What Is Reality? A BBC Horizon Documentary

What walking through walls has to do with tropical fruit and the search for the God particle.

We’re big fans of Horizon, BBC’s iconic popular science documentary series, whose claims to fame include pitting science against God and illuminating how music works. Their latest installment deals with one of the most fundamental questions of human existence: What Is Reality? — an inquiry so deep and complex it has occupied the seemingly insufficient minds of brilliant scientists and philosophers for eons.

It’s one of the simplest yet most profound questions in science: The search to understand the nature of reality. But on this quest, common sense is no guide.”

The series is available on YouTube in its entirety, and covers a number of fascinating scientific theories about the nature of reality, from theoretical physics to mathematics to quantum mechanics.

From the discovery of quarks, the fundamental building blocks of matter, to the story of the Large Hadron Collider, to the elusive Higgs boson, better-known as the God particle, the series takes an ambitious peer into the depths of intellectual inquiry and the outermost frontiers of human understanding.

Perhaps most fascinatingly, the documentary bridges concepts familiar from science fiction — parallel universes, time travel, teleportation — with areas of rigorous scientific research, brimming with concepts and discoveries so mind-bending yet grounded in present scientific investigation that they leave you questioning the very nature of everything you’ve come to know and accept as real.

For more on this enormous question, on par with our grand inquiry into what makes us human, you won’t go wrong with Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality — an elegant and eloquent read about the most important clash in theoretical physics, which shaped the course of quantum research. And of course — we’re almost embarrassed to mention this, that’s how fundamental a read it is — Stephen Hawking’s seminal A Brief History of Time should be required reading on any academic curriculum and a linchpin on every lifelong learner’s syllabus.

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The Joy of Stats: Hans Rosling on Statistics as Storytelling

Last month, we were once again stunned by our favorite statistical stuntsman, Hans Rosling, as he visualized 200 years that changed the world in 4 minutes using augmented reality, in a promo for BBC’s The Joy of Stats — a compelling look at the convergence of statistics and storytelling. The hour-long program is now available in its entirety and we highly recommend you indulge.

There’s nothing boring about statistics. Especially not today, when we can make the data sing. With statistics, we can really make sense of the world. With statistic, the “data deluge,” as it’s been called, is leading us to an ever-greater understanding of life on Earth and the universe beyond.”

Intelligent and witty, the segment begins with a compelling introduction to some basic statistical concepts, then segues into the power of data visualization, with cameos by Brain Pickings favorites like David McCandless and the We Feel Fine project. Interwoven throughout are cutting-edge examples of statistics that reveal hidden patterns in the real world and, in the process, improve our quality of life.

Tickled by the subject? Explore further with the excellent new book Data Analysis with Open Source Tools, an essential handbook for thinking about data and usiting it as a sensemaking mechnism for the world.

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Look at Life: The Swinging London of The 1960s

What sky-dining and London’s traffic wardens have to do with pre-modern hipsters.

During the 1960s, the Special Features Division of the Rank Organisation produced Look at Life — a fascinating British series of more than 500 short documentary segments exploring various aspets of life in Britain during the “swinging” era. From the rise of the supermarket to the tipping point of coffee culture to the emergence of the high-rise office, the series reveals the roots of many modern givens, alongside curioius era-specific fads and unique London fascinations like sky-dining and the culture of female traffic wardens.

They say London swings: It doesn’t. Not even the King’s Road, Chelsea. But here and there, among the conformist fat-cat crowds, is a lean cat or two, looking like it might swing, given some encouragement. And there among the chain stores and supermarkets is here and there a shop that may have something all its own to say. To the character who can send up a mass-production car. To people who can put living before a living.”

And the lollipop says what the toy car said: It’s all about that tiny colored womb, warm and gentle, in its way an escape from the H-bomb, television and other horrors of worker-day world.”

It’s particularly interesting to see the emergence of cultural phenomena we tend to see as nascent, from vintage revivalism to hipsterdom, in London’s “antique supermarkets,” predecessors of today’s vintage stores, and boutiques like I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet, an impressively more hipsterly-named then-version of Urban Outfitters. In fact, the program’s entire tone is oozing the same blend of genuine fascination, not-so-subtle condescendence and marginal mockery that you’d find in much of today’s media conversation on hipster culture.

One way of saying ‘no’ to authority is to parody it. Some of the young, with little to say ‘yes’ to, come to Soho — that pulsating heart of swinging London where girls join clubs to see old men strip… or is it vice-versa… and at the cutely named I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet, buy uniforms of the past to affront the uniformity of the present.”

Filmed, narrated and scored with delightful cinematic retrostalgia, the series does for the history of cultural innovation what James Burke’s Connections did for the history of technological innovation.

For more on the subject, we highly recommend Ready, Steady, Go!: The Smashing Rise and Giddy Fall of Swinging London — a sweeping review of the era that gave us mod, bob cuts, and a new paradigm for freedom of expression. From profiles of cultural icons like designer Mary Quant and photographer David Bailey to the sociology of Beatlemania to LSD, the book offers keen insight on a geotemporal phenomenon that crossed cultural borders and shaped the taste, style and sensibility of decades to come.

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Christmas Unwrapped: The History of Christmas

What Victorian anxieties have to do with Coke, candy canes and mythbusting the Bible.

How did a holiday that began in pagan Rome become the centerpiece of the Christian tradition and even a secular global celebration of consumerism across faiths? In Christmas Unwrapped: The History of Christmas, a fascinating 1997 History Channel documentary, historian Harry Smith traces the origins of Christmas and how many of the relative newcomer traditions like candy canes and the Christmas tree came to be. From how cartoonist Thomas Nast defined the look of Santa Claus to how Coca Cola subsequently appropriated it to the profound socioanthropological learnings from Dickens’ classic Christmas Carol, the documentary reveals the rich and surprising history of a holiday that has become a pillar of the modern calendar.

Christmas Unwrapped is available on YouTube in five parts or, for the quality aficionados, as a full-length DVD film from the A&E archives.

The church knew it could not outlaw the pagan traditions of Christmas, so it set out to adopt them. The evergreens traditionally brought inside were soon decorated with apples, symbolizing the Garden of Eden. These apples would eventually become Christmas ornaments.”

The documentary features commentary from renowned historians Stephen Nissenbaum, author of The Battle for Christmas and Penne L. Restad, who penned Christmas in America: A History.

If the shepherds are out in the fields, watching their flock by night, we’re not talking about one of the cold spells in the heart of winter.”

The film also dives into historical scholarship to debunk some fundamental premises of Christmas: For instance, a closer look of the Christian scriptures reveals Christ was likely born in the spring, not in December.

[Dickens’] Christmas Carol showed the Victorians what could be the use and the reading of Christmas in a society which was quite pleased with itself in a way but which, nevertheless, had fears about inequality, about materialism, about, perhaps, too rapid change.”

Certainly today, most of the churches revel in the celebrations as completely as do the corporate malls. That’s not a bad thing — it actually goes back to the sources of this kind of holiday, where we recognize that people have deep needs at this time of year to connect with that which is very important, but also to celebrate.”

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