Dawn of the Flick: The Doctors, Physicists, and Mathematicians Who Made the Movies

Today, we know that persistence of vision does not work like the progenitors of film thought it did (the retina does not retain images like Dr. Paris and others theorized), and many movies are filmed in 3-D and displayed on screens that are sometimes five stories tall. But as the technology of moving images has progressed and the group experience of attending a film has gotten increasingly sophisticated, a parallel trend has emerged, namely, to permit anyone to watch anything, anywhere, on a tiny cell phone. Curiously, this medium that was once limited to the single viewer appears to be circling back to that one-at-a-time format. The irony is not lost on Balzer. “It’s a very interesting loop,” he says, pun intended.