The Wonders Collection [DVD]

Who are we? And: Where do we come from?Professor Brian Cox opens the series Wonders of the Universe with these two ancient questions — questions always considered religious, spiritual or philosophical. They are but the answers to them are not. They are scientific. Of the thousands of creation stories told by man to himself throughout his existence, this one — the scientific — has the merit of being true, as it’s the lone one among them whose claims are verifiable through independent enquiry and testing. Belief, in other words, doesn’t enter into it. You just have to understand. Faith and belief are important emotionally in our lives, and this is certainly good. But intellectually it’s knowledge based on evidence that matters, and it’s this — the rational intellect — that is able to answer the questions above, not fantasy, ancient tales or mysticism. Is this liberating? It ought to be.Prof. Cox wanders the banks of the Bagmati in Kathmandu in Episode Two (“Stardust”). Funeral pyres burn along the river near ghats leading down to them. Ash rises in the smoke, human bodies disintegrating in the flames. Hindus gather to recite prayers for the departing souls, ushering them into the next life. Nothing, Hinduism says, is wasted and lost in life, this being one of its great intuitive insights. The ashes of the dead are returned to the earth, from whence new life emerges. Existence, always circular, recycles itself through its elements — though Hinduism doesn’t cite the 92 basic elements that naturally occur throughout the cosmos. Chemistry and cosmology do.The scene along the Bagmati is solemn yet colourful as the sun sinks on the horizon, many yellows, oranges and reds dancing on the river. Prof. Cox, calm and clear as ever, says:“Every civilisation, every religion across the world has a creation story. It tells of where we came from, of how we came to be here and what will happen when we die.Well, I have a different creation story to tell, and it’s based entirely on physics and cosmology. Now, it can tell us what we’re made of and where we come from. In fact, it can tell us what everything in the world is made of and where it came from. It also answers that most basic of human needs, to feel part of something much bigger. Because to tell this story, you have to understand the history of the universe. And it teaches us that the path to enlightenment is not an understanding of our own lives and deaths, but the lives and deaths of the stars.My creation story is the story of how we were made by the universe. It explains how every atom in our bodies was formed not on Earth, but in the depths of space through the epic life cycle of the stars.”How do we know that the 92 constituent elements that make up matter are found throughout the visible universe? Because the stars and their photons — their streams of light — tell us so. The rainbow of colours in starlight is the key to understanding the chemical composition of the stars. We can see these colours and know what has produced them because the elements are coloured differently. Throw sodium into a campfire, as Prof. Cox does, and it burns yellow. Copper, which ought to burn copper or brown, we feel, burns blue. And potassium? Its colour is a beautiful one made at the crossroads of white and purple — lilac.Absorption lines that can be read within the spectrum of starlight give detailed information about a star’s chemical composition. These lines act as a kind of barcode that reveal what a star is largely composed of. Not all stars are composed of the same ingredients. Our sun is largely made up of hydrogen and helium. It’s a medium-cool star in early middle age that isn’t hot enough to meld other elements. All the heaviest elements, metals such as gold, sliver, copper, iron, tin and lead, are formed in the intense heat made by supernova explosions, forged in the final death throes of these stars. All the other elements essential to life are made in other stars as well: carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, calcium, potassium, etc., etc. The trillions of stars in the universe have made all the elements that fill our schoolboy and schoolgirl chemistry sets.But where did matter, the basis of complexity made from the elements that make life possible, come from? From atoms built by quarks, protons and neutrons that appeared in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang when sub-atomic particles acquired mass.Prof. Cox admits this sounds mad and ridiculous. In another century he would have been sent to Bedlam or burned at the stake for heresy. But this is the state of current knowledge, a point beyond which our ignorance cannot take us — a perspective that makes the origin of our existence seem mad and ridiculous. As science advances the perspectives will change, will appear more sensible to our descendants as more information comes in.Artemis is the Big Bang. She was the Greek goddess of archery who hunted stags. She pulled her bow string back and let fly. That was 13.7 billion years ago. Spacetime was the arrow she shot. These days we call it time’s arrow, the thing that is hurtling the universe (and all things in it) forward into the future. The journey is relentless and accelerating. How can that be? Inertia says things must slow through time. The energy that powers movement is not limitless. The arrow in its arc should be meeting resistance as it journeys. Physics in the form of the second law of thermodynamics says this must be so. So how can it be speeding up?Gravity is the answer, a force that is pulling it forward. The source of this is 95% of the universe we cannot see. We don’t know what this is because we cannot examine it without light. It’s dark energy principally. The rest is dark matter. Both are mysterious forces, yet our calculations based on the behaviour of bodies in the visible universe say they are real.Strange to think, if thought is the applicable verb here, that our universe of billions of galaxies and trillions of stars makes up only 5% of the total mass of the cosmos. In such an immensity, an immensity beyond proper comprehension, we are paradoxically cosmic provincials, our chunk of cosmic real estate dinky. Thus as hitch-hikers in the galaxy and beyond it the universe never ceases to amaze us.Time’s arrow carries us ever forward, never backwards. It doesn’t reassemble itself to go in reverse. Order, which we have now in the form of planets, star systems and galaxies, tends through time toward disorder. Things fall apart, Yeats once told us, the centre will not hold, and he was right. The ordered forms of low entropy will be scattered into high-entropy disorder over the vast arc of time’s arrow. This is inevitable, how it must be. So says the second law of thermodynamics. Which means the end must come, the universe must die, just as everything else does too, including ourselves.But this fate of the universe is still a long way off — trillions of years ahead. If the universe were a person, it’s a teenager now. At present we live in the Stelliferous Age (the Age of Stars), a robust time of growth and good health in the cosmos. Trillions of stars light up the firmament, dispelling the darkness. It wasn’t always so, nor will it be. So it’s no accident we are alive now in this time of great order, this period of growth and good cosmic health. In the billions of nebulae scattered throughout the cosmos stars are being born. These stellar nurseries exist because the energy needed to create them is condensed and ordered at present. But as time’s arrow flies into the immensity of the future fewer and fewer nurseries will come into being.Other ages await in the grand life cycle of the cosmos. In late cosmic middle age galaxies will no longer exist. In old age the last of the white dwarfs will be sputtering out, their faint light fading. Only black holes will remain thereafter, and then toward the cosmic end even these will disintegrate. In the accompanying book to the series, Prof. Cox writes:“[Toward the end] the universe will be nearly empty. Photons, neutrinos, electrons and positrons will fly from place to place. Electrons and positrons will occasionally form positronium atoms. These structures are unstable, however, and their constituent elements will eventually annihilate each other.”But at least, as mentioned before, this is a long way off. Besides, there’s no guarantee how long our species will last anyway, as we live on a planet we are badly and foolishly maltreating. Shame on us.I’m not a scientist, so I don’t know much about cosmology. I’m just a normal person with an appetite for curiosity. So I found the series illuminating in numerous ways. Prof. Cox is convivial and agreeable. He never talks down to his audience, and, though shy with a lingering boyish charm, he looks straight into the camera as if conversing over tea or coffee with us. I like that he doesn’t flinch. He carries some dark and heavy secrets because of what cosmology has taught him, but he smiles anyway, joyously thrilled by the living universe around him — by the life of the stars, atoms, molecules, elements, rocks, trees, animals, cells in our bodies. That is the beautiful thing and he knows it, so he happily teaches us the material facts. Early on in the series he says:“Every atom in my body was once a part of something else — an ancient tree, a dinosaur, a rock. In fact, definitely a rock. And the reason the rocks of the earth can become living things and then living things will return to the rocks of the earth is because everything is made of the same basic ingredients. Those ingredients are the chemical elements, the building blocks of everything on Earth.”Things I didn’t know well about or learned for the first time in the series:• The universe was dark for the first 200 million years of its existence. Light was born when the first stars ignited 13.5 billion years ago.• Most of space is empty, 99.9% of it unoccupied.• Our Milky Way galaxy and our neighbour the Andromeda galaxy (currently 2.5 million light years distant) are fixed on a collision course, pulled inexorably by the force of gravity toward one another. They will collide three billion years from now, eventually merging (violently) into one new massive super galaxy.This astonishes me. The universe is expanding. We know this to be true. So why aren’t all the galaxies rushing away from one another? I don’t know the answer, but probably Prof. Cox does.• Einstein’s theory of general relativity perfectly explains the behaviour of bodies (planets, stars, galaxies) in the section of the universe we’re able to observe, but our understanding of spacetime ceases beyond the event horizons of so-called singularities such as black holes, places so dense with gravity that not even light can escape them.In the future we will need a new physics, or an additional physics, to explain black holes and their behaviour. Likewise, presumably, for dark energy and dark matter. Just when we thought we knew, thanks to Newton, along came Einstein and Heisenberg. But that’s how knowledge advances, shedding the husk of ignorance. Future great thinkers will come next to help us on our long journey of trying to understand.Life is a temporary structure, a novelty and exception in the universe. You are privileged to have it and to grasp a little of what it is and means. So smile and enjoy the ride, as it may never come again.

