The bar­ri­er that all pop­u­lar sci­ence pro­grammes have to sur­mount is that so many of our recent dis­cov­er­ies have come through the avenues opened up by Spe­cial and Gen­er­al Rel­a­tiv­i­ty and Quan­tum mechan­ics. And they are both so unfath­omably com­plex that it’s incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult to talk about either of them to the likes of you and I. Either you sac­ri­fice the sci­ence for the sake of mak­ing your pro­gramme acces­si­ble, or you alien­ate your view­ers by own­ing up to quite how insane­ly counter-intu­itive the quan­tum uni­verse is in the age of Rel­a­tiv­i­ty. Inevitably, pro­grammes tend to err on the side of pop­u­lar at the expense of sci­ence. They tend in oth­er words to be more BBC1 (and 3) than BBC2 (and 4).

Recent­ly though we’ve seen a num­ber of pro­grammes that man­age to redress that bal­ance, explor­ing the cut­ting edge of sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­ery, but doing so in a way that the non-sci­en­tist can (just about) com­fort­ably fol­low. Bri­an Cox’s pro­grammes on the Won­ders of the Solar Sys­tem and then the Uni­verse (see below), the His­to­ry Channel’s The Uni­verse, and now this, Through The Worm­hole with Mor­gan Free­man. The way that he’s done it is, basi­cal­ly, by mak­ing a pro­gramme that he’s designed specif­i­cal­ly for him.

Free­man plays the host, steer­ing us through the day’s top­ic which range from black holes and time trav­el, to the ori­gins of life and the pos­si­bil­i­ty of intel­li­gent life on oth­er plan­ets. But unlike so many of the fig­ure­heads who are tacked on to front pro­grammes like these, Free­man is as gen­uine­ly inter­est­ed in the top­ic being explored as we are. Like us, he too is curi­ous about what we now know when we look up into the night skies, and what it can tell us about who we are and where we came from. But he too has nev­er got around to for­mal­ly study­ing it. So when he was asked to get involved in a series about space and the cos­mos, he clear­ly saw it as a fan­tas­tic oppor­tu­ni­ty to explore all those things he was inter­est­ed in a bit more sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly (or alter­na­tive­ly, he’s an even bet­ter actor than I gave him cred­it for).

The jour­ney he takes us on in the course of the (so far two) series is as much his as it is ours. And the rea­son it works so won­der­ful­ly well is that he and it assume that we are as intel­li­gent as he is, but no more so. So that whilst it nev­er shies away from M (or string) the­o­ry, Rel­a­tiv­i­ty and the quan­tum uni­verse, he’ll remind us every now and then that he’s as baf­fled and befud­dled by all these appar­ent­ly insane the­o­ries as we are. After all, as Nils Bohr, one of the great 20^th cen­tu­ry physi­cists put it:

“Those who are not shocked when they first come across quan­tum mechan­ics can­not pos­si­bly have under­stood it.”

Apart from the mer­ci­ful­ly brief flash­backs relat­ing to so say child­hood mem­o­ries that each episode feels oblig­ed to begin with, it’s a won­der­ful­ly engag­ing, sci­ence-heavy series that man­ages to be both acces­si­ble and stim­u­lat­ing. And the fact that it so suc­cess­ful­ly bal­ances the dic­tates of edu­cat­ing, inform­ing and enter­tain­ing (and in that order) is in no small mea­sure a reflec­tion on its genial host.

Series 1 and 2 can be seen on the Dis­cov­ery Chan­nel now.

In 1974 Orson Welles made the appar­ent­ly con­ven­tion­al but qui­et­ly bril­liant F For Fake. He was con­vinced he’d invent­ed a new art form. On the face of it, it was a lan­guid doc­u­men­tary about a famous art forg­er, but in real­i­ty it was used by Welles to prod and probe our notions of art and arti­fice, of authen­tic­i­ty and men­dac­i­ty, and he used him­self and his life as the vehi­cle with which to do it. It was in oth­er words a metic­u­lous­ly con­struct­ed visu­al essay.

The essais, or “attempt” was pio­neered by Michel Mon­taigne in 16^th cen­tu­ry France. It was, as Sarah Bakewell puts it in her superb biog­ra­phy http://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Live-Montaigne-question-attempts/dp/0701178922, a way of “writ­ing about one­self in order to cre­ate a mir­ror in which oth­er peo­ple rec­og­nize their own human­i­ty”. Welles believed the medi­um of film was a won­der­ful oppor­tu­ni­ty to give the per­son­al essay a whole new lease of life.

But to his dis­may, F For Fake fell com­plete­ly flat. And, although Hans-Jür­gen Syberberg’s mag­is­te­r­i­al Hitler, A Film From Ger­many was shown in cin­e­mas three years lat­er in 1977, all 7 hours and 17 min­utes of it, it wasn’t cin­e­ma that proved to be the nat­ur­al home for the filmed essay, but television.

The ‘illu­sion of trans­paren­cy’ that the any­thing but ‘arbi­trary quad­ran­gle’ that tele­vi­sion cre­ates is the per­fect space to pur­sue per­son­al pas­sions. It’s giv­en voice to every­one from Jacob Bronows­ki, Carl Sagan and Ken­neth Clark to Nick Broom­field, Michael Moore and Louis Ther­oux. But by far and away the most sophis­ti­cat­ed author of the filmed essay is Adam Cur­tis. It is he who has picked up where Welles left off.

