Equinox
Season 1988
Equinox was a long-running Channel 4 popular science and documentary programme. The series ran from 1986 to 2001, originally aired on a weekly basis. The number of films per series fell over the years, from eighteen one-hour films a year originally to twelve by the late 1990s. The last regular series was shown in 2001, with six films. One-off films have occasionally been aired under the title "Equinox Special".
Where to Watch Equinox • Season 1988
18 Episodes
- ChaosE17
Chaos"Form and chaos, order and disorder are like rivals competing for supremacy in the vast arena that is our universe. Nature throws grotesque shapes and turbulent events at us and yet, within them, we strive to find evidence of patterns that we can classify and understand. For centuries man has struggled to impose order on a perversely irregular world, and what he couldn't understand was often ignored. Now, armed with a new weapon, the computer, man is at last challenging the kingdom of chaos. Describing the shapes and forms of the world, where the only straight lines are the ones he has introduced. A new science is emerging from this challenge, a science which promises to describe and explain the infinite complexity of the busy world in which we live. It's a science which is producing a new geometry that offers an insight into the surprising paradox that there is order even within disorder. It's a science that is turning conventional thinking on its head. A science called... Chaos." May people will be familiar with the explanation of chaos theory given by the character Ian Malcolm in "Jurassic Park", using water drops and their "sensitive dependence on initial conditions". This fascinating documentary represents a vast improvement on this. Some of the pioneers of chaos theory elucidate, amongst other things, affine transformations, fractals, strange attractors and the butterfly effect.