Episode 08: SISTERS OF THE SUN
The Pleiades Constellation – a guide
for our ancient forebears. They looked
into the night sky and used the Pleiades
to invent agriculture. Their improved
lot moved them from a people living
under the heavens to a people living in
dwellings, now disconnected from the
stars above them.
Fables and traditions – from Halloween
to the native American Kiowa nation’s
myth of the Devil’s Tower – they all
originated from the Pleiades. The
ancient Greeks saw the constellation
Orion chasing the Seven Sisters across
the night sky. Legends ascribed by
human storytellers to give meaning to
these distant mysterious points of light.
We hear a new story; that of two 20th century
female astronomers at Harvard who counted the
stars. A young British lady joined them in their efforts,
resisting the world’s leading authority, and she taught
the world about the real nature of the stars in our sky.
Our Ship of the Imagination takes us on an exploration
through stellar lifecycles including our
own familiar Sun. Looking up through
The Window on the Future we travel to
Earth and live through the final ideal day
on our mother planet. Exploring farther
we stand witness to the tragic death of
a binary star system.
In Australia we view the heavens with
clarity akin to our ancestors’ experiences.
7,500 light years away we see Eta Carina
and its malevolent companion, torturing
it with its strong gravity. Torn and twisted
not to become a supernova, but one
day to light up our skies as a hypernovae.
Neil samples the delights of a
Tuscan vineyard showing how sunshine
becomes moonshine. As we end this
chapter of our travels, he guides us to the planet of a
humdrum star orbiting a globular cluster. We see the
most beautiful sight never seen until now; not a sunrise
but a galaxy rise, as morning is brilliantly transformed
not by one sun but two hundred billion suns! This is the
rising of our Milky Way.
“Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together
people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another.
Books break the shackles of time.”
– Carl Sagan, “Cosmos”
Episode 09: THE ELECTRIC BOY
Our 21st century world of hi-tech, satnavs, Twitter
and Facebook, communication with our robotic
ambassadors at the fringes of our solar system – these
all are owed to the remarkable genius of Albert Einstein.
We start with Isaac Newton’s problem of why an
apple falls. Could this be the same riddle of why the
planets are pulled towards the Sun as if on an invisible
tether?
We move through Einstein’s early childhood and see
how his father sparked Albert’s creative genius with
the gift of a compass. How can the needle move if
there is nothing but empty space behind it? There must
be a deeply hidden reason to this.
We meet young Michael Faraday; born into obscure
poverty he rose above his humble beginnings to invent
the motor and the generator. He is our bridge from
the old world to our world of high tech iPhones and
computer tablets. Caught in th