MK ATLAS· Science Atlas

One Director's Questions — The Olive Tree Below

Watch the film The Olive Tree Below first, then think through together the questions its director, with no formal science training, asked while making it: how they meet the scientists who asked them first, how far science has answered, and where it has not. Each piece draws the line between science and the film's imagination. The director is the maker of the Science Atlas.

Walk this route on the map →

Leg 1 · What Does a Person Leave Behind? — Information Is What Reduces Not Knowing

  1. 11948Claude Shannon

Leg 2 · How Many Hands Does Carbon Have? — Why Life Is Made of Carbon

  1. 21865August Kekulé · The benzene ring
  2. 31939Linus Pauling · The chemical bond

Leg 3 · Whose Breath Did I Just Breathe In? — Trees Are Built from Air

  1. 41965Cyanobacteria and the Great Oxidation
  2. 51958Charles Keeling · The Keeling curve

Leg 4 · Do Atoms Remember Whose Breath They Were? — Feelings Travel Another Way

  1. 61926Schrödinger

Leg 5 · What Is in Empty Space? — Even Emptiness Has a Field

  1. 71865Maxwell
  2. 81887Michelson–Morley · The ether
  3. 91965Penzias & Wilson · CMB

Leg 6 · Why Doesn't Time Run Backwards? — Probability, Not Law, Forbids It

  1. 101877Ludwig Boltzmann · Entropy
  2. 111974Stephen Hawking · Hawking radiation

Leg 7 · Is There a Special Atom of Life? — The Blueprint Is an Order of Ordinary Atoms

  1. 121944Schrödinger · What Is Life?
  2. 131952Rosalind Franklin · Photo 51

Updated 2026-09-28