Browse documentaries

By the year 2050, the world's population will reach nine billion. The demand on the world's resources - energy, first and foremost - will be severe. But the road from now to then doesn't need be bleak. There is a path to a future filled with opportunities, with amazing individuals and extraordinary projects leading the way.

Comedian Ben Miller returns to his roots as a physicist to try to answer a deceptively simple question: what is one degree of temperature? His quest takes him to the frontiers of current science as he meets researchers working on the hottest and coldest temperatures in the universe, and to a lab where he experiences some of the strangest effects of quantum physics - a place where super-cooled liquids simply pass through solid glass. Plus, Ben installs his very own Met office weather station at home. Ben's investigations in this personal and passionate film highlight the importance of measurement and accuracy in the 21st century.

Investigation of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, after the Cassini spacecraft's seven-year trek landed the Huygens Probe on its surface. Does it reveal how life on Earth began?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PS5JyzeXZJ0

What will happen to the Earth? We tend to worry about issues like climate change that can have an impact over periods of time comparable to an average human lifetime. For the Earth, however, the biggest changes generally happen over hundreds of millions or billions of years. Supercontinents come and go, mass extinctions wipe out almost all life, and changes in the surrounding Solar System have an impact. It is ultimately the Sun that will decide Earth's fate. Billions of years from now, as our aging star begins to runs out of hydrogen fuel, it will change into a red giant and expand out into the inner Solar System as far out as the Earth's orbit.

Isaac Newton - brilliant rational mathematician or master of the occult? This innovative biography reveals Newton as both a hermit and a tyrant, a heretic and an alchemist. Magical images mix with actors and experts to bring alive Britain's greatest scientific genius in his own words.

Documentary of earth's violent past and tectonic plates

Black holes are one of the most destructive forces in the universe, capable of tearing a planet apart and swallowing an entire star. Yet scientists now believe they could hold the key to answering the ultimate question - what was there before the Big Bang? The trouble is that researching them is next to impossible. Black holes are by definition invisible and there's no scientific theory able to explain them. Despite these obvious obstacles, Horizon meets the astronomers attempting to image a black hole for the very first time and the theoretical physicists getting ever closer to unlocking their mysteries. It's a story that takes us into the heart of a black hole and to the very edge of what we think we know about the universe.

Light Fantastic is the title of a television documentary series that explores the phenomenon of light