Time is flying by on this busy, crowded planet… as life changes and evolves from second to second. And yet the arc of human lifespan is getting longer: 65 years is the global average … way up from just 20 in the Stone Age. Modern science, however, provides a humbling perspective. Our lives… indeed the life span of the human species… is just a blip compared to the age of the universe, at 13.7 billion years and counting.
From a distance, our galaxy would look like a flat spiral, some 100,000 light years across, with pockets of gas, clouds of dust, and about 400 billion stars rotating around the galaxys center. Thick dust and blinding starlight have long obscured our vision into the mysterious inner regions of the galactic center. And yet, the clues have been piling up, that something important, something strange is going on in there. Astronomers tracking stars in the center of the galaxy have found the best proof to date that black holes exist. Now, they are shooting for the first direct image of a black hole.
A presentation of the facts and theory surrounding the astronomical phenomenon of black holes, using the latest in computer-generated imagery. Theories regarding their origin are presented, along with speculation about what lies with and beyond them.
Without the moon, humans wouldn’t exist. Life, if it had started at all, would be in the earliest stages of evolution. Days would last four hours, winds would blow at hurricane force and there would be a dense and toxic atmosphere resembling that of Venus. Luckily, 50 million years after the formation of the solar system, our proto-planet was hit by a celestial body more than twice the size of Mars, which formed the moon.
In this one-hour special, we learn what Earth was like before the moon and what life would be like if the moon disappeared.
The Channel Tunnel, the world’s longest undersea tunnel is set 131 feet beneath the sea. It took six years to build and can transport up to 31 million passengers a year. A marvel of modern construction, the tunnel offered a great potential to link England with the rest of Europe.
A look at nebulas – the “art gallery of the galaxy” – amazing regions of space, where old stars die and new ones are born. Astronomers reveal the techniques and technology used to capture the details and wonder of these distant objects, many of which are too far away to be seen by the naked eye.
The Antonov AN 225 is the heaviest and largest jet ever built, with a landing gear system comprising 32 wheels, and a wing span of 291 feet. It was designed for the Soviet space program in 1988, and is able to airlift the Energia rocket’s boosters, Buran space shuttle or ultra-heavy and oversize freight, up to 250,000 kg.
Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking is followed as he prepares to deliver a July 2004 paper on black holes that contradicts his earlier, hard-fought theory on the subject. He is now convinced that black holes hold the key to the origins of the universe.
In 1927, Werner Heisenberg made a startling discovery. Quantum theory implies a limitation on how accurately certain pairs of physical variables could be measured simultaneously. Using some of the matrix mechanics that had been proposed by Max Born, Heisenberg realised that position and momentum (the relationship between mass and velocity) were non-commutable; you could not precisely know them both at the same time.
Two months after an explosion on BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico killed 11 people, Panorama’s Hilary Andersson tells the story of America’s ‘greatest environmental disaster.’
Dubbed an environmental ‘9/11′ by President Obama, the leak caused by the explosion is still releasing thousands of barrels of crude oil a day into the waters of the Gulf – livelihoods and ecosystems are threatened, fishermen are unable to work and billions have been wiped off the value of BP shares.
Panorama examines the full consequences of the disaster amid a mounting war of words between the Obama adminstration and an embattled BP, asking what went wrong and who is really to blame.
Australian documentary from 2002 exploring the prominent hacker community, centered in Melbourne, Australia in the late 80s to early 1990. The storyline centres around the Australian teenagers going by the pseudonyms “Electron” and “Phoenix”, who were members of an elite computer hacking group called The Realm, and hacked into some of the most secure computer networks in the world, including those of the US Naval Research Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a government lab charged with the security of the US nuclear stockpile, and NASA.
