American Documentary Tv Shows

"This was the first motor converting electric current into continuous mechanical motion. Looks pretty feeble, right? But that turning spindle is the beginning of a revolution, one that dwarfs all the shots fired and bombs ever detonated in the sheer magnitude of its effect on our civilization."

"By age 40, [Michael Faraday] had invented the electric motor, the transformer, the generator; machines that would change everything about the home, the farm, the factory. Now, at 60 . . . plagued by memory loss and melancholy, he fearlessly probed deeper into the mysterious invisible forces. . . . Having discovered the unity of electricity, magnetism and light, Faraday needed to know how this trinity of natural forces work together."

"[W]hy does our planet have a magnetic field at all? . . . Liquid iron, circulating around the solid part of the core as Earth rotates, acts like a wire carrying an electric current. And as Faraday showed us, electric currents produce magnetic fields. And that's a good thing. Our magnetic field protects us from the onslaught of cosmic rays, which would be very damaging to our biosphere."

"[Faraday's] fellow scientists . . . needed to see his ideas expressed in the language of modern physics - precise equations. [Then] James Clerk Maxwell . . . translated Faraday's experimental observations on electromagnetic fields into equations [and helped transform] human civilization from a patchwork of cities, towns and villages into an intercommunicating organism linking us at light speed to each other and to the cosmos."

"[L]ife itself sends its own stories across billions of years. It's a message that every one of us carries inside, inscribed in all the cells of our bodies, in a language that all life on Earth can read. The genetic code is written in an alphabet consisting of only four letters. Each letter is a molecule made of atoms; each word is three letters long."

"We've encoded our stories in radio waves and beamed them into space . . . for over 70 years. [And [[w:Search for extraterrestrial intelligence | since] 1960, we've been listening for extraterrestrial radio signals]] without hearing so much as a tolling bell. . . . For all we know, we may have just missed an alien signal. [Or perhaps a civilization] even slightly more advanced than ours may have already moved on to some other mode of communication."

"Whether or not we ever make contact with intelligent alien life may depend on a critical question: What is the life expectancy of a civilization? . . . Today, we have a single global civilization. How long will it live? . . . We're pumping greenhouse gasses into our atmosphere at a rate not seen on Earth for a million years. And there's scientific consensus that we're destabilizing our climate."

"The next golden age of human achievement begins here and now: New Year's Day of the next cosmic year. In the first tenth of a second, we take the vision of the Pale Blue Dot to heart, and learn how to share this tiny world with each other . . . as the effects of climate change reverse and diminish. A fifth of a second into this future people will stop dying from the effects of poverty. The planet is now a completely self-sustaining, intercommunicating organism."

"Why is Venus scorching hot? It's because . . . the flow of energy is blocked by a dense atmosphere of carbon dioxide. . . . Venus is in the grip of a runaway greenhouse effect."

"By burning coal, oil and gas, our civilization is exhaling carbon dioxide much faster than Earth can absorb it. So, CO2 is building up in the atmosphere. The planet is heating up."

"It's a pretty tight case. Our fingerprints are all over this one."

"Keep your eye on the man, not the dog. (Comparing the gradual curve of Tyson's path along a beach to climate and the erratic path of a dog Tyson is holding on a leash to weather.)"

"More solar energy falls on Earth in one hour than all the energy our civilization consumes in an entire year. If we could harness a tiny fraction of the available solar and wind power, we could supply all our energy needs forever, and without adding any carbon to the atmosphere."

"We looked back on our way to the Moon and saw "one world, indivisible, and kind of small. . . . This . . . was the unexpected gift of Apollo.""

"[M]ore than two millennia ago, in the city of Alexandria . . . [t]he Ptolemys [built] the greatest library on Earth. . . . The total work product of the awakening of ancient civilization was kept here. . . . And all of it, all of this is but a tiny fraction of the information that you have at your fingertips at this very moment [in] our own electronic Library of Alexandria."

"The essential message of life has been copied and recopied for more than 3 billion years. But where did that message come from? Nobody knows. Perhaps it began in a shallow, sunlit pool, just like this. . . . Or life could've started in the searing heat of a volcanic vent on the deep sea floor. Or is it possible that life came to Earth as a hitchhiker?"

