Parachutes • 2019 • episode "2/4" • Survival in the Skies

51:42

Planet Earth shrinks to half size causing altitude sickness and a cosmic disaster, the sun gets as small as a sun can be, turning Earth into a frozen mud ball. We also see what happens to a man who shrinks to the same size as a wasp.

2/2 • Size Matters • 2019 • Physics

52:00

Planet Earth grows to outlandish proportions that causes lying down to become the new standing up, the sun gets big ideas giving us a 20,000-year winter before blowing up in the biggest explosion since the big bang, we meet a dog the size of a dinosaur and Joe himself turns into a 49ft giant.

1/2 • Size Matters • 2019 • Physics

49:38

Richard Feynman was one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists and original thinkers of the 20th century. He rebuilt the theory of quantum electrodynamics, and it was for this work that he won the Nobel Prize in 1965. In 1981, he gave Horizon a candid interview, talking about many things close to his heart.

Horizon • 1981 • Physics

57:59

Hannah is going the other way by asking whether everything could, in fact, be smaller. But going smaller turns out not to be much safer... First, we shrink the Earth to half its size - it starts well with lower gravity enabling us to do incredible acrobatics, but things gradually turn nasty as everyone gets altitude sickness - even at sea level. Then we visit Professor Daniel Lathrop's incredible laboratory, where he has built a model Earth that allows us to investigate the other effects of shrinking the planet to half size. The results aren't good - with a weaker magnetic field we would lose our atmosphere and eventually become a barren, lifeless rock like Mars. In our next thought experiment, we shrink people to find out what life is like if you are just 5mm tall. We find out why small creatures have superpowers that seem to defy the laws of physics, meet Jyoti Amge, the world's smallest woman, and with the help of Dr Diana Van Heemst and thousands of baseball players reveal why short people have longer lives. Lastly, the Sun gets as small as a sun can be. We visit the fusion reactor at the Joint European Torus to find out why stars have to be a minimum size or fusion won't happen. And if our Sun were that small? Plants would turn from green to black, and Earth would probably resemble a giant, frozen eyeball. Which all goes to show that size really does matter.

2/2 • Size Matters with Hannah Fry • 2018 • Physics

59:08

Artist and writer Matt Collings takes the plunge into an alien world of equations. He asks top scientists to help him understand five of the most famous equations in science, talks to Stephen Hawking about his equation for black holes and comes face to face with a particle of anti-matter. Along the way he discovers why Newton was right about those falling apples and how to make sense of E=mc2. As he gets to grips with these equations he wonders whether the concept of artistic beauty has any relevance to the world of physics.

2010 • Physics

43:24

It's called the speed limit of the universe. Einstein blew all of our minds when he worked out the Theory of Relativity, and showed that space and time were malleable substances. He also theorized that we as humans can never travel faster than the speed of light, which leaves the stars and other galaxies almost impossibly out of our reach. But the dreams of Star Wars and Star Trek are not dead. In fact, there could be ways to travel faster than the speed of light - and some of them are already being tested in labs around the world.

S2E08 • Through the Wormhole • Physics