Redefining Reality: The Intellectual Implications of Modern Science

The metaphysical concept of reality and how it leads to a scientific worldview; the scientific picture of reality changes as theories are refined or overthrown; the germ theory of disease and philosopher Thomas Kuhn's idea of paradigm shifts.

Defining reality as understood by the ancient Greeks; revolutionary ideas about reality proposed by Plato, Aristotle, Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler; Newton inspires the Age of Enlightenment; closing with the Romantic backlash of the 19th century.

Mathematics hits the rocks of uncertainty in the 19th and 20th centuries; the discoveries of non-Euclidean geometries and the incompleteness theorem of Kurt Godel; "Alice in Wonderland" sheds intriguing light on this view of reality.

Until 1905, physical reality consists of absolute space, absolute time and the luminiferous aether; Einstein's special theory of relativity overthrows this deeply ingrained view; cultural figures such as Kurt Vonnegut draw on this legacy.

Relativity is incomplete until Einstein formulates a general theory of relativity that incorporates gravity; this breakthrough demolishes the idea of gravity as a force; the concept of warped spacetime; strange predictions such as black holes.

Investigating the underlying reality that governs the universe; learning whether the universe is eternally the same or is it changing and unstable; this debate culminates in the contest between the steady-state theory and the big bang model.