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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
