Tuesday 01 May 2007 - BBC 2

The Six Million Dollar Experiment: On 26th November 2007, a team of scientists will start-up of a scientific experiment at Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. This experiment will reconstruct the effect of the Big Bang!

And so the Universe began as a nuclear physics experiment.

Six Million Dollar.. Hmm - I think they missed off a few zeros there AND - with the accident a few weeks ago, November is looking iffy. But hey, Horizon never lets the facts get in the way of overly dramatising things.

Sure thing Doug... Did You see the BBC documentary in which they showed 4 scenarios/ways which could end the world? One of these was a mishap of such a particle accelerator experiment
For the interested, the other were a Tsunami, Asteroid impact and biological contamination.

While creating mini black holes is known to carry little risk as they evaporate quickly, the guys from Los Alamos who set off the first hydrogen bomb thought that there was a small chance that the atmosphere would ignite. They didn't have today’s modeling ability to sort it all out, so they just held their breath. Glad their intuition was correct.

Was it really intuition or just hope?
The same story circles around for the first nuclear test in New Mexico, btw.

If terrestrial particle colliders could create energies needed to produce an Earth-consuming black hole, our planet would have gone long ago... Some cosmic particles that hit the Earth's atmosphere are by far more powerful than the ones that can be produced by humans.

Indeed, let's hope CERN's IT department has efficient modeling software

Overall a superb Horizon documentary with great images ( Hubble Ultra Deep Field, New Jersey Horn Antenna, etc... ) and well explained why the 26th November 2007 experiment is so important: finding an explanation to the origin of mass...

ByTheWay: looks like our newspaper from which I took the initial post in this topic had a typo, BBC's title is: Six BILLION Dollar experiment. Hope I had it on DVD

Watching it now - melodramatic in the extreme. Horizon is not what it used to be.

Just wanted to point out that the HORIZON series are available via video.google... An example:
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=...913767641232956

Well, the episode "What's Wrong with Gravity" was a good one!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes...and/index.shtml

Agreed, it was excellent. A real scientist who could really communicate, and no overbearing portentious music.

Incidentally there is a programme on BBC Radio 4 at 9pm tonight (soon!) about growing plants in space.

I had a feeling it would be a good programme when I saw Dr Brian Cox was was presenting it. He has to be one of the most infectiously enthusiastic scientists around; which is something that is really needed these days.

He really should have his own series on Quantum Physics, I'm sure if anyone could do this subject justice and describe it in a clear and eloquent way, it would be him.

Well done Horizon.

For those outside of the UK who are unable to watch this (easily) on iPlayer someone has put it up on Google Video. it is definitely worth taking the time to watch.

Brian Cox really does a really excellent job, I'll be keeping an eye out for any other chances to get to see\hear him as he really is an exceptional communicator.

Horizon - tonight on BBC2 at 9.00p.m. looks into the hunt for extra-solar planets within the habitable zones of other stars.
Horizon is not the force it once was, but this may be quite informative.

Don't cry if you missed it. Eye-torturing, out-of-focus visual gimmickry and distracting synth-muzak throughout. Actual information only fleetingly mentioned and in apparently random order, leaving the viewer even after nearly an hour with no clear overview of the subject of extrasolar planets. Most of the script spoken by actors. It was all I could do not to turn it off half way through. By the end I wished I had.

I know what you mean. I thought it was impossible to make such an incredibly exciting and important subject as SETI boring, but that HORIZON managed it. They've just gone nuts, really: trendy shaky camera-work, ridiculous out of focus "prismatic" visual effects, fish-eye lenses used every 5 mins... they made SETI scientists seem like mad scientists or scientific fundamentalists or worse, and I actually left the TV halfway thru to browse UMSF, I just lost interest in the program. Great shame. HORIZON used to be THE science program on TV, before it was sacrificed to the false TV gods of film school gimmickry and soundbites...

The BBC had better not mess up the dramatisation of Eddington's life, due for briadcast later this year (actually I think that'll be ok, it's the same team that made the excellent Stephen Hawking doc a few years ago. Speaking of whom, the C4 Stephen Hawking prog on Monday evening was really good, I thought...

Indeed, some years HORIZON was more serious. However I'm happy they still create astronomy-cosmology related programs

Yeah - the Hawking program was great - the Horizon was meh, I couldn't maintain interest.

Doug

Sorry chaps - having flagged it up here, I actually missed it myself.
It seems to have been fairly poor by all accounts - a great shame because as I said, Horizon used to be very well-respected, and covered a wide range of subjects.

Interesting new 3-parts documentary " Earth - the Climate Wars " presented by Dr Ian Stewart:
BBC 2: Sunday evening 14th Sep 2008: part 2
http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/proginfo/...ml#startcontent

I didn't bother watching the first episode last night.

I was totally put off by the programme description



Perpetuating the old myth about global cooling in the 70's

Totally incorrect:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=94
http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/
http://ams.allenpress.com/perlserv/?reques...2370.1&ct=1

Maybe this was addressed in the program, but the overview is inaccurate, either accidentally or intentionally to sensationalise the program.

[Sigh] Very disappointing from the BBC.

James

Oh boy - here's a subject that I really don't think UMSF needs. As of now, it's on the UMSF topic black list.

As someone very interested in the subject -- I couldn't agree more.

Seems to me that tendentious subjects for discussion have in common a "religious war" nature; perhaps that's a useful meta-guide to topics best left unraised.

Anything Carl Sagan wrote about when he wasn't writing about Planetary Science.

I enjoyed the latest episode " Who's afraid of Black Holes? "

A heads-up for those of us in the UK - 'Mars: A Horizon Guide' is broadcast on BBC Four at 2100 tonight.

From the BBC website - 'The intriguing possibility of life on Mars has fuelled man's quest to visit the Red Planet. Drawing on 45 years of Horizon archive, space expert Dr Kevin Fong presents a documentary on Earth's near neighbour.'

(followed by a Sky at Night 'Mars special' with Patrick Moore and Chris Lintott at 2300)

And Doctor Who 'The Waters of Mars' is about to start in 3 minutes . .

Definitely NOT a Dr Who fan, but I'll take a look at the Horizon programme. And Sky and Night goes without saying. Thanks for the heads-up, NickF.

And it's set at Gusev -- the TARDIS lands on Husband Hill. Looks like they used Spirit's Pancams for the view. Nice hat tip to the Spirit team -- hope it cheers them up a bit.

UK UMSF'ers, remember to pick up a set of free anaglyph glasses from Sainsburys... plus a couple of pairs for the kids, one for the cat, don't forget aunty and uncle...

The Horizon best-of clips were patchy - the Viking era stuff was great (Gentry Lee!) but there was nothing on Pathfinder or Phoenix, and hardly a thing on MER, which fits my perception of Horizon's slide down the dumb-hole in the last 10-15 years quite well.

I've often wondered why we haven't had any Horizon type documentary of the MER rovers here in the UK, but judging by this appalling program i'm almost relieved we haven't. You just know 80% of it would be taken up with the Flash anomaly right at the start of Spirits mission.

And weird they didnt talk about Pathfinder/Sojourner, MGS, Mars Express, Spirit/Opportunity/ MRO and Phoenix. Just seemed to concentrate on mission failures post VIking.

The Sky at Night Mars special shown just a bit later was the programme to watch for a more complete Mars exploration overview. To my mind there would have been no point in the BBC doing essentially the same thing with the Horizon programme.

There's a reason the feature film drama directed by Ron Howard was Apollo 13 and not Apollo 17. Engineering failure and redemption is apparently more engaging than geology. Pity, because a lot has to go right for that geology.

Peril sells tickets.