Interesting and tongue-in-cheek insight into the manufacture of electric guitars and playing by greats such as Chet Atkins, Gerry Donahue, Jerry McGee, Seymour Duncan, Andy Summers, and a feature with Francis Dunnery together with It Bites in the studio, recording their 1988 album ‘Once Around The World’.
Equinox chart the development and construction of the intercity 225 Project's Class 91 Electra's, the Mark 4 coaches and MARK 4 DVTs for use on the ECML following the electrification program in the late 1980s.
"Form and chaos, order and disorder are like rivals competing for supremacy in the vast arena that is our universe. Nature throws grotesque shapes and turbulent events at us and yet, within them, we strive to find evidence of patterns that we can classify and understand. For centuries man has struggled to impose order on a perversely irregular world, and what he couldn't understand was often ignored. Now, armed with a new weapon, the computer, man is at last challenging the kingdom of chaos. Describing the shapes and forms of the world, where the only straight lines are the ones he has introduced. A new science is emerging from this challenge, a science which promises to describe and explain the infinite complexity of the busy world in which we live. It's a science which is producing a new geometry that offers an insight into the surprising paradox that there is order even within disorder. It's a science that is turning conventional thinking on its head. A science called... Chaos." May people will be familiar with the explanation of chaos theory given by the character Ian Malcolm in "Jurassic Park", using water drops and their "sensitive dependence on initial conditions". This fascinating documentary represents a vast improvement on this. Some of the pioneers of chaos theory elucidate, amongst other things, affine transformations, fractals, strange attractors and the butterfly effect.
Aerospace tech history.
Documentary examining whether the idea on which the feature film JURASSIC PARK is based, the genetic re-creation of dinosaurs, could ever come true. Is it possible to recreate a dinosaur, or should we let sleeping beasts lie? The programme follows each scientific step from finding the DNA code of the tyrannosaurus rex to the possibility of creating a fail-safe park for the prehistoric beasts. Contributors include palaeontologists Jim Horner and Jim Kirkland. The programme includes footage from the Steven Spielberg film, and goes behind the scenes to find out more about the special effects it uses.
Ten years after the death of Anna Anderson, EQUINOX has undertaken a full- scale forensic investigation into her claims to be the youngest daughter of the last Tsar of Russia, including pathology samples for DNA testing.
This programme puts the rave-culture phenomenon of the nineties under the microscope. With an estimated half-million young Britons immersing themselves in the world of insistent rhythms, lurid visuals and frenzied modes of self-expression every weekend, rave is no longer an underground fad. The programme traces the roots of rave, documents the dangers of the drug Ecstasy - and some of its possible benefits when used in psychotherapy - and illustrates how the movement has helped make music technology more accessible.
An examination of numerous inventions which claim to produce more energy than conventional calculations would allow, thus confounding our knowledge of thermodynamics. The five inventors on which the programme concentrates are: Nicolas Tesla, Alexander Chernetski, Jim Griggs, Stan Meyers and Jim Patterson.
Documentary on nature's ultimate abyss, the black hole. It is the darkest thing in the universe and its gravity is so powerful that not even light can escape. Most start out as brilliant stars which, after millions of years, eventually collapse forming a bottomless pit from which there is no escape.
A look beneath the veil of secrecy that has shrouded Britain's nuclear project for 50 years. Using footage of the British atomic bomb, never before seen, which has been de-classified by the MOD for this programme, the men who built the bomb tell their dramatic story for the first time.
Docu-drama of what the media might be like by the year 2012. EQUINOX's first drama, set in the future, focuses on the facts behind the suspicious death of media mogul, Liam Keller, whose software applications have had a huge impact upon broadcast TV, earning him enemies around the world. In the late 1990s, Keller had devised `Gambit', a virus which enabled all technologies (the internet, television broadcasting, e-mail) to converge - to communicate with one another. Found floating in the Thames, a television current affairs programme sets out to explore how Keller might have met his death. Through Keller's life story this drama explores the consequences of future technology, reflecting on what might happen to our present day media over the next few years. The programme also includes interviews with leading futurologists, including British Telecom's Director of Research Peter Cochrane.
Exploring the use of sophisticated techniques of forensic science tried and tested in suburban Britain in the hunt for the body of a Royal Marine who disappeared in the Falkland Islands in August 1980.
An epidemiologist and a medical researcher travel from Egypt to Canada and across America in search of a scientific explanation of the Ten Plagues which, the Bible tells us, devastated Egypt some 4,000 years ago.
The programme investigates some of the scientific questions surrounding the mysterious force of gravity. This includes the difficulties involved in making a precise measurement of the gravitational constant and how new cosmological observations can lead to changes in scientific ideas about the forces acting in the Universe.
An assessment of a controversial new theory that dogs may have had a profound influence on the evolutionary success of Homo sapiens, and helped to domesticate their human owners.
Is it a boat? Is it a plane? The Ekranoplan is the brainchild of a Russian scientist who also invented the modern hydrofoil, and it may represent the future of intercontinental travel.
A celebration of Murray Gell-Man, the Nobel prize-winning physicist who has devoted his research to the study of what is simple (as defined by the laws of physics) and what is complex (represented by the diversity of nature).
According to Einstein's calculations, there is so much matter in the universe that it ought to be collapsing inwards under its own weight. Since, so far as he could see, the universe was fairly static, he came up with the cosmological constant: a rather vague and mysterious quantity of energy which had got into the universe somewhere along the way and was keeping it all in one piece. At the dawn of a new century, a new theory is being born. It threatens to demolish the foundations of 20th century physics. Its authors are two of the world's leading cosmologists. If they're right, Einstein was wrong. It all began when Andy Albrecht and Joao Magueijo met at a conference in America in 1996. This program began from Newtonian view of the universe then takes you through the General Relativity and the Flatness problem. This leads to the Horizon problem and its solution, the Inflation theory. However modern astronomy doesn't stop here, the Inflation theory has its flaw too, and what happened before the big bang? This can all be answered by changing one thing, the one thing no body dare to question until now.
According to popular wisdom, psychopaths are crazed and bloodthirsty serial killers. The reality is not so simple. While many psychopaths do commit violent crimes, not all psychopaths are criminals and not all criminals are psychopathic. Equinox reports on techniques developed by psychologists to work out whether a person is psychopathic and shows how brain scientists are coming close to mapping the malfunctions in the brain that cause a person to be a psychopath.
Equinox examines computer hacking and the science of crime.
Engines are the key to successful rockets. Ever since Robert Goddard flew the first liquid-fuelled rocket in 1926, scientists and engineers have been striving to make more powerful and more efficient rocket engines. The US approach was to deal with design issues on the drawing board, and test only when they thought the design was the best they could get. The Russians had a much more experimental, hands-on philosophy, building rockets and using full test flights to find out how to improve their designs. Surprisingly, it's the hands-on Russian technology that will power a new generation of US rockets into space.
Documentary about the Coelacanth, a prehistoric bony fish believed to have been long extinct until one was caught in 1938 off the southern coast of Africa. No trace was found again until May 2000 when a colony of the fish were discovered and filmed.
Documentary on the scientific work done on identifying and researching the origins of GRBs (Gamma-ray Bursts) over the past forty years. Looks at some of the theories that have arisen and which one is now accepted to be correct, namely that of Polish astronomer Bodan Paczcynski who believes they come from collapsed super-massive stars on the edge of the observable universe.
