PBS to air three-part series produced by Bucks County partners

Peg Quann, Bucks County Courier Times
·2 min read
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Traveling the world, Bucks County-based partners have produced a three-part documentary entitled "SEARCHING: Our Quest for Meaning in the Age of Science."

It will air 10 p.m. Wednesday and Jan. 18 and 25 on the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) channel 12 (WHYY) in Philadelphia.

Physicist and author Alan Lightman walks through a cave with prehistoric drawings in Les Eyzies in the Dordorgne region of France during taping for the PBS series, "SEARCHING: Our Quest for Meaning in The Age of Science."
Physicist and author Alan Lightman walks through a cave with prehistoric drawings in Les Eyzies in the Dordorgne region of France during taping for the PBS series, "SEARCHING: Our Quest for Meaning in The Age of Science."

Geoff Haines-Stiles, who also directed and co-wrote the series, and his partner, Erna Akuginow, have worked with physicist and author Alan Lightman who will narrate the series as it discusses how "key findings of modern science help us find our bearings in the cosmos."

Haines-Stiles said he was reading a book by Lightman on how the atoms in each person's body originated in the stars when the idea for the series came to him. He had already worked as a senior producer on the late astronomer Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" documentary as well as several other scientific films.

The series is divided into three parts and will begin with "The Stars & The Osprey," which begins with Lightman's late-night experience alone with the stars and the ocean.

Part 2, "The Big & the Small," dramatizes where humans fit between atoms and stars and questions where we fit in the moral universe as Lightman talks with the Dalai Lama, a rabbi and a bio-ethicist about consciousness and the status of future artificial intelligences.

Part 3, "Homo Techno," will delve into how advances in science and technology will impact our future evolution.

Haines-Stiles and Akuginow have lived in an old farmhouse in Bucks County since 2017 and he said they "love it out here. In fact we’ve found more great neighbors and good friends 'out here' in the country than we did in the 'big city.' We’ve planted new trees, fought ash borers, grown tomatoes and kale, and I’ve volunteered video work for local campaigns. As well as working since 2019 on SEARCHING!"

The series is distributed by American Public Television and was made possible through a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. For "any time, anywhere" streaming, the series is on the website SearchingForMeaning.org in English and Spanish and also will be on PBS.org for the next 60 days.

This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: PBS to air 3-part series on science produced by Bucks County partners