In Our Time: Science

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Laws of Nature. Since ancient times philosophers and physicists have tried to discover simple underlying principles that control the Universe: In the 6th Century BC Thales declared “Everything is water”, centuries later Aristotle claimed that all of creation was forged from four elements, Newton more successfully laid down the Law of Universal Gravitation and as we speak, contemporary scientists are struggling to complete the task of ‘String Theory’ - the quest to find a single over-arching equation that unites all of physics, and can perhaps explain the organisation of everything in existence.But are the Laws of Physics really ‘facts of life’? Is what is true in physics, true in all areas of existence? Is it even true in other areas of physics?With Mark Buchanan, physicist and author of Ubiquity; Professor Frank Close, theoretical physicist and author of Lucifer’s Legacy: The Meaning of Asymmetry; Nancy Cartwright, Professor of Philosophy, LSE.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the question of consciousness, our sense of self, and how we are able to imagine things when they are not there, which are problems that have troubled the great minds of philosophy for thousands of years. Consciousness has been linked to language, has been married to the mind and divorced from the body; it has been denied to animals, opposed to the subconscious and declared irreducible, but still it defies definition, and the debate rages on as to why we evolved it at all. But perhaps science will finally provide the answer. With Professor Gerald Edelman, Director of the Neurosciences, Institute in California and winner of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1972; Igor Aleksander is Professor of Neural Engineering Systems, Imperial College, London; Margaret Boden, Professor of Philosophy and Psychology, University of Sussex.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the chemical elements. The aim and challenge in chemistry, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, is the understanding of the complex materials which constitute everything in existence since the Big Bang, when the whole universe emerged out of the two elements of hydrogen and helium. For Aristotle there were four elements: Earth, Air, Fire and Water. Now there are one hundred and eight, sixteen of which are produced artificially, and none of which figure in Aristotle's original four. But they are all still elements - defined as substances which cannot be broken down, the building blocks of all life.Today we have the key to understanding these elements, the Periodic Table, which is a pattern embedded in nature and was miraculously discovered in a dream. With Paul Strathern, former lecturer in philosophy and science, Kingston University and author of Mendeleyev's Dream: The Quest for the Elements; Dr Mary Archer, Visiting Professor of Chemistry at Imperial College, London; John Murrell, Emeritus Professor of Chemistry, University of Sussex.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the evolution of the human species. Where did we come from - we being Homo Sapiens? Let’s not go back to the Big Bang or in search of Genesis, but sift through the evidence from biology, palaeontology, climatology and anthropology.The story of human evolution is one that stretches back over five million years, and during that time there are reckoned to have been between fifteen and twenty species of hominid to have walked this planet. From the earliest (Genus) Australopithecus (Species) Anamensis through times when there have been several divergent pre-human species existing at once, we have now arrived at a period unique in the history of the earth when a sole human species, Homo Sapiens, is in evidence right across the globe.With Leslie Aiello, Professor of Biological Anthropology, University College, London; Robert Foley, evolutionary ecologist, writer and lecturer in biological anthropology at Cambridge University; Mark Roberts, Field Archaeologist, Project Leader of Boxgrove excavation and the discoverer of ‘Boxgrove Man’.

Melvyn Bragg examines the science of taxonomy. The Argentinean author Jose Luis Borges illustrated the problematic nature of scientific classification when he quoted from an ancient Chinese Encyclopaedia, the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. On these remote pages, in a complete absence of Phylum, Genus and Species, animals are divided into: “(a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs” and “those that tremble as if they were mad” ending with “those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush”, “others”, “those that have just broken the flower vase” and “those that at a distance resemble flies.”Perhaps our own system of classifying the natural world might seem just as fantastical to a more knowing mind, and perhaps underlying the Linnaean system that homo sapiens currently finds useful there are prejudices of our own which distort the scientific truth. How does natural history classify the ‘natural order’?With Colin Tudge, writer, scientist and author of The Variety of Life: A Survey and a Celebration of all the Creatures that Have Ever Lived; Dr Sandy Knapp, Research Botanist, Department of Botany, Natural History Museum, London; Henry Gee, Senior Editor of Nature and author of Deep Time: Cladistics, the Revolution in Evolution.

