Order & Disorder

What exactly is energy? And what makes it so useful to us? In attempting to answer these questions, scientists would come up with a strange set of laws that would link together everything from engines to humans to stars. It turns out that energy, so crucial to our daily lives, also helps us make sense of the entire universe. This film is the intriguing story of how we discovered the rules that drive the universe. It is the story of how we realised that all forms of energy are destined to degrade and fall apart, to move from order to disorder. Professor Jim Al-Khalili tells the story of how humanity mastered the two most important concepts of the modern age – energy and information. In the first programme, Jim reveals that as people began to build better and more powerful steam engines they uncovered the principles that underpin the workings of the entire cosmos. This is the story of how we understood the inner workings of everything from a car engine, to a living cell to a supernova. In the second programme Jim tackles information. He shows how it went from etchings on clay tablets to criss-crossing the globe at the speed of light. And he investigates how information is woven into the fabric of reality itself.