Jacob Bronowski's - The Ascent of Man (1973)

Check out Civilisation by Kenneth Clark if you like this. Like 10 hours of video that watches like great poetry. Possibly the best documentary series ever made.

Very nice video, it let me with one main question.
Who of this time will be remembered as these men?
Has progress stopped, do we know all we can, what social preconcieved thought barriers remain really, ok there is that little proble of convincing the rest of man kind to m any of the basics, but that's anothers story.

This changed my intellectual life, too. Bravo, Dr. Bronowski.

And to those who think that the age of towering generalists is over, dream on. Do you think Bronowski's Atomic Age was any different? There will always be men who confound our cynical faith in specialists. They are rare, but when they surface they are too great to be confined and too eloquent to be ignored. That, too, is part of The Ascent of Man.

Jacob Bronowski's series informed more of my view of life than any other public figure. Watching the DVDs today, it is amazing how little they've dated. Perhaps the optimism over progress of science is the one thing that has changed. Maybe even Bronowski didn't appreciate the ultimate limits of knowledge, the implications of chaos theory, of the implication that we can never truly know or control our lives.

Nobody now comes remotely close to his philosophical breadth.

I believe Carl Sagan's Cosmos (which took its inspiration from 'The Ascent of Man') comes a close second, don't you?

Lot's of scientists I believe, are still optimistic of uncovering the answer to the ultimate physical questions - the string theorists are a case in point.

But now, as you've pointed out, chaos theory places a high wall between the realm of simple particle collider systems and the chaocomplex everyday world.

Arguably the best documentary series ever broadcast. That quote from Blake at the end always brings a tear to my eyes. Such a shame that a great communicator like Bronowski died so shortly after making this series

Second Part:
Of course it is tempting to close one's eyes to history, and instead speculate about the roots of war in some possible animal instinct: as if, like the tiger, we still had to kill to live, or, like the robin redbreast, to defend a nesting territory. But war, organized war, is not a human instinct. It is a highly planned and cooperative act of theft."

whirlpoolzend, the full quote on war is this (in two parts):
"Genghis Khan was a nomad and the inventor of a powerful war machine--and that conjunction says something important about the origins of war in human history.

Thanks niansenx. now i know i want to see the series on DVD too. When I saw a few of these program as a boy in the 70's I remember being amazed too.

I echo every word you've just said niansenx!