Today I had a chance to watch the recording of the third episode; Professor Brian Cox takes on the story of the force that sculpts the entire universe - gravity. Gravity has been my most difficult subjects to understand many years ago when I was doing Physics at the Uni. It is one of the strangest and most surprising forces in the universe. Starting with a zero gravity flight, Brian experiences the feeling of total weightlessness, and considers how much of an effect gravity has had on the world around us.

Guardian had a witty review that I like to repeat here:-

Hi, I'm Professor Brian Cox, I'm one of the Wonders of the Universe (BBC2, Sunday). Here I am, on top of a mountain, triumphant in outdoor clothing. Why are we here? Where do we come from? These are the most enduring of questions. And why is it that you are a little bit in love with me? Is it my enormous mind? Or my boyish good looks, the NME hair, the expansive wardrobe coupled with exotic locations, the soft modest enthusiasm with just a hit of Lancashire, the winning smile . . . this winning smile – ah, that's got you, hasn't it? Look how proudly I stand, while the helicopter circles. I've conquered this mountain, just as I'm conquering your heart.
But gravity also acts over much greater distances. It is the great orchestrator of the cosmos. It dictates our orbit around the sun, our relationship with the other planets in our solar system, and even the way in which our solar system orbits our galaxy.

Brian Cox is a most certainly a very talented man. Since he has first appeared on BBC, he has managed to harness astro-physics and make one of the most watchable pieces of television since Alan Sugar in You Are Fired. He has succeeded in explaining how – and even more impressively, why – the universe will end, using a sandcastle. “Nothing ever lasts forever..” he says. But the people’s professor is talking about every piece of matter that has ever existed in the entire space -time continuum and how it will end.

In the third episode that I watched, he explains the paradox of gravity is that it is actually a relatively weak force. Brian takes a face distorting trip in a centrifuge to explain how it is that gravity achieves its great power, before looking at the role it plays in one of the most extraordinary phenomena in the universe - a neutron star. Although it is just a few kilometres across, it is so dense that its gravity is 100, 000 million times as strong as on Earth.

I have not done much physics for 3 centuries but it seems to me that what I learned back in 1970s about Gravity, has not much changed. However in this episode, Brian reveals that it is scientists' continuing search for answers that inspires his own sense of wonder. This episode, most certainly, re-ignited my old sense of wonder and I am sure by the end of the series I will be ordering couple of books on the subject from Amazon.

I have the opening episode recorded, and will most probably watch it this weekend. But I have read that the opening episode of Wonders of the Universe Brian Cox manages to tell complex stories in a way that leaves us not just with a sense of wonder – but the feeling that we actually understand something about our existence that we didn’t before. The reason that I am really looking forward to the first episode is that apparently the other subject that I had difficulty with is well explained. That was "The second law of Thermo-Dynamics" which is probably an intricate piece of work. He explains why decay and entropy mean that everything in the universe will ultimately cease to be, much like a sandcastle in the desert.

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@ Tuesday, April 03, 2012 3:33 PM

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