Professor Marcus du Sautoy explores why we are driven to measure and quantify the world around us and why we have reduced the universe to just a handful of fundamental units of measurement. He tells the story of the metre and the second - how an astonishing journey across revolutionary France gave birth to the metre, and how scientists today are continuing to redefine the measurement of time and length, with extraordinary results.

Comedian Ben Miller returns to his roots as a physicist to try to answer a deceptively simple question: what is one degree of temperature? His quest takes him to the frontiers of current science as he meets researchers working on the hottest and coldest temperatures in the universe, and to a lab where he experiences some of the strangest effects of quantum physics - a place where super-cooled liquids simply pass through solid glass. Plus, Ben installs his very own Met office weather station at home. Ben's investigations in this personal and passionate film highlight the importance of measurement and accuracy in the 21st century.

An apocryphal view on the pyramids, starting in awe at the amazing achievement of the Pharaonic architecture and sculpture, most specially at Gizeh, given Cheops's pyramid's size, weight, incredibly precise carving, four pairs of slightly shifted half sides, stunningly precisely measured shapes and symmetry. Then it questions and challenges conventional Egyptology beliefs, which it calls unproven or even impossible to verify, such as the absence of machines, a wharf duration of only 20 years or accidental equinox-orientation. Next it elaborates the theory that other major pyramid technology sites in Precolombian America, Easter Island and China can't coincidentally lie on two lines intersecting at Gizeh, even if not contemporaneous and without known contacts in their ages, and have several improbable things in common, like some of their cultures. Elaborate mathematical theories and measurements indicate the Egyptians must have known some astronomy, pi and the golden number

In the last episode, Al-Khalili turns detective, hunting for clues that show how the scientific revolution that took place in the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe had its roots in the earlier world of medieval Islam. He travels across Iran, Syria and Egypt to discover the huge astronomical advances made by Islamic scholars through their obsession with accurate measurement and coherent and rigorous mathematics.He then visits Italy to see how those Islamic ideas permeated into the west and ultimately helped shape the works of the great European astronomer Copernicus, and investigates why science in the Islamic world appeared to go into decline after the 16th and 17th centuries, only for it to re-emerge in the present day. Al-Khalili ends his journey in the Royan Institute in the Iranian capital Tehran, looking at how science is now regarded in the Islamic world

This is the story of two of the biggest scientific breakthroughs of the 21st century, told by the incredible scientists who made them happen. The first is LIGO’s measurement of gravitational waves coming from a black hole merger, and the second, the Event Horizon Telescope’s image of a black hole.