How the Universe Works - Black Holes

In the continuation of the "How the Universe Works" series, we have a documentary about the black holes, once again a very popular topic in all the cosmological shows. Entertaining and educational like the first episode, still most of the people that are up to date with cosmological discoveries won't find much new in this but I consider it one of the better shows about black holes.

How the Universe Works - Big Bang

First episode of the Discovery Channel's How the Universe Works series. Appropriate subject for the first episode is of course the Big Bang. Beginning of the Universe is a very common subject in documentaries and usually it's quite poorly explained, putting the weight on displaying the big explosion all over the screen and screaming about how big and hot it was while not giving any interesting information. This one on the other hand is pretty good, it still screams all that about explosions and heat but actually does a good job on informing the viewer what we currently know about it. My only disappointment was the part about the faster than light space expansion, it was poorly explained without going into any detail. Still it's better than most other such documentaries that don't even mention that.

Welcome to Mars

The ongoing unmanned Mars exploration mission, commenced in 2003 sent two robotic rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, to explore the Martian surface and geology. This is a continuation to the Mars, Dead or Alive documentary. Once again it deals with the two Mars rovers, just this time showing all the technical problems and challenges they faced on the surface of the red planet.

Mars, Dead or Alive

Despite the title, this is not so much about Mars, but about Mars rovers, technical issues about them and the people behind them. It is quite surprising too see how much technical problems they really had and how they solved them. Rovers are extremely complex machines, requiring many custom made parts unique to them. This makes them very difficult and expensive to test; breaking a 5 million dollar worth equipment during stress test is not a desired outcome, but still it has to be done. Documentary is filled with details like this and is really worth watching to appreciate the work that has been done there.

Fractals - The Colors Of Infinity

A fractal is a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole. The term fractal was coined by Benoît Mandelbrot in 1975 and was derived from the Latin fractus meaning "broken" or "fractured". Arthur C. Clarke presents this unusual documentary on the mathematical discovery of the Mandelbrot Set (M-Set) in the visually spectacular world of fractal geometry. This show relates the science of the M-Set to nature in a way that is often called "The fingerprint of God". Dr. Mandelbrot in 1980 discovered the infinitely complex geometrical shape called the Mandelbrot Set using a very simple equation with computers and graphics.