Sightings of my Photographic Periodic Table on TVMy periodic table poster has been featured both as a prop and as a more prominent video clip on a fair number of TV shows. And you couldn't ask for a more varied bunch.On October 9th, 2007 the premier science documentary series NOVA broadcast a show on the making of Samurai swords which included a twenty second clip of a rotating video version of my periodic table poster. They originally asked for the right to use my poster as a still image they would pan and zoom over, but when I told them I could give them the same image but in video form where every element is rotating in place, they of course took me up on the offer. Here is a clip showing how they used it:  See video clip. The paper version can been seen on a number of TV shows being used as a prop on the wall somewhere. The first one is MythBusters, a popular science-type show on the Discovery channel. Starting with the 2006 Holiday special show, they have one of my periodic tables hung on the wall behind a work table where they often gather to discuss what they are going to do to prove or disprove a myth. So it tends to show up multiple times in each show, hovering behind someone's head along with a wall full of other stuff:  See video clip. It now appears in almost every episode, because they use that table all the time, and it's always there right behind someone's head. (When I got an order from an Adam Savage with an address in San Francisco, I had a pretty good idea who that was, and I sent several extra copies along, figuring the more he had, the more chance they'd put one somewhere visible, and I was right!)  See video clip. Next the insipid teen soap opera Hannah Montana, on the Disney channel, used it in a science classroom set. It was right behind the action during most of this scene in the season premier episode in April 2007:  See video clip. It's not on every episode of Hanna Montana like it is in MythBusters, but they do expect to use that set again in future episodes, and my poster will be there, hopefully not as a backdrop to a yanking joke again, but hey, any publicity is good publicity, right? Next, it was on the CBS Friday night crime drama NUMB3RS on at least one show. It's a pretty successful show that features a mathematician solving crimes (kind of like CSI except with math instead of forensics). Some co-workers of mine (Ed Pegg, Michael Trott and Eric Weisstein) work as math consultants for the show and we have a really nice website about the math behind the show. (No clip, just a still shot from the episode titled "The Art of Reckoning"): 
On an even more dignified note, the PBS show Quest, produced by KQED, licensed a number of images from the poster and website in rotating video form for their show on nanotechnology. They used my wooden periodic tabletop in one shot:  And several rotating silicon samples, for example these chips:  Click either picture to go to their website where you can see the whole show online. Poster Home All text and images on this website Copyright (c) 2006 by Theodore W. Gray. |