"This adventure is made possible by generations of searchers strictly adhering to a simple set of rules: (1) Test ideas by experiment and observation (2) Build on those ideas that pass the test, reject the ones that fail (3) Follow the evidence wherever it leads, and (4) Question everything. Accept these terms, and the cosmos is yours."

"Many of us suspect that all of this - all the worlds, stars, galaxies and clusters in our observable universe - is but one tiny bubble in an infinite ocean of other universes; a multiverse. Universe upon universe; worlds without end."

"Stars . . . get so hot that the nuclei of the atoms fuse together deep within them to make the oxygen we breathe, the carbon in our muscles, the calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood. All of it was cooked in the fiery hearts of long-vanished stars. You, me, everyone: we are made of star stuff."

"Every person you've ever heard of lived somewhere in there [pointing]. All those kings and battles, migrations and inventions, wars and loves, everything in the history books happened here in the last seconds of the Cosmic Calendar."

"Science is a cooperative enterprise spanning the generations. It's the passing of a torch from teacher to student to teacher; a community of minds reaching back to antiquity and forward to the stars."

"This is a story about you . . . and me . . . and your dog."

"If life has a sanctuary, it's here in the nucleus, which contains our DNA - the ancient scripture of our genetic code. And it's written in a language that all life can read."

"The Theory of Evolution, like the Theory of Gravity, is a scientific fact. Evolution really happened. Accepting our kinship with all life on Earth is not only solid science, in my view, it's also a soaring spiritual experience."

"That nameless corridor? That's for another day. (While standing near the as-yet-unnamed, sixth corridor in the "Halls of Extinction.")"

"[On] Titan, Saturn's giant moon . . . the seas and the rain are made not of water but of methane and ethane. . . . [W]e can imagine other kinds of life. There might be creatures that inhale hydrogen instead of oxygen. And exhale methane instead of carbon dioxide. They might use acetylene instead of sugar as an energy source."

"Science works on the frontier between knowledge and ignorance. We're not afraid to admit what we don't know. There's no shame in that. The only shame is to pretend that we have all the answers."

"Does the fact that most of us know the names of mass murderers but never heard of Jan Oort say anything about us?"

"Newton's Principia Mathematica set us free. . . . By finding the natural laws governing the comings and goings of comets, he decoupled the motions of the heavens from their ancient connections to our fears."

"Like Babe Ruth predicting where his next home run would land in the stands, Halley stated flatly that the comet would return at the end of 1758, from a particular part of the sky, following a specific path."

"Newton's laws made it possible for Edmond Halley to see some 50 years into the future and predict the behavior of a single comet."

"Using nothing more than Newton's laws of gravitation, we astronomers can confidently predict that several billion years from now our home galaxy - the Milky Way - will merge with our neighboring galaxy - Andromeda. . . . Any life on the worlds of that far off future . . . would be treated to an amazing billion-year-long light show; a dance of a half a trillion stars, to music first heard on one little world, by a man who had but one true friend."

"Some stars are so far away, it takes eons for their light to get to Earth. By the time the light from some stars gets here, they are already dead. For those stars, we see only their ghosts."

"When [the light we see today] left the Pleiades, about 400 years ago, Galileo was taking his first look through a telescope."

"In the observed universe, everyone gets to feel special . . . at the center of the cosmic horizon. . . . It's what you get when you have a finite speed of light in a universe that had a beginning in time."

"Nature commands, "Thou shalt not add my speed to the speed of light." . . . For reality to be logically consistent, there must be a cosmic speed limit."

"Black holes may very well be tunnels through the universe. [If you could somehow survive the ride on] this intergalactic subway system, you could travel to the farthest reaches of spacetime, or you might arrive in someplace even more amazing. We might find ourselves in an altogether different universe."

"The age and size of the cosmos are written in light. The nature of beauty and the substance of the stars, the laws of space and time they were there all along, but we never saw them until we devised a more powerful way of seeing."

"In China, more than 2,000 years ago, a philosopher named Mo Tzu is said to have observed that light could be made to paint a picture inside a locked treasure room. This was the description of the first camera: the camera obscura, the prototype of all image-forming cameras (including the one that's bringing you this picture)."

"Morgan Freeman — host"

"Earth is a planet of extremes... Extreme places, and extreme animals. But some animals are more extreme than others. Join us as we count down to find the most unusual, and the most extraordinary, on Animal Planet's The Most Extreme."