Featured
Carl Sagan’s Cosmos
The world would be a better place if everybody watched Cosmos. Carl Sagan’s epic 13 hour journey through space and time should be compulsory viewing for every citizen of the Earth. Filled with deep poetic insights, and the clearest explanations of complex scientific ideas, Sagan guides us through the cosmos with humility and awe. Stripping […]
Neil deGrasse Tyson – SciCafe: Life the Universe and Everything
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is the larger than life Director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, and an ebullient evangelist of science. He was never not going to be famous and, already a scientific adviser to the US President and the host of PBS Nova, his star is set to rise even further when […]
Richard Feynman: Fun To Imagine
In this 1983 BBC series, Richard Feynman looks at the mysterious forces that make ordinary things happen. “why rubber bands are stretchy, why tennis balls can’t bounce forever, and what you’re really seeing when you look in the mirror.” All six bite-size videos in the series are available in the playlist below, some in multiple […]
The Funky Solar System
Heikegani Productions presents ‘The Funky Solar System’, a funky tour of the Solar System. The Sun and each of the planets have their own soundtrack and personality with the common theme that this is the funkiest solar system in the galaxy. Featuring amazing cgi documentary footage of the planets, sci-fi films clips, Carl Sagan soundbites, […]
The Antikythera Mechanism – 2,000 Year Old Computer
Where do you start? Part Indiana Jones, part Stargate, the story of the Antikythera Mechanism is extraordinary, its implications profound. In 1900 a team of sponge divers, sheltering from a storm on the island of Antikythera in southern Greece, made an unplanned dive of the greatest serendipity. To their astonishment they found the wreck of […]
Bitter Lake
Bitter Lake is a 2015 BBC documentary film by filmmaker Adam Curtis. It argues that Western politicians keep simplifying the stories they tell, into a simple-to-digest by the public “good” vs. “evil” argument, due to society’s overwhelming chaos and disorder, which they neither grasp nor understand.
Recommended Viewing
Neil Armstrong: First Man on the Moon
It was a monumental first. Greater than Columbus. Greater than any previous voyage of discovery. Played out live on TV across the globe, Neil Armstrong instantly became the most famous man on the planet. A humble aeronautical engineer, Armstrong was not prepared for worldwide celebrity. He was however, the most prepared, capable and competent man […]
Richard Feynman: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
The inimitable Richard Feynman interviewed on BBC’s Horizon in 1981. A rare genius made even rarer by his ability to communicate his ideas through well crafted and captivating stories. His excitement for the universe seems to almost burst out of his every pore, an instatiable thirst for knowledge and an infectious enthusiasm fuelled by a […]
The Trap – What Happened to our Dream of Freedom
The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom is 2007 BBC documentary series made by challenging and thought provoking English filmmaker Adam Curtis, who has been celebrated for this as well as his other documentaries including The Century of the Self and The Power of Nightmares. Three engrossing one-hour programmes explore the concept and […]
Brian Greene – The Illusion of Time
Brian Greene‘s excellent 2011 adaptation of his book, the Fabric of the Cosmos, resulted in a 4-part series for PBS Nova. In this episode he explores the mysteries and paradoxes of time. Atomic clocks are now so accurate they won’t lose a second in more than 100 million years, but while clocks can tell us […]
Fractals: The Colours of Infinity
The Mandelbrot Set is perhaps the most beautiful representation of infinity ever discovered. In this rare 1995 documentary Arthur C. Clarke takes us on a psychedelic journey into the depths of the M-Set, discovering that it has no end, it literally goes on for ever. No matter how much you zoom in on it there is […]
All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace is a 2011 BBC documentary series by filmmaker Adam Curtis. The series argues that computers have failed to liberate humanity and instead have “distorted and simplified our view of the world around us”. The title is taken from the 1967 poem of the same name by Richard […]
Lucky Dip
Isaac Asimov’s ‘The Last Question’
The Last Question is perhaps Isaac Asimov‘s most famous short story. First published in 1956, it concerns the evolution through time of Multivac, a super computer which begins as a sort of giant problem solving internet and, over billions of years, evolves into a godlike intelligence permeating the entire universe. The early Multivacs predict Google […]
Nikola Tesla – Master of Lightning.
Nikola Tesla. The ultimate mad genius scientist. Inventor of alternating current (A/C), the radio and the remote control, he died penniless working on the ultimate weapon – the ‘death beam’. Criminally forgotten by the general public, in favour of his great rivals Thomas Edison and Guglielmo Marconi, Tesla’s inventions power the world we live in […]
A Mathematical Mystery Tour
Fascinating BBC Horizon programme from 1984 looking at the greatest unsolved problems in mathematics including Fermat’s Last Therom (since solved), The Goldback Conjecture, The Riemann hypothesis, the P=NP Problem, and more. Featuring interviews with many modern mathematicians, this documentary also looks at the history of maths and some of if it’s major players from Euclid […]
The Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster
The story of the 1986 Challenger disaster is every bit as compelling as that of the Titanic. It was rushed into launch by a PR machine intended to boost the sagging popularity of the Space Shuttle, which had come to be seen by many as pointless and expensive. School teacher Christa McAuliffe was chosen […]
Martin Rees: Are We Real?
Lord Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and former president of the Royal Society, delves into the deepest questions of existence in this thought provoking documentary. Rees, immaculate silver hair never out of place, embarks on an intellectual adventure illuminated by a stellar collection of talking heads in the shape of John Conway, Leonard Susskind, Max Tegmark […]
Jacob Bronowski “The Ascent of Man”
Jacob’s Bronowski‘s award winning 13 part documentary was ground breaking when first aired in 1973 and remains unsurpassed. Showcasing the breadth of Bronowski’s knowledge, The Ascent of Man is both awe-inspiring and thoroughly engaging. The level of details is incredible, but not as incredible as the fact that the great man is able to impart […]