Black Holes: The Other Side of Infinity
Collaborator Biographies
Narrator: Liam Neeson
Liam Neeson is one of the leading international motion-picture actors today, and is recognized for his many memorable roles. He starred in the box-office phenomenon Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace (1999), playing the role of Qui-Gon Jinn, the Master Jedi Knight who bestows his Force-ful wisdom upon Obi-Wan Kenobi and the young Anakin Skywalker. In addition, Neeson was nominated for an Academy Award for his portrayal of Oskar Schindler in Steven Spielberg’s highly acclaimed Schindler’s List. Recently, Neeson provided the voice of Aslan in the Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, and has starred in other hits such as Batman Begins, Kinsey and Love Actually.
Composer: Richard Fiocca
Composer Richard Fiocca has a long list of award-winning film and television credits, including scores for PBS, HBO, the BBC, and all the major US networks. Recent work includes theme and scoring for the CBS newsmagazine 48 Hours, the Discovery Channel/Animal Planet’s Into the Lion’s Den, the IMAX feature Wildfire, and music and sound design for the Oscar winning HBO documentary Liberation: A Survivor Remembers. He also composed the score for CBS TV’s groundbreaking special on the World Trade Center attack 9/11. Recent collaborations with Thomas Lucas include Mysteries of Deep Space and Voyage to the Milky Way, both for PBS.
A frequent visitor to Prague as both a conductor and composer, Fiocca recorded the score for Black Holes: The Other Side of Infinity with the Czech Screen Orchestra.
Director: Thomas Lucas
Thomas Lucas has completed more than 20 major documentary films for NOVA, PBS, the Discovery Channel and other networks. He specializes in productions that make use of special effects and high-end computer animations.
Lucas got his start in 1985 with the production of a documentary for NOVA called “Tornado!” The film became one of the most popular productions in NOVA’s history, reaching an audience of tens of millions. It was also cited by Michael Crichton as the inspiration for the 1996 motion picture Twister. Lucas’ other productions have explored such diverse subject matter as the mysteries of deep space, cannibalism, cyborgs, the 1988 Yellowstone wildfires and hammerhead sharks, among other topics.
Black Holes: The Other Side of Infinity is Lucas’ first planetarium show. Using adaptations of the scientific visualizations from Black Holes, Lucas is directing a NOVA program called “Monster of the Milky Way” that will be broadcast on PBS in 2006.
Executive Producer: Joslyn Schoemer
Schoemer was bitten by the astronomy bug in 1990 when attending a lecture about wormholes and black holes. After receiving her undergraduate degree in astrophysics and math, she discovered a passion for sharing the excitement of astronomical discoveries and the exploration of space with the general public through films, exhibits and educational programs. She received a M.S. in museum and field studies, with an emphasis on informal science education.
Schoemer has worked on a variety of space science education projects for informal learning institutions. These include exhibits and programs at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, including Voyage!, a scale-model solar system permanently installed on the National Mall. She coordinated space projects for the Challenger Center for Space Science Education, the University of Colorado Natural History Museum and the University of Colorado’s Fiske Planetarium. Schoemer joined the Denver Museum of Nature & Science in 1999 as a project manager and worked on developing the Museum’s permanent space science exhibition, Space Odyssey. Black Holes: The Other Side of Infinity is her first all-digital planetarium show.
Science Director: Dr. Andrew J.S. Hamilton
Dr. Andrew J.S. Hamilton is a fellow of JILA (formerly the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics), and a professor in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he has worked since 1986.
Though Hamilton’s background is in mathematics and astrophysics and he has published about 60 papers on subjects ranging from supernovas to cosmology, his students helped pique his interest in black holes. Their strong desire to understand relativity led Hamilton to develop his first scientifically accurate general relativistic visualizations of black holes in 1996. With the help of one of his accelerated introductory astronomy classes, Hamilton used those visualizations to create a highly popular show on black holes that debuted at Fiske Planetarium at CU in 1997.
This content was adapted for a Web page called “Falling into a Black Hole,” which has received more than a million visitors since it went online in 1997. Hamilton continued to refine his visualization technique with the development of the “Black Hole Flight Simulator” during a yearlong sabbatical with the Denver Museum of Nature & Science in 2001 and 2002. The simulator, an elaborate software program, takes real, computational data about black holes and translates it into the images that are the centerpiece of Black Holes: The Other Side of Infinity.
Science Director: Dr. Lynn Cominsky
Dr. Lynn Cominsky has been a professor of physics and astronomy at Sonoma State University since 1986, and currently chairs the Departments of Physics and Astronomy, and Chemistry. At SSU, she also directs the education and public outreach (E/PO) group that develops science and mathematics curriculum resources for grades K–12, and is primarily sponsored by NASA.
Cominsky is a scientific coinvestigator and leads the education and public outreach team for the Swift Gamma-ray Burst Explorer Mission, launched by NASA on November 20, 2004, and featured in Black Holes: The Other Side of Infinity. Swift is studying gamma-ray bursts, the biggest explosions observed in the universe today. Cominsky serves in a similar capacity on NASA’s Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) mission (expected to launch in 2007), and on the European Space Agency’s XXM-Newton mission, which studies X-rays from black holes, neutron stars, supernova remnants and stellar corona.
NCSA Producer and Art Director: Donna J. Cox
Donna J. Cox is the director of visualization at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a professor of art and design. Her collaborative scientific visualizations are featured in a variety of large-format venues around the world, including the Academy Award-nominated 1997 IMAX film Cosmic Voyage, and on two American Museum of Natural History planetarium shows, Passport to the Universe and The Search for Life: Are We Alone? She and her team also provided the thrilling visuals used in the NOVA programs “Hunt for the Supertwister” and “Runaway Universe” on PBS.
Cox’s passion is bringing cultural scientific narratives to a wide range of audiences through innovative and aesthetic presentations of data-driven scientific simulations. In addition to her large-scale productions, Cox has authored many articles on the use of visualization in science, art, and information design.
NCSA Choreographer and Art Director: Robert Patterson
Robert Patterson is a visualization research artist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who has been collaborating with scientists to produce visualizations since 1989. Patterson has choreographed and art directed visualizations for NOVA, PBS, the Discovery Channel, IMAX and digital planetarium productions.
In addition, Patterson cocreated a virtual reality tool called Virtual Director, a voice and gesture controlled navigation and camera choreography system for use in analyzing simulation data and for collaborative design of visualizations. He has used Virtual Director in combination with other visualization technologies to create cinematic presentations of scientific data in the areas of astrophysics, astronomy, networking, atmospheric sciences and oceanography.
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