Seven Wonders of the World (BBC series)

Seven Wonders of the World is a British television documentary that aired on BBC Two in two series, in 1995 and in 1997. In each series of seven episodes, a renowned scientist reveals what excites and inspires them.

SEVEN WONDERS OF THE WORLD A sort of scientific Desert Island Discs: in each programme, a brilliant scientist tells us about his or her own seven wonders of the world

Producer: Christopher Sykes / Introduced by Sue Lawley/ Original music by Derek Wadsworth

Brief introductory profile, and scientists talk about how they ended up in their field, and what inspires them

Episodes

Series 1

No.	Title		Original air date
1	"Miriam Rothschild"	Zoologist.	22 March 1995 (1995-03-22)	vimeo
The Tiger moth ear-mite, the Monarch butterfly (strongly aromatic to warn of poisonous), the jump of the flea, dawn on the Jungfrau, the life-cycle of the parasitic worm Halipegus, Jerusalem glimpsed in a sandstorm, and carotenoid pigments.
2	"Steve Jones"	Professor of Genetics, UCL.	29 March 1995 (1995-03-29)	YouTube
Creation (origin of life), snails (are hermaphroditic), sex or rather sexual reproduction (curious that it exists at all as females bear all of the costs, but asexual reproduction makes copies of the parent. Sexual reproduction confers protection though variation. Irish potato famine due to monocultural potatoes being attacked by a new paraste. A broader range of variaton would have provded protection. Tropics have more parasites, and more sex), the rete mirabile (a countercurrent, naturally occurring heat exchanger, eg in wading birds legs), the rules of Greek architecture as exhibited in the Parthenon, the ugliness of the Appleton Tower in Edinburgh, Fizeau's experiment to measure the speed of light (the best type of experiment is cheap). BBC episode page
3	"Stephen Jay Gould"	Professor of Geology and Zoology, Harvard.	5 April 1995 (1995-04-05)	Vimeo
The Akeley Hall of African Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History (presents painstaking constructed diaporama), Darwin's On the Origin of Species, Chartres Cathedral (most sublime), the fossil Anomalocaris (largest creature in the Cambrian, 500Ma ago), "deep" time (geological time not measured in millions but billions of year) and ceaseless motion (plate tectonics, always moving. Summit of Everest is marine limestone), and biodiversity, and music as a metaphor for diversity and variation. BBC episode page
4	"James Lovelock"	Physiologist and inventor.	12 April 1995 (1995-04-12)	Vimeo
Electricity (its ubiquity, we just accept it and that's wonderful), human bravery (civilisation is the overcoming of instinct. Genes are left by those who run away. JL prefers cool, calm, personal courage, eg William Tyndale in translating the Bible into English), standing upright (being able to balance on feet only happens because of the constant feedback from the body to the brain), (sensing low concentrations of molecules electron absorption(capture) detector, 1 part per million million. Important for establishment of environmental movement as pesticides found in near everything), [13.00] his parents, [14.45] the Personal computer (darwinian evolution to get better gaming), Earth seen from space (those people that first saw those pics of the Earth were changed by it. Jim Lovell viewing the Earth and calling the whole planet 'home'), The Earth as superorganism (bees keep their environment at a constant temperature, Gaia), reading (captures the reader, as a child read fiction and non-fiction), the second law of thermodynamics (nothing so certain as death and taxes, universe heading for heat-death. We are the benificiaries of the Sun running down). BBC episode page
5	"Julie Theriot"	Cell biologist.	19 April 1995 (1995-04-19)	YouTube
Bowerbirds (The male bower bird builds elaborate decorated bowers to attract a mate. This has no further use after the birds are paired, so is being done for purely aesthetic appreciation), slime moulds (unicellular slime moulds when stressed by drought, can amalgamate into a multicellular slug to travel, divide...), the scanning tunnelling microscope (the ability to see and manipulate individual atoms), limb regeneration (In salamanders, the cells near an injury dedifferentiate and can recreate the cells needed for the whole limb), fireflies (producing light through an act of will, for mating or for feeding. Some female fireflies do both by faking the flashing pattern of a smaller species and eat the expectant incoming male), the end of the universe (is there enough matter in the universe that we end with a Big Crunch, or expand forever? appeal of the cyclical universes), gene therapy (very powerful but an ethics minefield). BBC episode page
6	"Danny Hillis"	Physicist and supercomputer designer.	26 April 1995 (1995-04-26)	vimeo
Atoms (limited number 96 naturally occurring. Not every building block can be combined. Valency), the periodic table (explains a lot of what does go together and not go together), DNA (naturally occurring and reproducing complex of building blocks. Occasional errors might give more evolutional advantage, so the machines for reproducing get better), the brain (neurone cells developed that did nothing else but carry messages fom one part of a body to another. The brain allowed learned reposnses, but reactions were no longer programmed in and unchangeable, when controlled only by DNA. Creatures with a nervous system and brain can xxx basis of individual experiences), language (we can transmit things that we learn to each other), telecommunications (most complex machine in the world, billion dollars worth of resources at your command), and computers.
7	"John Maynard Smith"	Professor of Zoology, Sussex.	3 May 1995 (1995-05-03)	YouTube
Sidewinding snakes (solving the problem of moving over very slippery surfaces, like sand), the flight of the albatross (flying without ever flapping its wings as wind slower close to the sea. JMS loves the juncture of maths and natural beauty), the Tippe top (very odd behaviour that can be predicted by mathematics and Newton), bee orchids (natural selection that make the orchid both look and smell like a bee), termite mounds (architecturally cunning, but without an architect), DNA replication, and space travel (excitement at being on other planets; all life on Earth descended from a single common ancestor. Life on other planets would tell us so much).

