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TIME | 4. COSMIC TIME
Monday 20 August 2007 midnight-1am; rpt Tuesday 21 August 2.55am-3.55am (Monday night)
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Throughout history, one thing has never changed - time. It is something we rely on to plan our lives, and it is consistent, regular and ceaseless. But is it? High in the Alps, Michio encounters a mystery - tiny particles called muons which shouldn't exist. They don't last long enough to be detected on Earth - and yet here they are. The answer to this mystery lies in one of the greatest discoveries of all time - Einstein's theory of relativity. The faster you travel, the slower time ticks. So time is not fixed at all.
Michio goes on a journey to places where time becomes very strange. Inside atoms, time blurs to such an extent that something can be in two places at once. Within extreme places in space, like black holes, time is squeezed to such an extent that, to an observer, it seems to stand still. Time is more variable that it could ever have been thought possible. It can even, theoretically, move backwards. This leads to one of the most extraordinary possibilities - a time machine. This episode shows a graphical representation of what it might look like: the size of a planet and consuming unimaginable amounts of energy but still a possibility.
Finally, Michio tackles the greatest questions of all - did time itself have a beginning, and will it have an end? He explains how the time capsule of the stars revealed the evolution of the Universe - and pointed the way to the ultimate beginning, the Big Bang, 13.6 billion years ago. And the future? Michio discovers that the cosmos of the stars is only a moment in the Universe's history, that we live in the stelliferous age - the age of the stars - the second of the Universe's five ages of time. But Michio explains that it is hardly an age at all: within the entire lifetime of the Universe the stars shine for less than a finger-click of history.
 Time Homepage
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