The Way We Are: It Started with the Greeks

S01 E01 • Tuesday, Mar 19, 1985 • Mar 19 • 45m

Written and presented by James Burke, this 10-part series traces the development of Western thought through its major transformations since the days of ancient Greece. Program one is an overview of the series, showing how a culture’s view of the world around it determines how it sees itself, and is reflected even in the smallest details of its customs and habits.

In the Light of the Above: Medieval Conflict: Faith and Reason

S01 E02 • Tuesday, Mar 26, 1985 • Mar 26 • 45m

Point of View: Scientific Imagination in the Renaissance

S01 E03 • Tuesday, Apr 2, 1985 • Apr 2 • 45m

Shows that Western Europe’s rediscovery of perspective through the study of Arab optics led to revolutions in art and architecture. The West’s new-found ability to control things at a distance resulted in new methods of warfare and the confidence to make long voyages of exploration.

A Matter of Fact: Printing Transforms Knowledge

S01 E04 • Tuesday, Apr 9, 1985 • Apr 9 • 45m

Observes that the invention of printing and the advent of cheap paper forever transformed the nature of knowledge from the local and traditional to the systematic and testable. Nationalism, public relations, and propaganda are among the results.

Infinitely Reasonable: Science Revises the Heavens

S01 E05 • Tuesday, Apr 16, 1985 • Apr 16 • 45m

Notes that investigators such as Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton evolved better explanations of natural phenomena than those of Aristotle. Highlights the theories that led to a new conception of how the universe works and of man’s place in it.

Credit Where It's Due: The Factory and Marketplace Revolution

S01 E06 • Tuesday, Apr 23, 1985 • Apr 23 • 45m

Locates the origins of contemporary consumerism in the English industrial Revolution, powered by religious dissenters barred from all activities except trade. The invention of the steam engine, new forms of credit, surplus wealth, and opening markets laid the foundation for industrial society.

What the Doctor Ordered: Impacts of New Medical Knowledge

S01 E07 • Tuesday, Apr 30, 1985 • Apr 30 • 45m

Traces modern society’s recognition of the value of statistics to medical advances stemming from responses to the French Revolution and an English cholera epidemic. Identifies the origins of medicine as a science with the discovery of anesthesia, antiseptics, and bacteriology.

Fit to Rule: Darwin's Revolution

S01 E08 • Tuesday, May 7, 1985 • May 7 • 45m

Tracks the expectation of change, fundamental to contemporary society, through the developing sciences of botany, geology, and biology to Darwin’s theory of evolution. Darwin’s theory, in turn, has been used as a justification for Nazism, communism, and cut-throat capitalism.

Making Waves: The New Physics: Newton Revised

S01 E09 • Tuesday, May 14, 1985 • May 14 • 45m

Points out that studies of the properties of magnetism, electricity, and light have led scientists to the realization that Newtonian physics is inadequate to explain all that they observe. The public, meanwhile, has continued to concentrate on the technological by-products of science.

Worlds Without End: Changing Knowledge, Changing Reality

S01 E10 • Tuesday, May 21, 1985 • May 21 • 45m

Observes that over the centuries Western civilization has regularly shifted its conception of the nature of truth. The series closes with host James Burke's remarkably prescient assessment of the role in which modern computer networks are beginning to now play in shaping man's current conception of his reality as well as how they may well define the fundamental nature of all future human interaction. And while his message is ultimately a positive one, it is tempered with the warning that while the promise of the computer may indeed provide a framework for a future anarchism where human freedom is nourished and where every individual conception of reality is a valid one, it could conversely become of tool of totalitarian repression and conformity.