The story of a remarkable group of pioneers who wanted to reach the ultimate extreme: absolute zero, a place so cold that the physical world as we know it doesn’t exist, electricity flows without resistance, fluids defy gravity and the speed of light can be reduced to only 38mph.

Absolute zero became the Holy Grail of temperature physicists and is considered the gateway to many new technologies, such as nano-construction, neurological networks and quantum computing. The possibilities, it seems, are limitless.

It is virtually impossible to conceive of the vastness of Earth time: in an attempt to illustrate the planet’s lifespan, Michio Kaku travels from the West to the East coast of America, each millimetre representing a single year. But where do we fit in? Our time seems so insignificant, but we’re part of perhaps the greatest story ever told – the story of life itself.

The programme looks at bacteria which have been brought to life from a time capsule of rock after 250 million years, encounters creatures in which evolution can be seen in action, and explores the ultimate biological clock – DNA. Michio has his own DNA tested to reveal his ancestral journey all the way back to our first human ancestors in Africa. Finally, the episode concludes with a look into the future to ask where we are ultimately going.

High in the Alps, Michio Kaku encounters a mystery – tiny particles called muons which shouldn’t exist. They don’t last long enough to be detected on Earth – and yet here they are. The answer to this mystery lies in one of the greatest discoveries of all time – Einstein’s theory of relativity. The faster you travel, the slower time ticks. So time is not fixed at all.

Particle physicist Professor Brian Cox asks, ‘What time is it?’ It sounds like the answer ought to be simple, but do we really understand the question?

He visits the ancient Mayan pyramids in Mexico where they built temples to time, finds out that a day is never 24 hours and meets Earth’s very own Director of Time. He also journeys to the beginning of time, and travels deep into the realms of string theory, exploring the very limit of time, subsequently discovering we not only travel through time at the speed of light, but the experience we feel as the passing of time could, in fact, be an illusion.

David Malone looks at four brilliant mathematicians – Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing – whose genius has profoundly affected us, but which tragically drove them to insanity,  leading them to eventually commit suicide.

The film also talks to the latest in the line of thinkers who have continued to pursue the question of whether there are things that mathematics and the human mind cannot know. They include Greg Chaitin, mathematician at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center, New York, and Roger Penrose.

Dangerous Knowledge tackles some of the profound questions about the true nature of reality that mathematical thinkers are still trying to answer today.

Millions of years ago, our planet was a very different place. Before the era of dinosaurs, creatures such as dicynodonts and gorgonopsians roamed the land, while the oceans too teemed with life. Then, in the blink of an eye, everything changed. Life itself was almost completely wiped out in what is known as the Permian extinction.

Tony Robinson and his team of experts travel to South Africa, California and Iceland searching for evidence of a massive volcanic eruption that destroyed 95 per cent of life on Earth 250 million years ago. Believed to have originated in Siberia, it emitted a lava flow the size of Europe, accelerated global warming and left only tiny burrowing cynodonts alive – creatures that are believed to have eventually evolved into mammals.

It is the greatest climate disaster to have ever affected Earth – 650 million years ago, a cataclysmic ice age buried the planet beneath snow and ice, almost completely wiping out life and turning the world into one huge snowball.

Snowball Earth uncovers the story behind one of the most controversial theories in science today. To investigate, the programme travels the world to follow scientists scouring southern Australia, Nevada’s Death Valley and Alaskan glaciers for tantalising clues as to how our planet ran away into this doomsday scenario.

Professor Jim Al Khalili delves into over 50 years of the BBC science archive to tell the story behind the emergence of one of the greatest theories of modern science, the Big Bang.

The idea that our universe simply began from nothing has not always been widely accepted with the conviction it is now and, from fiercely disputed beginnings, took many years to emerge as the de-facto explanation of how our universe began. Using curious horn-shaped antennas, U-2 spy planes, satellites and particle accelerators, scientists have slowly pieced together the cosmological puzzle, and this documentary charts the overwhelming evidence for a universe created by a Big Bang.

A journey deep into the strange world of theoretical physics – a place where cutting-edge ideas are sometimes indistinguishable from the utterly crazy.

Ever since Einstein proved it was possible, the desire to travel through time has drawn both eccentric amateurs and brilliant scientists in equal measure. There is, however, one way that time travel to the past could be made possible, and it would be much more convenient; future civilizations could use computers to create exact replicas of the past. Unfortunately this notion has the world of physics feeling rather uneasy, since if you can generate a perfect virtual reality version of the past, what’s to say we’re not living in one of these replica realities right now?

Tony Robinson investigates the history of natural disasters, from the Earth’s formation up until the present day, and explores the notion that we, ourselves are the product of such catastrophes. Four and half billion years ago, a planet thought to be around the size of Mars smashed into our young Earth with such force that this extreme event nearly obliterated the planet entirely.

This event has since revealed itself however, as a defining moment in Earth’s history. As our molten planet reeled from the impact, the Moon was formed. This orbiting body subsequently triggered an extraordinary series of events, enabling our world to develop life.

Professor Jim Al-Khalili sets out to uncover one of the great mysteries of science – how does a universe that starts off as dust end up with intelligent life? How does order emerge from disorder?

It’s a mindbending, counterintuitive and for many people a deeply troubling idea, but the programme reveals the science behind much of the beauty and structure in the natural world and discovers that, far from it being magic or an act of God, it is in fact an intrinsic part of the laws of physics.

Attempting to explain the power of mathematics to a non-mathematician, Professor Marcus du Sautoy is taking Alan Davies, one of Britain’s best-loved comedians, on a mathematical journey.

Mathematics is not only of the most powerful disciplines in history, one of the primary means by which we’ve built the world around us, but it also offers insight into how the universe works. Why then, do so many people hate it?