It was for a gift but they said it was a good collection and they enjoy watching it

Great series, Brian gets very excited talking about stuff and is worth watching just for that alone. Very insightful, entertaining and enjoyable series of mini films that is ideal for all people aged 5 and up.

If you or your children are into the Earth and beyond this is a very good watch. The Professor talks to you in plane English, it becomes a compelling watch. Loved it.

lovely set of dvds, worth watching, incredibly fascinating

This series explores some of the most challenging and fundamental questions our brains have ever thought about. It manages to explain in a day to day language what is normally for the pleasure of advance thinkers in mathematics and physics. Having a deep understanding of maths, physics and chemistry is in no way a prerequisite to absorbing the beauty of where everything has come from. Evolution of the species is a fascinating and elegant subject with much evidence and weight behind it, but nothing prepared me for how impressed I was towards the advancements in technology, techniques and pure human will to explore astronomy and the cosmos. The filling of these great voids in our knowledge is currently being piled on in spades with good evidence base.The information appears to be up to date with current advances including the amazing images from the great Hubble Telescope. The animations simulating the places we have not been yet, or for whatever reason can not go are excellent at conjuring up a taste of these inhospitable environments. In turn the statistics these places boast are extraordinary.Brian Cox is excellent at presenting the information and visibly his passion of the subject is a pleasure to watch. He is elegant and concise in delivery without being cold and monotone but instead warm, happy and clearly moved at times by the wonders of the cosmos.Finally it was not unusual during the solitary viewing of these discs for me to verbally speak aloud words such as 'No way' or 'What?!' or '####!'..........You get the picture ;)Now when I look at the sky through binoculars and see those 'little' dots of white or blue or red I have a small knowledge of seeing more than just pin sized dots.

I love this series. Relaxing to view and educational

Brian Cox makes excellent video documentaries for people who like physics and astronomy. Otherwise, could be somewhat boring, although pitched at a level for just about anyone to understand. This particular collection seemed like excellent value for the price.