Beautiful Minds (TV programme)

Beautiful Minds is a British documentary television programme, produced by BBC and broadcast on BBC Four. The first series aired in April 2010, and the second series in April 2012. Each series consists of three episodes.

Beautiful Minds
GenreDocumentary
Country of originUnited Kingdom
No. of series2
No. of episodes6
Production
Running time1 hour
Original release
NetworkBBC Four
Release7 April 2010 (2010-04-07) –
25 April 2012 (2012-04-25)

Overview

edit

The programme features significant British scientists who describe their big moment or discovery.[1]

Episodes

edit

Series 1 (2010)

edit
No.
overall
No. in
season
ScientistOriginal air date
11Jocelyn Bell Burnell7 April 2010 (2010-04-07)
Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell describes how she discovered pulsars, the by-products of supernova explosions which make life in the universe possible.
22James Lovelock14 April 2010 (2010-04-14)
Environmentalist James Lovelock explains how his way of thinking led him not only to breakthroughs in atmospheric detection systems on Earth and Mars, but also to the Gaia hypothesis – a new way of thinking about the Earth as a holistic, self-regulating system.
33Tim Hunt21 April 2010 (2010-04-21)
Biochemist Sir Tim Hunt at Cancer Research UK, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2001 for his discovery of the mechanism of how cells divide, recalls moments in his life that provided inspiration for his career as a scientist.

Series 2 (2012)

edit
No.
overall
No. in
season
ScientistOriginal air date
41Jenny Clack11 April 2012 (2012-04-11)
Jenny Clack, Professor of Vertebrate Palaeontology at Cambridge University, recounts how she overcame setbacks before she found and described a fossil which offered new evidence of how fish made the transition onto land.
52Andre Geim18 April 2012 (2012-04-18)
Andre Geim, Professor of Physics at the University of Manchester, reveals how his playful approach to his research helped him uncover the properties of graphene, the world's thinnest material, and won him the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics.
63Richard Dawkins25 April 2012 (2012-04-25)
Professor Richard Dawkins reveals how he came to write The Selfish Gene in 1976, an explosive book which divided the scientific community and made him the most influential evolutionary biologist of his generation, and how this made him an outspoken spokesman for atheism.

References

edit
  1. ^ BBC4: Beautiful Minds. Retrieved 19 April 2012
edit