Cosmos A Spacetime Odyssey

Episode 6 Summary

We voyage to the bottom of a dewdrop to discover the exotic life forms and violent conflict that’s unfolding there.

Our epic journey brings us to the nano-world of perhaps the best-kept industrial secret of all time — photosynthesis. We barrel to the surface to encounter life’s ingenious strategies for sending its ancient genetic message into the future.

We travel from a molecule of the scent of lilacs all the way to a memory, the processing of a single thought along the neural network of our brain…

The nature of the atomic structure of matter prevents us from ever really touching. Here it’s made manifest in the context of a story of budding love between a young boy and girl.

The trees and plants around us, and the Earth itself, breathe in and out and we realize we never really noticedbefore.

An evening in ancient Greece comes alive to us as Democritus presents his magnificent conception of the reality of the unseen. We venture into his wine glass to experience the way carbon atoms affect us – and why they make for such a natural fit with life.

We enter the sanctum sanctorum of the cathedral of the nucleus and to the heart of the Sun to understand it as the fusion reactor it is.

We travel deep beneath the surface of the Earth to a place unlike any other, to discover nature’s most mysterious known particle – the neutrino. And to the Temple of Ramses in Egypt where on two days of the year, the Sun’s rays advance past the statues of the Pharaohs to enter the precincts of the gods. They always stop just short of the statue of Ptah, Lord of Creation. We travel to the equivalent place on the Cosmic Calendar, to come up against the wall that stands between us (for now, anyway) and the beginning of time.

The cell, the atom, the common dewdrop, are undiscovered realms awaiting our reconnaissance. To study, teach, and do science is to be part of an endless voyage of discovery.