His lat­est, All Watched Over By Machines Of Lov­ing Grace has just been shown on the BBC, and is divid­ed into three parts. The first is, arguably, its least con­vinc­ing. It’s debat­able just how influ­en­tial Ayn Rand’s “eco­nom­ics” were on Alan Greenspan, and the causal rela­tion­ship he sketch­es between Asia’s eco­nom­ic chaos and our own six or sev­en years lat­er is much more com­plex than he suggests.

The sec­ond instal­ment though is much more sat­is­fy­ing, and the pat­tern he weaves between some of the 20^th century’s big ideas and the direc­tion that the envi­ron­men­tal move­ment head­ed off in is bril­liant­ly stitched together.

The third episode is even more impres­sive again, and is a sear­ing indict­ment of Belgium’s respon­si­bil­i­ty for the geno­cide and chaos they caused in Rwan­da in the lat­ter half of the 20^th century.

But it is also a fas­ci­nat­ing por­trait of two of the most impor­tant recent evo­lu­tion­ary sci­en­tists, George Price and W.D. Hamil­ton, whose work paved the way for Richard Dawkins to pop­u­larise the idea of the Self­ish Gene. And it con­tains an intrigu­ing mini-por­trait of the Amer­i­can zool­o­gist Dian Fos­sey, marked­ly dif­fer­ent to the one you’ll see in Goril­las In The Mist.

What’s so exhil­a­rat­ing about Cur­tis, and in par­tic­u­lar this third episode, is that he some­how man­ages to meld all these ele­ments togeth­er alchem­i­cal­ly to pro­duce a coher­ent whole. So that what you get is three fas­ci­nat­ing mini biogra­phies, viewed in the light of the com­bustible way that sci­ence and pol­i­tics often seem to interact.

Archae­ol­o­gy is a sur­pris­ing­ly mod­ern prac­tice. The word was first used by Thucy­dides in the 5^th cen­tu­ry B.C. where he warned future his­to­ri­ans against under­es­ti­mat­ing the impor­tance of Spar­ta if all they did was to look at the evi­dence that Spar­ta left behind. It wasn’t until 1738 though that we first began to study ancient remains, when the digs at Her­cu­la­neum and then at near­by Pom­peii were begun. But it was only with the advances made in the 20^th cen­tu­ry that Archae­ol­o­gy began to be prac­ticed in a con­sis­tent­ly sci­en­tif­ic manner.

The only way to ever dis­cov­er any­thing is by using the sci­en­tif­ic method. You look at an event or phe­nom­e­non and sug­gest an expla­na­tion for all those sorts of things. Then you devise exper­i­ments to test your ideas, which you mod­i­fy sub­se­quent to the results that you get, when at last you can pro­duce a the­o­ry. This is then exam­ined and test­ed by your peers, who eval­u­ate the tests you used and your inter­pre­ta­tion of the results, until hope­ful­ly a con­sen­sus is reached as to the valid­i­ty of your ideas.

So, in archae­ol­o­gy, you gath­er what evi­dence you can find, bits of pot­tery, rock, seeds, pollen, bones, and, if you are very lucky, texts, and you test them to see what infor­ma­tion you can extract. For any­thing up to about 40–50,000 years old for instance, radio car­bon dat­ing can give you a very good idea as to what time frame you are look­ing at, and the more recent it is, the more accu­rate the read­ing. Alter­na­tive­ly, you might look at the use of gram­mar in a text to com­pare it with already estab­lished lit­er­ary norms from oth­er texts, to see whether what you have belongs to this or to that tradition.

Even­tu­al­ly you pub­lish your con­clu­sions, which are then care­ful pored over by your peers. What you can­not do, ever, is to begin with your con­clu­sions, and then go about search­ing for evi­dence that sup­ports them. This though is pre­cise­ly how “archae­ol­o­gy” was con­duct­ed in the Mid­dle East dur­ing the 50s, 60s and 70s.

The start­ing point from where they all began was, the bible is an his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ment. Any evi­dence that was then unearthed that didn’t sup­port that was, at best ignored, at worst destroyed. In any oth­er part of the world, this sort of behav­iour would have been deemed beneath con­tempt, and wouldn’t have last­ed a week. But such were (and of course are) the sen­si­tiv­i­ties around the nascent Israel, that these incred­i­bly un-sci­en­tif­ic prac­tices were left unchal­lenged for an entire generation.

Dr. Francesca Stavrakopoulou’s superb first episode in the BBC’s the Bible’s Buried Secrets charts this mis­use of pseu­do-sci­ence, and exam­ines the copi­ous quan­ti­ties of actu­al archae­o­log­i­cal evi­dence that the region has pro­duced. The bible isn’t a fac­tu­al doc­u­ment, and any­body who tries to read it as such is doing it a mas­sive dis­ser­vice. You’re meant to learn from its sto­ries, moral­ly. Its per­ma­nence and depth derive from its moral truth, not from its his­tor­i­cal accuracy.

It’s a con­cise and con­fi­dent intro­duc­tion to ter­rain already cov­ered by William Schnieder­wind (http://www.amazon.com/How-Bible-Became-Book-Textualization/dp/0521829461), and Thomas L. Thomp­son (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2000/sep/02/historybooks.nicholaslezard). The for­mer is the eas­i­er read, the lat­ter the more relent­less­ly scholarly.