The BEST episodes directed by Joseph Mcmaster
#2 - Time Travel
NOVA - Season 26 - Episode 11
Is time travel anything more than sci-fi fantasy? Many leading physicists now believe that time travel is not only possible in theory but are discussing how to build a time machine. Physicist Kip Thorne tells NOVA how humankind's infinitely advanced descendants might go about achieving it with "quantum wormholes" and some "exotic matter." Demonstrating that faster-than-light travel may be possible, German physicist Guenter Nimtz claims to have transmitted Mozart's 40th Symphony across his lab at 4.7 times the speed of light. Impossible, yes, but recorded by NOVA's cameras and perhaps another step on the road to reaching the future or the past. The truth about time travel is wrapped up in the detail of how our universe works and how it all began. Mind-boggling as these perspectives are, NOVA dramatizes them in a playful and visually dazzling style that will captivate viewers and sweep them along on the ultimate thrill ride.
#3 - The Elegant Universe: String's the Thing (2)
NOVA - Season 30 - Episode 13
In order to solve some of the deepest mysteries of the universe, the rules that govern large objects like galaxies must be combined with the rules that govern small objects like subatomic particles.
#4 - The Elegant Universe: Welcome to the 11th Dimension (3)
NOVA - Season 30 - Episode 14
String theory is radically changing our ideas about the nature of space, opening up the possibility that extra dimensions, rips in the fabric of space, and parallel universes actually exist.
#5 - Judgment Day: Intelligent Design On Trial
NOVA - Season 34 - Episode 13
In this two-hour special, NOVA captures the turmoil that tore apart the community of Dover, Pennsylvania in one of the latest battles over teaching evolution in public schools. Featuring trial reenactments based on court transcripts and interviews with key participants, including expert scientists and Dover parents, teachers, and town officials, "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial" follows the celebrated federal case of Kitzmiller v. Dover School District. This program was coproduced with Paul G. Allen's Vulcan Productions, Inc. In 2004, the Dover school board ordered science teachers to read a statement to high school biology students suggesting that there is an alternative to Darwin's theory of evolution called intelligent design–the idea that life is too complex to have evolved naturally and therefore must have been designed by an intelligent agent. The teachers refused to comply. Later, parents opposed to intelligent design filed a lawsuit in federal court accusing the school board of violating the constitutional separation of church and state. "There was a blow-up like you couldn't believe," Bill Buckingham, head of the school board's curriculum committee, tells NOVA. Buckingham helped formulate the intelligent-design policy when he noticed that the biology textbook chosen by teachers for classroom use was, in his words, "laced with Darwinism." NOVA presents the arguments by lawyers and expert witnesses in riveting detail and provides an eye-opening crash course on questions such as "What is evolution?" and "Is intelligent design a scientifically valid alternative?" Kitzmiller v. Dover was the first legal test of intelligent design as a scientific theory, with the plaintiffs arguing that it is a thinly veiled form of creationism, the view that a literal interpretation of the Bible accounts for all observed facts about nature. During the trial, lawyers for the plaintiffs showed that evolution is one of the best-tested and most thoroughly con