The Science Fiction Theater episodes are a hoot. If you can accept them as products of their time, they are actually remarkable glimpses into the past, and the future of technology. This show opened with a demonstration of a cloud chamber. I'll bet the number of people today who can tell you what a cloud chamber is represents only a tiny fraction of the population.
The story begins with a couple of odd ducks who appear at a boarding house, needing a place to stay. However, they lack money, and convince the woman who runs the boarding house to let them stay. They devour some of her husband's scientific texts overnight instead of sleeping, and in the morning head out to the institute to locate physicists.
The physicists are suspicious. They assume these guys are cranks, like many others who have paraded through the halls with some off-the-wall theories and ideas. But somehow Dr. Pliny knows some crucial details of astronomical features. "He was anything but a simple crackpot". Pliny offers free limitless energy, but requires "tritanium" which the institute seems to lack. But undaunted, he builds a machine that he refuses to patent (because it belongs to nature).
An institute psychiatrist diagnoses Dr. Pliny as a nut. Before finishing their device, they are chased away by the threat of the authorities coming to apprehend them. But they leave behind the device and the last piece the local scientists need to set off the Tesla coils and the flashing lights, and it breaks through the atomic age into the next level of knowledge, a new age of cosmic power.
Pliny and his assistant have moved on to the next institute that might entertain them. The series host wonders if other, wiser, more advanced civilizations could come to help us break through technological barriers someday. Or if they already have.
The story begins with a couple of odd ducks who appear at a boarding house, needing a place to stay. However, they lack money, and convince the woman who runs the boarding house to let them stay. They devour some of her husband's scientific texts overnight instead of sleeping, and in the morning head out to the institute to locate physicists.
The physicists are suspicious. They assume these guys are cranks, like many others who have paraded through the halls with some off-the-wall theories and ideas. But somehow Dr. Pliny knows some crucial details of astronomical features. "He was anything but a simple crackpot". Pliny offers free limitless energy, but requires "tritanium" which the institute seems to lack. But undaunted, he builds a machine that he refuses to patent (because it belongs to nature).
An institute psychiatrist diagnoses Dr. Pliny as a nut. Before finishing their device, they are chased away by the threat of the authorities coming to apprehend them. But they leave behind the device and the last piece the local scientists need to set off the Tesla coils and the flashing lights, and it breaks through the atomic age into the next level of knowledge, a new age of cosmic power.
Pliny and his assistant have moved on to the next institute that might entertain them. The series host wonders if other, wiser, more advanced civilizations could come to help us break through technological barriers someday. Or if they already have.