Science Stories

In these ten absorbing series, award-winning authors Naomi Alderman and Philip Ball and guest presenters Tracey Logan, Kevin Fong, Simon Schaffer and Lindsey Fitzharris take a look at the many amazing events and characters from science's long history. In this collection, which runs close to 23 hours in total, they throw light on the revolutionary visionaries who defined how we see the world, from pioneers and prophets to inventors, experimenters and creators.

Among the topics explored are feuding dinosaur hunters, jumping genes, the engine that nearly ran out of steam, the day the Earth stopped standing still, how laughing gas was discovered, the first female professional scientist in Britain, and how an eel sparked our interest in electricity. So, if you want to know more about a medieval bishop's Big Bang theory, how Florence Nightingale saved lives with statistics, the medieval equivalent of GPS, the woman who tamed lightning, Cyrano de Bergerac's designs for a spaceship, and what happened when Einstein decided to fix the fridge, our presenters are here to fill you in. Helping them discover the fact behind the fiction are a host of scientists and experts, including Professor Edith Hall, Hannah Fry, Tim Spector, Marcus du Sautoy, Richard Wiseman, Natalie Haynes and Tracy Chevalier.

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on the following dates:

The Bone Wars 10 June 2015
The engine that ran out of steam 17 June 2015
DNA's Third Man 24 June 2015
How Perkin brought purple to the people 1 July 2015
Seeing is Believing - The Leviathan of Parsonstown 8 July 2015
Submarine for a Stuart King 6 January 2016
How an eel sparked our interest in electricity 13 January 2016
The meteorite and the hidden hoax 20 January 2016
The duchess who gatecrashed science 27 January 2016
Einstein's Fridge 3 February 2016
Florence Nightingale: Statistician 18 May 2016
Chaucer's Astrolabe - The Medieval GPS 25 May 2016
Paul Ehrlich's 'Magic Bullet' and the Cure for Syphilis 1 June 2016
Maxwell's Demon 8 June 2016
Blood Banks 15 June 2016
The Day The Earth Stopped Standing Still 30 November 2016
How Much Testosterone Makes You a Man 7 December 2016
The man who predicted deforestation and climate change 200 years ago 14 December 2016
The Woman Who Tamed Lightning 21 December 2016
Mesmerism 28 December 2016
Jumping Genes 4 January 2017
The Birth of Photography 11 January 2017
Pavlov and his Dogs 7 June 2017
The Medieval Bishop's Big Bang Theory 14 June 2017
The Man Who Found Physics in Shells, Seeds and Bees 28 June 2017
Caroline Herschel and the Comets 5 July 2017
A wolf, a goat and some cabbages 22 November 2017
The Wondrous Transformation of Caterpillars 29 November 2017
Lise Meitner: Humanitarian physicist
who unlocked the science of the atom bomb 6 December 2017
How Humphry Davy discovered laughing gas 13 December 2017
Michael Faraday and his 'instructess' in chemistry 20 December 2017
17th-Century Space Flight: The Real Cyrano de Bergerac 13 June 2018
Urea and the Wohler Myth 20 June 2018
Descartes' Daughter 27 June 2018
Hypatia: The Murdered Mathematician 4 July 2018
Mary Anning and Fossil Hunting 11 July 2018
Eddington's Eclipse and Einstein's Celebrity 12 December 2018
Lucretius, Sheep and Atoms 19 December 2018
Kepler's Snowflakes 26 December 2018
Lady Mary Montagu's Smallpox Experiment 2 January 2019
Ibn al-Haytham and How We See 9 January 2019
Galileo's lost letter 13 August 2019
Madame Lavoisier's Translation of Oxygen 20 August 2019
Ignaz Semmelweiss: The Hand Washer 27 August 2019
Ramon Llull: the medieval prophet of computer science 3 September 2019
Alexis Carrel and the immortal chicken heart 10 September 2019
Mary Somerville, pioneer of popular science writing 11 December 2019
Sophia Jex-Blake, first woman doctor in Scotland 18 December 2019
Isaac Newton and the story of the apple 25 December 2019

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