"What is the stuff of the world?" asks the dead-ringer-for-Linus-of-the-Peanuts-gang narrator of Smithsonian World's The Quantum Universe. This hour-long documentary looks at the shadowy rules and elements that make up the "infinite onion" that is our universe. The "imaginably small" basis of the "inexplicably large" is an endlessly fascinating question that's been pursued by Newton, Einstein, Heisenberg, and Schrodinger, to name just a few. Given that rich history of inquiry, it's downright amazing that this program on that very topic is so dull. It's admittedly not without its moments, such as a tour of the two-mile-long Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC), but the majority of the program features too many dry and unimaginatively filmed close-up interviews with various researchers and astrophysicists. Throw in some horribly over-the-top performances from Tom Stoppard's spies-and-physics play, Hapgood, and you've got an astonishing yawn of a show. Those with a hankering for Hawking should stick to the real thing. Too heady for kids and too cursory for adult aficionados of this kind of thing, The Quantum Universe is an unfortunate letdown. For a documentary on the history of "the mind teaching the eye to see," you'd think the end product would be a little more riveting. --Bob Michaels
