at the end it said, "The characters and events in this motion picture are fictitious...." No exceptions. Einstein, Eisenhower, etc., they're all made up. I wonder if there are legal reasons why they can't modify that to say "many of the characters."

(I love how these boards let conversations continue after years of silence. It's a curious way in which instant communication permits very slow, drawn out communication.)

"You know what happens to people who shut everybody up?"
"They lead quiet, peaceful lives?"

[–] robebrown-1 16 years ago

The settings were real (except Einstein's house was actually next door to the one used in the film). And the time-deprivation experiments in the psychology lab really did occur at Princeton around this time. Also, Einstein did like to sail on Lake Carnegie in Princeton. The equation Ed discusses in his "lecture" is real, although it doesn't refer to cold fusion. And Einstein really did have a heart attack during the period of the film... but he didn't recover enough to create a remote-control device for a car.

[–] mortface 16 years ago

I recognised one of the equations mentioned as looking sort-of-kinda like a Schrodinger equation for some specific potential, but I didn't understand what system the Hamiltonian could refer to? Did anyone else understand more? Was the 'grand equation' in his lecture the Hamiltonian of the spin-orbit interaction in the Hydrogen atom?

[–] therealshapeshifter 13 years ago

According to Wikipedia:

His father once showed him a pocket compass; Einstein realized that there must be something causing the needle to move, despite the apparent "empty space".-Schilpp (Ed.), P. A. (1979), Albert Einstein – Autobiographical Notes, Open Court Publishing Company, pp. 8–9

And:

Einstein and Maric married in January 1903. In May 1904, the couple's first son, Hans Albert Einstein, was born in Bern, Switzerland. Their second son, Eduard, was born in Zurich in July 1910.

It says that Einstein did work with Boris Podolsky and Kurt Gödel, but it seems that Nathan Liebknecht is fictional.
And Einstein doesn't seem to have had any nieces.

[–] Eightythreeyearoldguy 13 years ago

Of course, the quote "God doesn't play dice with the universe" is actual along with his feeling against either arms or space races.

Life, every now and then, behaves as though it had seen too many bad movies