Episode
Horizon: What Is Reality?
Overview
There is a strange and mysterious world that surrounds us, a world largely hidden from our senses. The quest to explain the true nature of reality is one of the great scientific detective stories. Clues have been pieced together from deep within the atom, from the event horizon of black holes, and from the far reaches of the cosmos. It may be that that we are part of a cosmic hologram, projected from the edge of the universe. Or that we exist in an infinity of parallel worlds. Your reality may never look quite the same again.
Details
- Series
- Horizon
- Season
- Season 48
- Episode
- Episode 9
- Air date
- 2011-01-17
- Runtime
- 60 min
Episode context
What Is Reality? is Episode 9 in 2010-2011 of Horizon. It aired on 2011-01-17. The runtime is 60 min.
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Episode 8: What Is One Degree?
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.
Episode 10: Science Under Attack
Nobel Prize winner Sir Paul Nurse examines why science appears to be under attack, and why public trust in key scientific theories has been eroded - from the theory that man-made climate change is warming our planet, to the safety of GM food, or that HIV causes AIDS.
More episodes from this season
Episode 7: Deepwater Disaster - The Untold Story
Horizon reveals the untold story of the 87-day battle to kill the Deepwater Horizon oil blowout a mile beneath the waves - a crisis that became America's worst environmental disaster. Engineers and oil men at the heart of the operation talk for the first time about the colossal engineering challenges they faced and how they had to improvise under extreme pressure. They tell of how they used household junk, discarded steel boxes and giant underwater cutting shears to stop the oil. It's an operation that one insider likens to the rescue of Apollo 13.
Episode 11: The Secret World of Pain
Horizon reveals the latest research into one of the most mysterious and common human experiences - pain. Breakthroughs have come from studying a remarkable woman in London who has felt no pain at all in her life, a man in the US who cut off his own arm to survive, and three generations of an Italian family who don't feel extremes of temperature. We witness a new treatment that involves a pioneering computer game 'snow world' that contains the power to banish pain. And we find how powerfully our moods and emotions shape what pain we feel.
Episode 6: Asteroids - The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Famed for their ability to inflict Armageddon from outer space, asteroids are now revealing the secrets of how they are responsible for both life and death on our planet.
Episode 12: Surviving a Car Crash
Horizon meets the scientists working to make fatal car crashes a thing of the past. A remarkable fusion of mechanical engineering and biology promises to save countless lives across the world. The programme has exclusive access to the secretive world of the most advanced car crash tests. Horizon reveals how the latest advances in trauma medicine, psychology and even extreme sport are transforming your chances of surviving on the roads. And the programme shows how researchers are creating a new virtual crash test dummy that could change how our cars are designed forever.
Episode 5: Miracle Cure? A Decade of the Human Genome
A decade ago, scientists announced that they had produced the first draft of the human genome, the 3.6 billion letters of our genetic code. It was seen as one of the greatest scientific achievements of our age, a breakthrough that would usher in a new age of medicine. A decade later, Horizon finds out how close we are to developing the life-changing treatments that were hoped for.
Episode 13: How to Mend a Broken Heart
Dr Kevin Fong finds out how close scientists are to being able to mend your heart if it stops working. He meets some of the people who have undergone pioneering heart operations and the scientists who are pushing the limits of cardiac treatment. We meet a man who has had his heart replaced with an artificial one powered by a mechanical pump he carries around in a rucksack, and witness a scientist bring a dead animal heart back to life on a workbench. Plus, the work of an American scientist who is using stem cells to turn what she calls a 'ghost heart' - the scaffold of a heart - into a replacement heart for humans.
Episode 4: Is Seeing Believing?
Horizon explores the strange and wonderful world of illusions - and reveals the tricks they play on our senses and why they fool us. We show how easy it is to trick your sense of taste by changing the colours of food and drink, explain how what you see can change what you hear, and see just how unreliable our sense of colour can be. But all this trickery has a serious purpose. It's helping scientists to create a new understanding of how our senses work - not as individual senses, but connected together.
Episode 14: Are We Still Evolving?
Dr Alice Roberts asks one of the great questions about our species: are we still evolving? There's no doubt that we're a product of millions of years of evolution. But thanks to modern technology and medicine, did we escape Darwin's law of the survival of the fittest? Alice follows a trail of clues from ancient human bones, to studies of remarkable people living in the most inhospitable parts of the planet, to the frontiers of genetic research to discover if we are still evolving - and where we might be heading.
Episode 3: What Happened Before the Big Bang?
They are the biggest questions that science can possibly ask: where did everything in our universe come from? How did it all begin? For nearly a hundred years, we thought we had the answer: a big bang some 14 billion years ago. But now some scientists believe that was not really the beginning. Our universe may have had a life before this violent moment of creation. Horizon takes the ultimate trip into the unknown, to explore a dizzying world of cosmic bounces, rips and multiple universes, and finds out what happened before the big bang.
Episode 15: Predators in Your Backyard
Across the world scientists are releasing predators, nature's ultimate killers, close to where people live. In Florida, a new population of panthers, feared as ambush predators, have been released near to the busy town of Naples. In the Italian Alps, bears have been reintroduced after they became virtually extinct, and now try to get into people's homes in the middle of the night. And in Yellowstone National Park, wolves have been brought back 70 years after they were exterminated. Horizon meets the scientist behind this radical scheme, and the people who now have to share their backyards with these predators.