Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland is a short educational film from the University of Akron based on the story by George Gamow. The film uses Gamow’s story featuring the titular character Mr. C.J.H. Tompkins to explain the basics of space, time, and relativity. The film opens with a banking clerk sitting at his desk. The clerk, Mr. Tompkins, sits at his desk and reads a newspaper. He sees an advertisement for a public lecture on “Space, Time and Relativity” in the paper. Mr. Tompkins takes his seat in a lecture hall at a university—presumably on Akron’s campus (04:38). A professor speaks about the world of physics, focusing on the nature of space, time, and relativity (05:45). The professor uses a sketch of a train to explain velocity of light in relation to Earth and ether (09:56). He then writes the equation on a chalkboard that shows the relationship of velocity. Mr. Tompkins falls asleep at the lecture, then wakes up next to the professor on a park bench (14:25). The two men climb into a taxi and take a trip around the block, demonstrating the relativity of space. A boy on a bicycle crashes at a car sales lot (17:11). A model train runs on a track, then the film cuts to an actual train station where the two men wait for the arrival of a train (18:51). A young-looking man climbs off the train and is the grandfather of the professor—demonstrating the relativity of time. The men ride in a taxi at night down a street lined with street lights (21:38), as the professor talks about the speed of light. The film then cuts back to Mr. Tompkins sleeping in the lecture hall (22:48). The professor uses an overhead projector to illustrate Einstein’s theory of relativity. The professor shows an illustration of a rocket traveling into space with a scientist inside the pod (26:18). The film then cuts to Mr. Tompkins and the professor in “space,” an interstellar backdrop with “space dust” blowing around (30:04). The professor inflates a balloon to explain how the universe expands with the passage of time. Back at the lecture hall (35:10), the lecture ends and people leave; Mr. Tompkins wakes up and follows the crowd out of the room, concluding the film.

Mr. Tompkins is the title character in a series of four popular science books by the physicist George Gamow. The books are structured as a series of dreams in which Mr. Tompkins enters alternative worlds where the physical constants have radically different values from those they have in the real world. Gamow aims to use these alterations to explain modern scientific theories.

Mr. Tompkins’ adventures begin when he chooses to spend the afternoon of a bank holiday attending a lecture on the theory of relativity. The lecture proves less comprehensible than he had hoped, and he drifts off to sleep and enters a dream world in which the speed of light is a mere 4.5 m/s (10 mph). This becomes apparent to him through the fact that passing cyclists are subject to a noticeable Lorentz–FitzGerald contraction. Mr. Tompkins becomes acquainted with the Professor delivering the lectures and ultimately marries the Professor’s daughter, Maud. Later chapters in the books deal with atomic structure (Mr. Tompkins spends time as a conduction electron, returning to consciousness when he is annihilated in an encounter with a positron) and thermodynamics (the Professor expounds an analogy between the second law of thermodynamics and the bias towards the casino in gambling before being confounded by a local reversal of the second law through the intervention of Maxwell’s demon who has introduced himself to Maud in one of her dreams). Mr. Tompkins’ initials are ‘C.G.H.’ which stand for c (the speed of light), G (the constant of gravitation) and h (Planck’s constant). Following their marriage Maud refers to him as ‘Cyril’.

Later books in the series tackled biology and advanced cosmology. In 2010 the first volume of a proposed ten-issue comic book series, The Adventures of Mr. Tompkins, was created by Igor Gamow, George Gamow’s son, and illustrator Scorpio Steele. In the book Tompkins learns about relativity from Albert Einstein, radioactivity from Marie Curie and the structure of the atom from Ernest Rutherford. A second volume, in which Tompkins meets Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel and James Watson, was published in July 2011. Main belt asteroid 12448 Mr. Tompkins is named after Tompkins. The Scientific Background to the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry begins by citing Mr. Tomkins inside himself.

This film is part of the Periscope Film LLC archive, one of the largest historic military, transportation, and aviation stock footage collections in the USA. Entirely film backed, this material is available for licensing in 24p HD, 2k and 4k. For more information visit http://www.PeriscopeFilm.com