Great Scientists (five); Without A Trace (C4); HE was born the same year as Shakespeare. He was an intellectual bruiser - a large, flame-haired rabblerouser who loved conflict and confrontation.

He was Galileo, the 16th century mathematician and inventor who was the subject of the second in the Great Scientists series.

According to presenter Allan Chapman, he talked a load of balls. Excuse the turn of phrase, but this cheerful programme positively invited that sort of thing as it belonged to the science-can-be-fun school of thought.

This was no dry and dusty TV biography of the great man. Chapman - who has something of the mad professor about him - was keen to make it all jolly interesting with speeded up film and mad experiments.

As for balls, Galileo used them in one of the defining experiments in the history of physics, to show that Aristotle "knew nothing about the nature of balls".

It was all to do with the acceleration of rolling and falling balls. Coming from Pisa, Galileo had the perfect place to prove his point by conducting an experiment to show that objects, whatever the weight, fall to earth at the same speed.

He dropped two balls of different sizes from the top of the leaning tower. Unfortunately one seemed, to some onlookers, to hit the ground slightly ahead of the other. "No one could agree whether Galileo's balls had dropped at the same time," concluded Chapman.

Some may consider such an approach made light of the work of a very important man, namely the world's first internationally famous celebrity scientist.

Others invented the telescope before him but his "perspective", as he called his spying instrument, was better than those made by the Dutch because he used Venetian glass.

The telescope opened up the cosmos but Galileo's ideas got him shut up. His books were censored and he was put under house arrest, but not so closely controlled that he couldn't make several more major discoveries.

The FBI Missing Persons Squad in the new US thriller import Without A Trace was hoping to find an absent boarding school pupil. Seventeen-year-old Andy never made it home after leaving the campus.

Anthony LaPaglia's agent soon sniffed out who was responsible, the headmaster. An unauthorised search of his house that uncovered child pornography convinced him of the teacher's guilt. But, as the evidence was gathered illegally, a judge ruled he couldn't use it.

He and the headmaster were left to play a cat-and-mouse game in the race to find the boy, hopefully still alive.

Without A Trace comes from the same stable as CSI and CSI Miami, and is further proof that producer Jerry Brockheimer knows what viewers want from detective stories, just as he knows how to deliver blockbusters like Pirates Of The Caribbean to cinema audiences.

The series is slick, suspenseful and well-acted by a top notch cast. The makers of some British detective series could learn a lot.

Published: 20/01/2004