Randall MacLowry

SILICON VALLEY tells the story of the pioneering scientists and engineers who transformed rural Santa Clara County into the hub of technological ingenuity we now know as Silicon Valley. The film spotlights the creativity of the young men who founded Fairchild Semiconductor, in particular the brilliant, charismatic young physicist Robert Noyce. Their radical innovations would include the integrated circuit that helped make the United States a leader...

In 1910, the Pennsylvania Railroad, led by the company's president, Alexander Cassatt, successfully accomplished the enormous engineering feat of building tunnels under New York City's Hudson and East Rivers, connecting the railroad to New York and eventually, via the Hell Gate Bridge, to New England, knitting together the entire eastern half of the United States. But just fifty-three years after the station's opening, the unthinkable happened.

The history of the Everglades is a dramatic yet little known story of humanity's attempt to conquer nature. This program, told through the lives of a handful of colorful and resolute characters, explores the repeated efforts to reclaim, control and transform what was seen as a vast wasteland into an agricultural and urban paradise, and, ultimately, the drive to preserve America's greatest wetland.

"Called 'the most remarkable mathematician of the second half of the century, ' Nash suffered a devastating breakdown at the age of thirty. He suddenly claimed that aliens were sending him messages, became obsessed with secret numbers and saw conspiracies all around him. Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, Nash spent a decade in and out of mental hospitals, surviving with the support of his wife and former colleagues. During that time, a mathematical...

L. Frank Baum was 44 when he published the first book about Oz, having spent most of his life reinventing himself with each new career in pursuit of the American Dream. When in Chicago, his observations of an uncertain nation during the Gilded Age informed his magical tale of survival, adventure, and self-discovery which went on to become a quintessential classic.

Using humor, everyday examples and computer animation for the more abstract concepts, author and physicist Brian Greene explains complex theories of the universe and the focus of his research, string theory.