The Day the Universe Changed

S01E01 The Way We Are: It Started with the Greeks

March 19, 1985 45 min

Written and presented by James Burke, this 10-part series traces the development of Western thought through its major transformations since the days of ancient Greece. Program one is an overview of the series, showing how...

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S01E02 In the Light of the Above: Medieval Conflict: Faith and Reason

March 26, 1985 45 min

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S01E03 Point of View: Scientific Imagination in the Renaissance

April 2, 1985 45 min

Shows that Western Europe’s rediscovery of perspective through the study of Arab optics led to revolutions in art and architecture. The West’s new-found ability to control things at a distance resulted in new methods of...

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S01E04 A Matter of Fact: Printing Transforms Knowledge

April 9, 1985 45 min

Observes that the invention of printing and the advent of cheap paper forever transformed the nature of knowledge from the local and traditional to the systematic and testable. Nationalism, public relations, and propaganda are among...

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S01E05 Infinitely Reasonable: Science Revises the Heavens

April 16, 1985 45 min

Notes that investigators such as Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton evolved better explanations of natural phenomena than those of Aristotle. Highlights the theories that led to a new conception of how the universe works and...

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S01E06 Credit Where It's Due: The Factory and Marketplace Revolution

April 23, 1985 45 min

Locates the origins of contemporary consumerism in the English industrial Revolution, powered by religious dissenters barred from all activities except trade. The invention of the steam engine, new forms of credit, surplus wealth, and opening...

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S01E07 What the Doctor Ordered: Impacts of New Medical Knowledge

April 30, 1985 45 min

Traces modern society’s recognition of the value of statistics to medical advances stemming from responses to the French Revolution and an English cholera epidemic. Identifies the origins of medicine as a science with the discovery...

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S01E08 Fit to Rule: Darwin's Revolution

May 7, 1985 45 min

Tracks the expectation of change, fundamental to contemporary society, through the developing sciences of botany, geology, and biology to Darwin’s theory of evolution. Darwin’s theory, in turn, has been used as a justification for Nazism,...

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S01E09 Making Waves: The New Physics: Newton Revised

May 14, 1985 45 min

Points out that studies of the properties of magnetism, electricity, and light have led scientists to the realization that Newtonian physics is inadequate to explain all that they observe. The public, meanwhile, has continued to...

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S01E10 Worlds Without End: Changing Knowledge, Changing Reality

May 21, 1985 45 min

Observes that over the centuries Western civilization has regularly shifted its conception of the nature of truth. The series closes with host James Burke's remarkably prescient assessment of the role in which modern computer networks...

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