Melvyn Bragg examines 20th century physics’ quest for the ultimate theory of everything. Einstein left us with his theory of General Relativity, which explained how gravity works on the scale of stars, galaxies, and the universe itself and Schroedinger left us with the equation that explained the mechanics of the tiny quantum realm. Both theories work to wonderful effect in their own worlds, but (and this is the sticking point) gravity is strangely absent from the quantum realm and planets behave nothing like particles. The enigma for scientists throughout most of the last century is that, as they are currently formulated, general relativity and quantum mechanics cannot both be right. The history of twentieth century physics has been a struggle to find a way to unite them, to find what has become the holy grail of modern physics: The Grand Unified Theory. With Brian Greene, Professor of Physics and Mathematics, Columbia University and Cornell University; Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and Royal Society Research Professor in Astronomy and Physics at Cambridge University.

Explore Goethe's contributions to geology, botany, and anatomy, his transition from poet to scientist, and his critique of Newton's color theory. Discover his belief in replicable experiments and collaboration for scientific progress.

Melvyn Bragg discusses the social and economic consequences of the information revolution. There are now more than 200 million people connected to the internet world-wide. The world’s biggest ever merger has just seen Time Warner united with the internet service provider America Online, and in the United States alone it is predicted that transactions conducted in cyberspace will account for 327 billion dollars worth of business by 2002. Should we be pleased? Is it the ‘third wave’ as Dr Toffler predicted in 1980 - after the first wave, the agricultural revolution about 8000 BC and then the second, the Industrial Revolution three centuries ago.Is this change going to alter our society radically, empowering the individual and offering greater choice, or will information technology lead us into a dark age for society that destroys democracy, the work-place and family life? With Charles Leadbeater, Demos Research Associate and author of Living On Thin Air: The New Economy; Ian Angell, Professor of Information Systems, London School of Economics and author of The New Barbarian Manifesto: How to Survive the Information Age.

Melvyn Bragg discusses climate change. In 1999 the weather gave the planet’s occupants a terrible beating: 16,000 people lost their lives as a result of storms. Some 15 million people were left homeless and 10,000 died when the world’s worst cyclone swept across eastern India. Hurricane Floyd wreaked 4.3 billion pounds worth of damage in the United States, Typhoon Bart hit Japan and Typhoon York hit Hong Kong and Macau. Western Europe is unused to hurricane force winds, but since Christmas 80 people have died in France as a result of storms. And in Venezuela floods and mud slides are continuing to cause devastation on a massive scale.The climate has become political but is the science, supposedly underpinning apocalyptic and apposite millennial claims of doom, really water-tight? It might seem that the effects of global warming are already upon us, but are they - and if so how can we really hope to stop them? With Sir John Houghton, Co-Chair of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change - the United Nations’ global warming science committee; George Monbiot, environmentalist, journalist and Visiting Professor, Department of Philosophy, Bristol University.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of mankind’s attempt to understand the nature of time. At the end of the 19th century, H.G.Wells imagined travelling through time in The Time Machine; “The palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous greyness; the sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous colour like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch in space”. When he was writing we thought time was unbending and universal and counted out by Newton’s clock. A hundred years later we have had Einstein and relativity, quantum theory, and atomic clocks, but in the third millennium, is mankind any closer to understanding what time really is? What, in short, do we know about time itself? A Greek philosopher thought that time was a figment of the imagination and there are contemporary physicists who go a long way to agreeing with him. Newton’s views on time were bent by Einstein. The ancient skills of astronomy once ruled the known world and skill in time usage could be said to be enthroned as a master craft in our day. “But at my back I always hear time’s winged chariot hurrying near and yonder all before us lie deserts of vast eternity” - Marvel wrote that of love, but it could be our epigraph for time. With Dr Neil Johnson, theoretical physicist at the Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford University and Royal Institution Christmas Lecturer 1999 on the subject of Time; Lee Smolin, cosmologist and Professor of Physics, Pennsylvania State University.