Absolute Zero is the ultimate limit of cold – a Holy Grail as exciting for scientists as the North and South Poles were to the great polar explorers. The Conquest of Cold is an epic journey from dark beginnings to an ultra-cool frontier.

The Conquest of Cold charts the attempts of many great names in science such as Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, Michael Faraday and Antoinne Lavoisier to grapple with the perplexing mystery of cold.

Dr Helen Czerski goes on a spectacular journey to the extremes of the temperature scale, where everyday laws of physics break down and a new world of scientific possibility begins.

For at least 100,000 years, humans have known how to make fire. But the skill to make cold is a very modern technique. Innovation expert Steven Johnson traces the unsung heroes of cold, like the doctor who was desperate to beat fever and created a refrigerator, the rookie heating engineer who discovered how to cool our homes and set off a mass migration to the desert, and the young man who cut ice from a lake and transported it thousands of miles.