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One of the Universe's most enduring mysteries is Time Travel. In this episode, we explore the possibilities. Discover why Time Travel into the future is unavoidable in the Einsteinian world of Relativity. As for the past... the laws of physics do not tell us it's impossible, but the bizarre consequences of going into the past and altering the future make for mind-bending science. Finally, we go for the future by traveling to the nearest star, 4.3 light years away... in only 45 days. Our destination may be an Earth-like planet; a planet scientists are now hunting for, and may find in the next 3 to 4 years.

We feel it every moment of our lives but for physicists, gravity is the longest running unsolved mystery of the universe. Why do all objects that have mass pull on one another? Cutting-edge theories are proposing unexpected answers: Gravity could be another force in disguise, a thermodynamic mirage, or even, a shadow of a hidden holographic universe. If so, the force that holds us to the surface of the earth, and holds the earth in orbit around the sun, may be a trick of the mind. We feel it, but it may not be real. Is Gravity an Illusion?

For one night only, Professor Brian Cox goes unplugged in a specially recorded programme from the lecture theatre of the Royal Institution of Great Britain. In his own inimitable style, Brian takes an audience of famous faces, scientists and members of the public on a journey through some of the most challenging concepts in physics. With the help of Jonathan Ross, Simon Pegg, Sarah Millican and James May, Brian shows how diamonds - the hardest material in nature - are made up of nothingness; how things can be in an infinite number of places at once; why everything we see or touch in the universe exists; and how a diamond in the heart of London is in communication with the largest diamond in the cosmos.

Time is woven into the fabric of the universe as one of the dimensions in which we live our daily lives. But maybe it is only a brain state that we use to piece together events. Could it exist only in our minds? Your sense of time can be totally different than the person next to you. This and other theories illustrate that time is an illusion and does not really exist. The world's top physicists tackle this fundamental question, does time exist, and offer new ways to perceive the physical world.

This episode explores the wave theory of light as studied by mankind, noting that light has played an important role in scientific progress, with such early experiments from over 2000 years ago involving the camera obscura by the Chinese philosopher Mozi. Tyson describes the work of the 11th century Arabic scientist Ibn al-Haytham, considered to be one of the first to postulate on the nature of light and optics leading to the concept of the telescope, as well as one of the first researchers to use the scientific method. Tyson proceeds to discuss the nature of light as discovered by mankind. Work by Isaac Newton using diffraction through prisms demonstrated that light was composed of the visible spectrum, while findings of William Herschel in the 19th century showed that light also consisted of infrared rays. Joseph von Fraunhofer would later come to discover that by magnifying the spectrum of visible light, gaps in the spectrum would be observed. These Fraunhofer lines would later be determined to be caused by the absorption of light by electrons in moving between atomic orbitals when it passed through atoms, with each atom having a characteristic signature due to the quantum nature of these orbitals. This since has led to the core of astronomical spectroscopy, allowing astronomers to make observations about the composition of stars, planets, and other stellar features through the spectral lines, as well as observing the motion and expansion of the universe, and the existence of dark matter.

Every cosmologist and astronomer agrees: our Universe is 13.7 billion years old. Using cutting-edge technology, scientists are now able to take a snapshot of the Universe a mere heartbeat after its birth. Armed with hypersensitive satellites, astronomers look back in time to the very moment of creation, when all the matter in the Universe exploded into existence. It is here that we uncover an unsolved mystery as old as time itself -- if the Universe was born, where did it come from? Meet the leading scientists who have now discovered what they believe to be the origin of our Universe, and a window into the time before time.