Legend says Empedocles leapt into Mount Etna to prove he was a god, and the volcano spat back a single bronze sandal. This episode separates that myth from the fifth-century BC Sicilian aristocrat whose ideas shaped Western science for two thousand years. We look at his wealthy family in Acragas, his Olympic champion grandfather, and why Hellenistic biographers who read his metaphorical poetry as literal fact turned him into a miracle worker who studied under Pythagoras on an impossible timeline.

We then explore his answer to Parmenides' claim that change is impossible: four eternal roots (fire, air, water, earth) mixed and separated by the cosmic forces of Love and Strife. From there we cover his grotesque account of wandering heads and limbs combining into creatures, of which only the viable ones survived, his theory that light has a spee ...