E=mc² looks simple, but this NOVA film, based on David Bodanis' book, argues that the equation is really a story about five people. Dramatized reenactments and historian interviews trace Michael Faraday's kitchen experiments with magnets and wire, Antoine Lavoisier's precise measurements of mass in revolutionary France, and Émilie du Châtelet's translation and expansion of Newton's work, which first linked energy to velocity squared. The film follows Einstein himself from a Swiss patent office to the 1905 papers that connected energy and mass through the speed of light, then carries the equation forward to Lise Meitner's explanation of nuclear fission and the bomb built from it. Location shooting in Europe grounds each episode in the actual rooms and instruments involved. Rather than treating the formula as Einstein's isolated stroke of genius, the film builds it piece by piece out of a century of separate discoveries, showing how each scientist's work became a term in the equation that would eventually explain both starlight and Hiroshima.