I personally feel like _The Day The Universe Changed_ (his second documentary) is better. I love Connections but the basic thesis (there are hidden connections between disparate developments in science and technology) ends up pretty scattershot, spreading out like Brownian Motion. _tDtUC_ is much more focused. Largely based on Kuhn's _Structure of Scientific Revolutions_ for individual stories, it traces how the understanding of time in Europe changed from the middle ages to the 1980's- the idea of time as a marker of descent from a previous golden age (1), or at best a repeating cycle, evolves into our modern conception of time as endlessly improving into a better future. And the supporting book was amazing too.

I also want to speak up for the BBC history documentary team that worked with Michael Wood: _In Search of the Trojan War_, _In Search of the Dark Ages_, _The Story of England_, _The Story of India_ they were also a staple of American PBS and informed my understanding of the world.

1: My go to example for this is imagine you walk into the Pantheon in 1000 AD: no one on your entire continent has known how to build a dome like that in 500 years, and won't again for another 500 years. The fundamental way you understand the world has to be completely different from the "newer is better" baseline that we have understood the world by for the past 150 years.

I first saw Connections in the late 2000s... the final scene of the last episode, "inside the British Airways computer" (an entire floor of a large building), had me standing on my couch pointing at the screen.

A year or two before I was born, James Burke wandered between mainframes and reel-to-reel tape machines, speaking with extraordinary prescience about data, communications, decision-making systems, and power:

"This is the future. Because if you tell a computer everything you know about something, it will juggle the mix, and come up with a prediction. Do this, and you'll get that. And if you have information and a computer, you too can look into the future. And that is power. Commercial power, political power, power to change things."

I'm going to watch that scene again, because it's even more important 20 years further along: smart phones, "big data", large language models, Palantir...

I was so lucky to be able to grow up watching quality shows like this. Thank you PBS (and BBC).

Thanks for the link.

This clip is Season 1 Episode 8 "Eat Drink and Be Merry" and the shot starts at 48:17:

https://archive.org/download/bbc-connections-1978/Connection...

There is also a fourth season from 2023. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30222317

Also note that there is a book: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Connections/James-Bur...

https://archive.org/details/connections0000burk/page/n7/mode...