Imagine a world where infinite copies of you are playing out every storyline of your life. It sounds like a plot stolen straight from Hollywood, but far from it. This is the multiverse. Until very recently the whole idea of the multiverse was dismissed as a fantasy, but now this strangest of ideas is at the cutting edge of science. And for a growing number of scientists, the multiverse is the only way we will ever truly make sense of the world we are in. Do multiple universes exist? And if so, which one are we actually in?" Imagine a world where dinosaurs still walk the earth. A world where the Germans won World War II and you are president of the United States. Imagine a world where the laws of physics no longer apply.
Forget the Big Bang. The real moment of creation was the Cosmic Dawn - the moment of first light. It's the moment the first stars were born, the moment that lit up the Universe, and made the first structure and the first ingredients of life. This is the scientific version of the story of Genesis. The Big Bang gets all the credit for creating our universe. But in fact, the universe it gave was dark and boring. There were no stars, no galaxies, just a vast, black fog of gas - the cosmic dark ages". But, after a hundred million years of nothing, came a dramatic moment of transformation - the Cosmic Dawn. Astronomers are now trying to witness this cosmic dawn. For the first time they have the tools to explore the very first stars of the universe and to tell the scientific story of our creation.
Black Holes are one of the most destructive forces in the universe, capable of tearing a planet apart and swallowing an entire star. Yet scientists now believe they could hold the key to answering the ultimate question - what was there before the Big Bang? The trouble is that researching them is next to impossible. Black holes are by definition invisible and there's no scientific theory able to explain them. Meet the astronomers attempting to image a black hole for the very first time and the theoretical physicists getting ever closer to unlocking their mysteries. It's a story that takes us into the heart of a black hole and to the very edge of what we think we know about the universe.
20 years ago, two astronomers made a remarkable discovery, one which would change the way we view the universe for ever. A planet outside our solar system, orbiting a distant star - an exoplanet. Since then, we have found worlds where it rains diamonds, ones that boil at 3,000 degrees centigrade
and even a world with four suns in its sky. But the big question is -
will we ever find another Earth? As we close in on the discovery of the 2,000th planet outside our solar system, or exoplanet, we investigates the techniques that are revealing so much about these alien worlds. The documentary asks if we are really any closer to finding another world like our own - a second Earth.
The film tells the tale of Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who was the subject of a landmark experiment to see if an ape could learn to communicate with language if raised and nurtured like a human child. This study was the brainchild of Dr. Herbert Terrace, a Columbia University behavioral psychologist who hoped to teach Nim enough language that he could eventually express what he was thinking and feeling. This would refute Noam Chomsky's thesis that language is inherent only in humans, hence his moniker, a direct pun on the famous linguists' name. The doc was a smash when it played at Sundance with this entirely different incredible but true story
