Science Stories
Channel Details
Science Stories
Surprising stories from the history of science told by Naomi Alderman and Philip Ball.
Recent Episodes
16 episodes
Alexis Carrel and the immortal chicken heart
Philip Ball tells the story of Alexis Carrel, the French surgeon who worked to preserve life outside the body and create an immortal chicken heart in...
Ibn al-Haytham and How We See
Philip Ball's story is of Ibn al-Haytham, the first scientist, and his book of optics that defined how we see.
Lady Mary Montagu's Smallpox Experiment
Naomi Alderman's Science Story reveals how Lady Mary Wortley Montagu experimented on her own child in a quest to prove that smallpox inoculation works...
Kepler's Snowflakes
Philip Ball reveals the tale of a small booklet 'On The Six-Cornered Snowflake", written by Johannes Kepler as a New Year's gift. The C17th astronomer...
Lucretius, Sheep and Atoms
Naomi Alderman's tale is of Lucretius, author of a 2000 year old poem that theorised about atoms and the natural world. Written in the first century B...
Eddington's Eclipse and Einstein's Celebrity
Eddington's Eclipse and Einstein's Celebrity
Philip Ball's tale is of a solar eclipse 100 years ago observed by Arthur Eddington, a British astr...
Mary Anning and Fossil Hunting
Mary Anning lived in Lyme Regis on what is now known as the Jurassic Coast in the first half of the 19th century. Knowing the shore from childhood and...
Hypatia: The Murdered Mathematician
Naomi Alderman's tale is a murder mystery, the story of Hypatia, the mathematician murdered by a mob in the learned city of Alexandria, around the yea...
Descartes' Daughter
There's a story told about French philosopher René Descartes and his daughter. He boards a ship for a voyage over the North Sea with a large wooden bo...
Urea and the Wohler Myth
Philip Ball tells the story of German chemist Friedrich Wöhler's creation of urea, an organic substance previously thought only to be produced by livi...
17th-Century Space Flight: The Real Cyrano de Bergerac
Philip Ball reveals the real Cyrano de Bergerac - forget the big nosed fictional character - and his links to 17th Century space flight.
Cyrano...
Einstein's Fridge
What do you do when you've described the nature of the universe?
In the late 1920s Einstein was working on a grand unified theory of the unive...
The duchess who gatecrashed science
In the spring of 1667 Samuel Pepys queued repeatedly with crowds of Londoners and waited for hours just to catch a glimpse of aristocrat writer and th...
The meteorite and the hidden hoax
In 1864 a strange type of rock fell from the sky above Orgueil in rural France. Shocked and frightened locals collected pieces of the peculiar, peaty...
How an eel sparked our interest in electricity
Naomi Alderman presents an alternate history of electricity. This is not a story of power stations, motors and wires. It’s a story of how the electric...
Submarine for a Stuart King
Philip Ball dives into the magical world of Cornelis Drebbel , inventor of the world's first submarine in 1621.
How did the crew of this remarka...