cosmos-2014

46m
Episode 1
Standing Up in the Milky Way
The Ship of the Imagination sets out on a tour of the observable universe, locating Earth's address in the Milky Way and in the sweep of cosmic time.
44m
Episode 2
Some of the Things that Molecules Do
Artificial selection and the evolution of the eye illustrate how natural selection changes a population of species over time.
46m
Episode 3
When Knowledge Conquered Fear
A ride through the Oort Cloud follows one comet on its million-year fall toward the Sun, and traces how natural events stopped being read as divine displeasure.
44m
Episode 4
A Sky Full of Ghosts
How light, time and gravity distort the view of the universe from Earth. On a beach in 1809, William Herschel tells his son John why telescopes are time machines.
46m
Episode 5
Hiding in the Light
Ibn al-Haytham works out how light travels and how sight works in 11th-century North Africa, and William Herschel later finds infrared hidden in starlight.
46m
Episode 6
Deeper, Deeper, Deeper Still
A voyage into a dewdrop reveals life invisible to the eye, then the neural network behind smell and memory, and a search far underground for the most elusive particle known.
44m
Episode 7
The Clean Room
Geochemist Clair Patterson develops uranium-lead dating to fix Earth's age at 4.5 billion years, then turns to the lead spreading through the environment.
43m
Episode 8
Sisters of the Sun
Annie Jump Cannon catalogs the spectra of the stars and Cecilia Payne uses that data to work out what stars are made of, leading into how stars live and die.
44m
Episode 9
The Lost Worlds of Planet Earth
Earth's history is written in its atoms, oceans and continents, and geologist Marie Tharp draws the first true map of the ocean floor.
43m
Episode 10
The Electric Boy
Michael Faraday, raised in poverty in 19th-century England, invents the motor and the generator and works out the magnetic fields behind them.
45m
Episode 11
The Immortals
A search across the cosmos for beings that might live forever, and for the reasons civilizations perish, ends at a cosmic calendar of the future.
41m
Episode 12
The World Set Free
Venus supplies the lesson as the series traces the long history of the greenhouse effect and the scale of human impact on Earth's atmosphere.
46m
Episode 13
Unafraid of the Dark
The two Voyager probes carry the series out into interstellar space, closing on what the vastness of the cosmos means for the human condition.