This year's Reith Lecturer is Professor Bernard Lovell, the first Director of the Jodrell Bank Experimental Observatory, and Professor of Radio Astronomy at Manchester University. During the Second World War, he helped to develop radar systems for aircrafts, for which he received an OBE in 1946. He delivers six lectures on the wonders of the solar system in his series entitled 'The Individual and the Universe'.

In his second lecture entitled 'The Origin of the Solar System', Professor Lovell considers how our solar system was created. He analyses some of the theories that astronomers have put forward to explore the beginning of the universe as we know it. Show less