Russell Stannard, professor of physical sciences at the Open University, argues that science itself has limits, and spends this ten-part lecture series testing where they fall. He starts with the hardest cases: consciousness and its relationship to the physical brain, free will versus the unpredictability of subatomic particles, and the origin of the Big Bang itself. Stannard walks through Edwin Hubble's discovery that the universe is expanding, the resulting estimate of 13.7 billion years since the Big Bang, and the problem this creates for cause and effect if no time existed beforehand. He raises the fine-tuning problem, the odds against a universe capable of sustaining life at all, and uses astronauts' experience of time dilation to introduce spacetime as a four-dimensional structure rather than the three-plus-time model of everyday intuition. Delivered as straight lecture with no dramatization, the series treats each question as genuinely open rather than building toward a resolution, closing this opening episode on whether these riddles are solvable at all.