I'm watching Stephen Hawking's two hour "Into the Universe" on Discovery Channel. That's to be followed by "How the Universe Works", a one-hour show on black holes, one of my fav topics. I am really enjoying the show. The graphics are really cool, lending colorful visuals to the phenomena they discuss: the formation of black holes...how Sol condensed from a dust cloud and started fusing...how the "stuff of life" from which we're made originated in stellar fusion, released by the explosions of supernovae. Very entertaining. My only minor complaint is, like a lot of shows of this type, it's a bit light on the science for me. For example, they talked about how black holes formed, but didn't go into detail about why some black holes are larger than others (how does a point singularity equate with descriptions of size?), or explain the statement that smaller black holes actually aren't pure black, but give off energy. Of course they're covering a lot of time, and the show is crafted to be easily digestible by a diverse TV audience, so I won't quibble too much.
I really like the show, but you know, decades later, I still haven't seen a science series that moved and informed me quite as much as Carl Sagan's "Cosmos". A close second is James Burkes' great series "Connections", a British science series in which the narrator shows, as the name implies, how discoveries and inventions across history and in various places are related to each other in amazing ways. He may, for example, start talking about the invention of the steam engine, and in the middle, tell you how a key part of its invention is related to...tea in India, then jump from that to the art of spinning yarn, and so on, ultimately showing how all these seemingly unrelated things in fact worked together. Fascinating stuff, which you can watch here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcSxL8GUn-g