BBC2 /7 x 30 minutes (1995) "Some of the freshest science programmes for a long time" The Times "Programme of the week" Independent on Sunday "A damn fine programme" Time Out "Few series have celebrated Earth's awesome beauty more than this Wednesday-night series" Hello!

Series 2

No.	Title		Original air date
1	"Aubrey Manning"	Professor of Natural History, Edinburgh.	12 March 1997 (1997-03-12)	YouTube
The longevity of trees (walking yews and momento mori), waggle dances of honey bees (now understood so well that we can create an artificial bee to dance meaningfully in hives), the tasmanian tiger (an illustration of convergent evolution, but also what happens when a species gets in Man's way), the square root of minus one (imaginary human construct but with many real-world applications), the hit-or-miss governor, Durham Cathedral, the Grand Canyon (visually familiar but did not disappoint in reality, a visual slice though millions of years of history).
2	"Monica Grady"	Curator of Meteorites, Natural History Museum.	19 March 1997 (1997-03-19)	YouTube
Meteorites (travellers in time and space. "Think about it ... 4,500 million years, give or take a Tuesday"), the Internet (tool for connecting professionals with each other and with Meatloaf videos), the Natural History Museum building in London, the structure of crystals (the exterior manifestation of the interior properties of the atoms that make them up), Antarctica (in constant movement, the constant sound of it when you lay your ear on or near the ice), the heartbeat of her unborn son (being able to learn about the being inside her, from the outside, and see it reacting), the night sky (a wondrous view ever since Man first looked upwards... if you can avoid the light pollution).
3	"Arthur C. Clarke"	Writer, inventor, explorer and television series host.	26 March 1997 (1997-03-26)	youtube vimeo,45'
The Saturn V rocket (imagine 150 million horses all pulling three men up into the sky; The Saturn V is the equivalent to going to New York in the Queen Mary with three passengers and sinking after one voyage), rock fortress of Sigiriya in Sri Lanka, the microchip, the Mandelbrot set, Stokowski orchestral transcription of the Bach Toccata and Fugue in D minor (referenced in the finale of his short story The Transit of Earth), the giant squid, the SS 433 eclipsing X-ray binary star system ...
4	"Thomas Eisner"	Professor of Neuropharmacology, Cornell.	2 April 1997 (1997-04-02)	YouTube Vimeo
The stereo microscope (takes an entomologist into the insect world), fire power of the bombardier beetle, mosquito courtship (Hiram Maxim's discovery that mosquitoes use sound in the mating process), [music] (importance to humans, but also whalesong contributing to human support), Hemispherota (the palmetto tortoise beetle can anchor itself to a leaf using 60,000 bristles on its feet), photography (inc scanning electron microscope, timelapse), the hidden value of nature =Global biodiversity? (the species that we haven't discovered yet, with its chemical and genetic information, impact of species loss is permanent)
5	"Richard Dawkins"	Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, Oxford	9 April 1997 (1997-04-09)	vimeo
The spider's web, the bat's ear, the pianist's fingers, the losslessness of digital codes (inc DNA), the parabolic reflector, the embryo ("Do you really believe in evolution, that we can start with a single cell and end with a human being?" "You did that yourself, and in just 9 months"), and Sir David Attenborough (for sharing and showing the natural world so we do not need to go ourselves (and thus ruin it)).
6	"Alison Jolly"	Primatologist, Princeton.	16 April 1997 (1997-04-16)	YouTube
Lemurs (isolated on Madagascar, evolved to fill all of the environmental niches taken by monkeys and apes elsewhere), the Karst pinnacles of Bemaraha in Madagascar (dramatic forests of limestone needles), Machu Picchu (forgotten by the outside world after being hidden by the Incas), volcanic vents in the ocean bed (life 2500m down), homeobox genes (complexes of genes in a block that control repeating anatomical features, that can cause strange effects if displaced or suppressed), human dignity, and a pinch of salt (iodine deficiency is the easiest and simplest step to fix to improve global human health). All 7 are discoveries, some personal. Diplodocus is 2.5x the size of the largest dragon she had imagined. Real world is more interesting than fiction. BBC episode page
7	"Steven Pinker"	Professor of Neuropsychology, MIT.	23 April 1997 (1997-04-23)	Vimeo
The bicycle (first self-propelled vehicle to be invented. Most efficient form of transport/ movement for work done vs energy expended), (HELP!) combinatorial systems (arranging a fixed number of elements in different orders seems to indicate a limit, but the number of combinations is too large to be comprehensible: music, DNA, language), the language instinct (any of the 6000 languages can be learned by an infant without lessons, just by exposure), the camera (recording of something of a different time, or a different place), the eye (evolved at least 40 different times and in 40 different ways), stereo vision (allows a creature to penetrate camouflage as it gives a slightly different view of an object), and the mystery of consciousness.

BBC2 /7 x 30 minutes (1997) "Beautiful television... Programme of the week. No question" The Guardian "Seven Wonders is that rarity among TV programmes - it treats the viewer with respect" Daily Express "Wonderfully entertaining stuff" The Times "This marvellous series" The Observer

References

External links