BBC Four Winter/Spring 2007
Science You Can't See Season
The 20th century saw scientific breakthroughs unprecedented in history, but the most important weren't just invisible, they were barely comprehensible, even to the geniuses who pioneered them.
This series attempts the impossible – to make these breakthroughs not just visible, but also understandable.
From the particles that go to make up the atom, and the bizarre laws they obey, to mathematics so staggeringly abstruse that they have driven mathematicians to insanity and beyond, welcome to a short season of Science You Can't See.
Dangerous Knowledge
In the hit feature film The Matrix, few people had glimpsed the true nature of reality and most saw only what was on the surface of their world. Very few people could see the numbers that made up the "Matrix" – but, in real life, such people really do exist.
Over the last century, a handful of mathematicians have lifted the veil and seen facets of the universe as it really is. But these people were often so disturbed by what they discovered that they were driven insane or even committed suicide. Dangerous Knowledge is about what caused these crises: the "Matrix" that lies behind our reality.
Film-maker David Malone explores how a small group of the most brilliant minds – among them Georg Cantor, Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing and Ludwig Boltzman – unravelled our cosy certainties about maths and the universe. He also shows how, once they had looked at these problems, these men could not look away.
Today's great mathematicians, such as Greg Chaitin and Roger Penrose, talk from personal experience about what it's like to understand the "Matrix" as it really is.
They demonstrate and bring to life some of today's most mind-bending ideas and look back at the moments of crisis and madness when the great thinkers got too close to knowledge they couldn't handle.
As they do so, the series tackles some of the most profound questions about the true nature of reality that mathematical thinkers are grappling with today.
Atom
Atom charts the truly extraordinary and awe-inspiring story of humanity's greatest-ever scientific discovery.
No one could have predicted just how bizarre, capricious and weird the world of the atom and the sub-atomic would turn out to be. The discovery of the electron, an object less than a billionth of a millimetre across, shattered the whole edifice of physics and turned 3,000 years of philosophy on its head.
Even today, as we peer deeper into the atom, it throws back as many questions as it answers.
Author and physicist Jim Al Khalili takes an epic journey of discovery, from the relatively simple premise that we live in a world made up of atoms, into the outlandish and mysterious realm of quantum theory.
Jim shows how the story of the atom encapsulates nature's ability to exceed the power of the human imagination.
As scientists delved deeper into the atom, they unravelled some of nature's most shocking secrets. But, in the process, they had to abandon everything they believed in and create a completely new science – a science that underpins the whole of physics, biology, chemistry and, very possibly, life itself.
Atom reveals science as a gloriously human endeavour, riddled with jealousy, rivalry, missed opportunities and, just occasionally, moments of genius.
Absolute Zero
It has been said that the progress of civilisation can be charted through our mastery of heat, from the use of fire to mould metals, to the harnessing of steam power to generate electricity.
But, in the 21st century, our future progress may depend upon our mastery of cold...
This scientific detective tale tells the story of a remarkable group of pioneers who wanted to reach the ultimate extreme: Absolute Zero, a place so cold that the physical world as we know it doesn't exist, electricity flows without resistance, fluids defy gravity and the speed of light can be reduced to 38 miles per hour.
The story begins with a Court magician's use of alchemy to make the King shiver and ends in the future with a strange quantum world as physicists get within a few millionths of a degree of this Absolute Zero.
Each film features a strange cast of eccentric characters, including: Captain Birdseye; Frederic "Ice King" Tudor, who founded an empire harvesting ice; and James Dewar, who almost drove himself crazy by trying to liquefy hydrogen.
Absolute Zero became the Holy Grail of temperature physicists and is thought of today as the gateway to many new technologies, among them nano-construction, neurological networks and quantum computing. The possibilities, it seems, are limitless...
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