Skip to content

The Day the Universe Changed — Season 1

Episodes

  • No preview

    E01 The Way We Are: It Started with the Greeks

    Mar 19, 1985 · 45m

    Written and presented by James Burke, this 10-part series traces the development of Western thought through its major transformations since the days of ancient Greece. Program one is an overview of the series, showing how a culture’s view of the world around it determines how it sees itself, and is reflected even in the smallest details of its customs and habits.

  • No preview

    E02 In the Light of the Above: Medieval Conflict: Faith and Reason

    Mar 26, 1985 · 45m

  • No preview

    E03 Point of View: Scientific Imagination in the Renaissance

    Apr 2, 1985 · 45m

    Shows that Western Europe’s rediscovery of perspective through the study of Arab optics led to revolutions in art and architecture. The West’s new-found ability to control things at a distance resulted in new methods of warfare and the confidence to make long voyages of exploration.

  • No preview

    E04 A Matter of Fact: Printing Transforms Knowledge

    Apr 9, 1985 · 45m

    Observes that the invention of printing and the advent of cheap paper forever transformed the nature of knowledge from the local and traditional to the systematic and testable. Nationalism, public relations, and propaganda are among the results.

  • No preview

    E05 Infinitely Reasonable: Science Revises the Heavens

    Apr 16, 1985 · 45m

    Notes that investigators such as Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton evolved better explanations of natural phenomena than those of Aristotle. Highlights the theories that led to a new conception of how the universe works and of man’s place in it.

  • No preview

    E06 Credit Where It's Due: The Factory and Marketplace Revolution

    Apr 23, 1985 · 45m

    Locates the origins of contemporary consumerism in the English industrial Revolution, powered by religious dissenters barred from all activities except trade. The invention of the steam engine, new forms of credit, surplus wealth, and opening markets laid the foundation for industrial society.

  • No preview

    E07 What the Doctor Ordered: Impacts of New Medical Knowledge

    Apr 30, 1985 · 45m

    Traces modern society’s recognition of the value of statistics to medical advances stemming from responses to the French Revolution and an English cholera epidemic. Identifies the origins of medicine as a science with the discovery of anesthesia, antiseptics, and bacteriology.

  • No preview

    E08 Fit to Rule: Darwin's Revolution

    May 7, 1985 · 45m

    Tracks the expectation of change, fundamental to contemporary society, through the developing sciences of botany, geology, and biology to Darwin’s theory of evolution. Darwin’s theory, in turn, has been used as a justification for Nazism, communism, and cut-throat capitalism.

  • No preview

    E09 Making Waves: The New Physics: Newton Revised

    May 14, 1985 · 45m

    Points out that studies of the properties of magnetism, electricity, and light have led scientists to the realization that Newtonian physics is inadequate to explain all that they observe. The public, meanwhile, has continued to concentrate on the technological by-products of science.

  • No preview

    E10 Worlds Without End: Changing Knowledge, Changing Reality

    May 21, 1985 · 45m

    Observes that over the centuries Western civilization has regularly shifted its conception of the nature of truth. The series closes with host James Burke's remarkably prescient assessment of the role in which modern computer networks are beginning to now play in shaping man's current conception of his reality as well as how they may well define the fundamental nature of all future human interaction. And while his message is ultimately a positive one, it is tempered with the warning that while the promise of the computer may indeed provide a framework for a future anarchism where human freedom is nourished and where every individual conception of reality is a valid one, it could conversely become of tool of totalitarian repression and conformity.