James Burke walks the history of Western science as a series of ruptures, moments when a new way of seeing broke the old consensus so completely that people could no longer perceive the world as they had before. Across ten episodes he moves from the printing press, which broke the Church's monopoly on interpreting scripture, through Copernicus and Galileo removing Earth from the center of the cosmos, to Newton's mechanics recasting the universe as a predictable machine. Later episodes track Darwin's evolution upending humanity's place in nature and the arrival of relativity and quantum mechanics dismantling Newton's tidy clockwork in turn. Burke narrates on location at the actual sites tied to each shift, using period instruments, manuscripts, and working demonstrations rather than reenactment, and his recurring argument is that scientific change is never purely intellectual: each new idea survives only because it fits the politics, religion, and economics of its moment. The series treats knowledge as contingent rather than a straight line toward truth, asking what got discarded each time the universe changed.