Science Stories

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In these ten absorbing series, award-winning authors Naomi Alderman and Philip Ball and guest presenters Tracey Logan, Kevin Fong, Simon Schaffer and Lindsey Fitzharris take a look at the many amazing events and characters from science’s long history. In this collection, which runs close to 23 hours in total, they throw light on the revolutionary visionaries who defined how we see the world, from pioneers and prophets to inventors, experimenters and creators.

Among the topics explored are feuding dinosaur hunters, jumping genes, the engine that nearly ran out of steam, the day the Earth stopped standing still, how laughing gas was discovered, the first female professional scientist in Britain, and how an eel sparked our interest in electricity. So, if you want to know more about a medieval bishop’s Big Bang theory, how Florence Nightingale saved lives with statistics, the mediaeval equivalent of GPS, the woman who tamed lightning, Cyrano de Bergerac’s designs for a spaceship, and what happened when Einstein decided to fix the fridge, our presenters are here to fill you in. Helping them discover the fact behind the fiction are a host of scientists and experts, including Professor Edith Hall, Hannah Fry, Tim Spector, Marcus du Sautoy, Richard Wiseman, Natalie Haynes and Tracy Chevalier.

Episode List

01 – The Bone Wars
02 – The engine that ran out of steam
03 – DNA’s Third Man
04 – How Perkin brought purple to the people
05 – Seeing is Believing – The Leviathan of Parsonstown
06 – Submarine for a Stuart King
07 – How an eel sparked our interest in electricity
08 – The meteorite and the hidden hoax
09 – The duchess who gatecrashed science
10 – Einstein’s Fridge
11 – Florence Nightingale Statistician
12 – Chaucer’s Astrolabe – The Medieval GPS
13 – Paul Ehrlich’s ‘Magic Bullet’ and the Cure for Syphilis
14 – Maxwell’s Demon
15 – Blood Banks
16 – The Day The Earth Stopped Standing Still
17 – How Much Testosterone Makes You a Man
18 – The man who predicted deforestation and climate change 200 years ago
19 – The Woman Who Tamed Lightning
20 – Mesmerism
21 – Jumping Genes
22 – The Birth of Photography
23 – Pavlov and his Dogs
24 – The Medieval Bishop’s Big Bang Theory
25 – The Anglo-Saxon remedy that kills MRSA
26 – The Man Who Found Physics in Shells, Seeds and Bees
27 – Caroline Herschel and the Comets
28 – A wolf, a goat and some cabbages
29 – The Wondrous Transformation of Caterpillars
30 – Lise Meitner Humanitarian physicist who unlocked the science of the atom bomb
31 – How Humphry Davy discovered laughing gas
32 – Michael Faraday and his ‘instructess’ in chemistry
33 – 17th-Century Space Flight The Real Cyrano de Bergerac
34 – Urea and the Wohler Myth
35 – Descartes’ Daughter
36 – Hypatia The Murdered Mathematician
37 – Mary Anning and Fossil Hunting
38 – Eddington’s Eclipse and Einstein’s Celebrity
39 – Lucretius, Sheep and Atoms
40 – Kepler’s Snowflakes
41 – Lady Mary Montagu’s Smallpox Experiment
42 – Ibn al-Haytham and How We See
43 – Galileo’s lost letter
44 – Madame Lavoisier’s Translation of Oxygen
45 – Ignaz Semmelweiss The Hand Washer
46 – Ramon Llull the medieval prophet of computer science
47 – Alexis Carrel and the immortal chicken heart
48 – Mary Somerville, pioneer of popular science writing
49 – Sophia Jex-Blake, first woman doctor in Scotland
50 – Isaac Newton and the story of the apple