David Malone (independent filmmaker)

David Malone, author of The Debt Generation, is also director of acclaimed documentaries on philosophy, science and religion originally broadcast in the UK by the BBC and Channel 4.

Work

Malone's work includes

• The Flow of Time (1999), The film focuses on the problem of explaining time in physics throughout history, featuring Roger Penrose, Faun Flynn, Robert Iliffe, Jim Al-Khalili and Louis Sass.
• Testing God (2001), on the clash between science and religion in three episodes:

  Killing the Creator

  Darwin and the Divine

  Credo Ergo Sum

• Soul Searching (2002), on consciousness in two episodes:

  Know Thyself

  The Undiscovered Country

• Voices In My Head (2005), on how science and religion interpret the phenomenon of people hearing disembodied voices
• Dangerous Knowledge (2007), The film looks at four mathematicians-Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing-whose genius has profoundly affected the way we understand mathematics and science, but who all died in tragic circumstances. The film begins with Georg Cantor, the mathematician whose work proved to be the foundation for much of 20th-century mathematics. He believed he was God's messenger and struggled greatly to prove his theories of infinity. Ludwig Boltzmann struggled to prove the existence of atoms; his work may have contributed to his eventual suicide. Kurt Gödel, the introverted confidant of Einstein, proved that there would always be problems which were outside human logic. His life ended in a sanatorium where he starved himself to death. Alan Turing, the great Bletchley Park code breaker and father of computer science, committed suicide after being chemically castrated by the British authorities for his homosexuality. The film also talks to the latest in the line of thinkers pursuing the question of whether there are things that mathematics and the human mind cannot know. They include Gregory Chaitin, mathematician at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center in New York, and Roger Penrose.
• High Anxieties: The Mathematics of Chaos (2008). The film looks at how developments in 20th Century mathematics have affected our view of the world, and particularly how the financial economy and earth's environment are now seen as inherently unpredictable. The film looks at the influence the work of Henri Poincaré and Alexander Lyapunov had on later developments in mathematics. It includes interviews with David Ruelle, about chaos theory and turblence, the economist Paul Ormerod about the unpredictability of economic systems, and James Lovelock the founder of Gaia theory about climate change and tipping points in the environment.
• The Secret Life of Waves (2011)

In 2008 Malone began commenting on the financial pages of the Guardian newspaper's website about the credit crunch and the ensuing financial crisis under the pseudonym Golem XIV, the name of a military supercomputer in a novel of the same name by the Polish science fiction writer Stanisław Lem. Malone became a fierce critic of the bank bailouts arguing that they would lead to massive cuts in public spending. In November 2010 his book about the crisis, The Debt Generation, was published in the UK by Level Press.

References

• The Debt Generation
• Golem XIV Blog
• High Anxieties - The Mathematics of Chaos
• becauseyouthink.tv - directors
• Dangerous Knowledge
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