Zachary Quinto charts a journey to determine whether time travel is possible. He meets a man who claims to have traveled back in time due to a secret government program and a group of people living in Liverpool known as 'time slippers'. Zachary makes a visit to the CERN headquarters in Geneva, where he attempts to understand the origins of the universe and the dimension of time. Equipped with this new knowledge, Zachary tests his own perception of time with an elaborate skydiving experiment to see if he can slow down time itself.
What is the universe made of? If you answered stars, planets, gas and dust, you'd be dead wrong. Thirty years ago, scientists first realized that some unknown dark substance was affecting the way galaxies moved. Today, they think there must be five times our understanding of the universe and the nature of reality itself has drastically changed over the last 100 years - and it's on the verge of another seismic shift. In a 17-mile-long tunnel buried 570 feet beneath the Franco-Swiss border, the world's largest and most powerful atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, is powering up. Its goal is nothing less than recreating the first instants of creation, when the universe was unimaginably hot and long-extinct forms of matter sizzled and cooled into stars, planets, and ultimately, us. These incredibly small and exotic particles hold the keys to the greatest mysteries of the universe. What we find could validate our long-held theories about how the world works and what we are made of -- or, all of our notions about the essence of what is real will fall apart.
It bursts from the Sun with the power of ten thousand nuclear weapons... and when it hits our planet, it could create the largest disaster in recorded history. A magnetic storm from the Sun could wipe out electrical power, television, radio, military communication, and nearly every piece of electronics in the Northern Hemisphere. It's a "Solar Katrina" -- a planet-wide "hurricane" of magnetic forces that scramble all 21st Century technology, possibly for good. What causes this magnetic superstorm? Why is magnetism so powerful -- and yet so poorly understood? And is there anything we can do to prevent the Magnetic Storm?
1917. People have had enough of the war. Behind the scenes, uprisings are brewing, like the one that toppled the Tsar in Russia; on the front soldiers begin to mutiny as they did at Chemin des Dames in France. German submarine attacks in the Atlantic will finally pull the Americans into the war, but they arrive too late to help prevent the carnage of the Battle of Passchendaele.
There's something very odd going on in space - something that shouldn't be possible. It is as though vast swathes of the universe are being hoovered up by a vast and unseen celestial vacuum cleaner. Sasha Kaslinsky, the scientist who discovered the phenomenon, is understandably nervous: 'It left us quite unsettled and jittery' he says, 'because this is not something we planned to find'. The accidental discovery of what is ominously being called 'dark flow' not only has implications for the destinies of large numbers of galaxies - it also means that large numbers of scientists might have to find a new way of understanding the universe. Dark flow is the latest in a long line of phenomena that have threatened to rewrite the textbooks. Does it herald a new era of understanding, or does it simply mean that everything we know about the universe is wrong?
Electricity is not just something that creates heat and light, it connects the world through networks and broadcasting. After centuries of man's experiments with electricity, the final episode tells the story of how a new age of real understanding dawned - how we discovered electric fields and electromagnetic waves. Today we can hardly imagine life without electricity - it defines our era. As our understanding of it has increased so has our reliance upon it, and today we are on the brink of a new breakthrough, because if we can understand the secret of electrical superconductivity, we could once again transform the world.
Zachary makes a visit to the CERN headquarters in Geneva, where he attempts to understand the origins of the universe and the dimension of time. Equipped with this new knowledge, Zachary tests his own perception of time with an elaborate skydiving experiment to see if he can slow down time itself.