Atoms: Examines the behavior of the atom. With a series of simple but striking demonstrations, Morrison shows how the atom reveals itself in all matter. Fireworks, gold beating, sorting sand on a beach, highway flares, and even quantum jumps are employed as a single barium atom provides the light for its own portrait.
Change: Presents science’s grand laws of conservation by looking at what remains unchanged in processes as complex as the three-week-long Tour de France bicycle race and a three-foot lucite box packed with Rube Goldberg-type contraptions that spin and bump and explode when triggered. Energy is measured in a blaze of jelly donut units; mass is measured in terms of the weight of the dot over the letter i. And eventually, both constants are unified by Morrison as he uses a little orange wind-up kangaroo to discuss Einstein’s famous formula, E=mc2.
Clues: Presents another key to the way science works: reconstructing the past with the evidence of the present. To illustrate this, Morrison follows a geologist who uses a simple hammer to test a sample and infer the history of Amethyst Mountain in Yellowstone National Park. For the rest of the intriguing story, an elaborate computer-controlled drill ship is required to piece together the clues to a new and dramatic hypothesis: that five million years ago the Mediterranean Sea was an arid salt desert formed as the straits of Gibraltar closed into a huge natural plug that shut off the Atlantic waters.
Doubt: Begins around the time that World War I has ended, when the world of science was exploding in an array of new breakthroughs—one of the greatest coming from a young astronomer named Cecilia Payne. The program follows her exciting quest to find the recipe of the stars utilizing tiny rainbow images to deduce their composition—90% hydrogen. This has been recently thrown into doubt as astronomer Vera Rubin demonstrates. New ways of looking at the heavens have shown that most of the universe is made of something we can’t see . . . something dark, hidden, unknown, perhaps something left over from the beginning of the universe.
Looking: Examines the way we see and the influence it has on what we understand. By tracing the development of Galileo’s telescope and using compelling demonstrations, Morrison shows how instruments have been central to the development of scientific theories through the ages. But no matter what new instruments are developed, science still requires that we use our everyday common sense when evaluating new evidence. For just as the naked eye can be tricked, so too can the sophisticated instruments we develop to amplify the power of our unaided senses.
Mapping: A Ryder rental van is turned into a mobile star-sighting observatory on a long voyage through Nebraska and Kansas as Morrison explores the way mapmakers use the stars—natural and artificial alike — to determine locations on earth. Morrison also ventures beyond our world of 3-D or 4-D into a realm where ideas, concepts, and data—even music—are displayed visually for better comprehension.
