Howdy,
I work for the Beeb and though you might be interested in a new BBC Four Season – Science You Can’t See. I haven’t seen the programmes yet, but they sound fantastic (Jim Al-Khalili presents some of them).
More details below:
Dangerous Knowledge tells how a small group of the most brilliant minds unravelled the old cosy certainties about maths and the universe. It is also about how, once they had looked at these problems they could not look away, and pursued their questions to the brink of insanity and then over it to madness and suicide.
Atom charts the truly extraordinary and awe inspiring story of humanity’s greatest ever scientific revelation – the discovery that all known matter is made of atoms. No one could have predicted just how bizarre, capricious and weird the world of the atom would turn out to be. An object one ten millionth of millimetre across shattered the whole edifice of physics and turned 3,000 years of philosophy on its head. Even today as scientists continue to peer deeper and deeper into the atom; it throws back as many questions as it answers. In Atom, 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 – to the outlandish and mysterious realm of quantum theory.
Absolute Zero is a scientific detective story about a remarkable group of pioneers who wanted to reach the ultimate extreme of cold. This epic story begins in the 17th century in Westminster with a court magician’s use of alchemy to make the King shiver on a hot summer’s day and ends in the future with a strange gravity-defying quantum world as physicists approach to within a few millionths of a degree of this Absolute Zero. Along the way this conquest of cold triggered breakthroughs such as air conditioning and refrigeration that have transformed the way we live.
The programmes will be shown from 24 July on BBC Four.
