Everyone's heard of it, but what does E=mc2 -- the world’s most famous equation -- really mean? And why did it change the world?

With brilliant period recreations, NOVA dramatizes how an obscure young patent clerk, Albert Einstein, came up with his shattering 1905 discovery that the realms of matter and energy are inescapably linked. An accessible, suspenseful epic, Einstein's Big Idea reveals the roots of his astonishing breakthrough in the human stories of men and women whose innovative thinking across four centuries helped lead to E=mc2, and ultimately unleashed the power of the atom.

Here are stories rich with achievement and failure, feuds and duplicity, love and rivalry, politics and revenge: Michael Faraday, the penniless blacksmith’s son who fought the ridicule of the scientific establishment; Antoine Lavoisier, the cool-headed experimenter who fell victim to the guillotine; and Lise Meitner, the physicist who weathered Nazi persecution and personal betrayal on her path to discovering the splitting of the atom.

As one discovery builds on the next, Einstein's Big Idea shows how Einstein's saga began with the personal lives of these pioneers and their years of persistence, ingenuity, sacrifice, and heroic struggle against the odds.

The film stars Aidan McArdle (Ella Enchanted) as Einstein, and Shirley Henderson (Bridget Jones and Harry Potter) as Einstein's first wife, Mileva Maric.