Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00The Kingdom of Matter stores its treasures on many levels.
00:07Until recently, we thought there was only one.
00:11We had no idea there were others.
00:17When we strike a match, a chemical reaction liberates energy stored in the molecules.
00:24Old chemical bonds break, and new ones are foraged.
00:30Now, the adjacent molecules begin to move faster, and the temperature increases.
00:38Soon, the process becomes self-propagating, a kind of chain reaction.
00:43The energy represented by a flame has been locked, perhaps for many years,
00:48in chemical bonds between atoms, mediated by the electrons that revolved around their core.
00:56When we make a fire, we release this hidden chemical energy.
01:03But there is a deeper level of matter that houses another kind of energy.
01:07Inside the heart of the atom, its nucleus.
01:16This hidden treasure was forged billions of years ago in distant stellar furnaces,
01:22long before Earth was formed.
01:28It's what powers the stars.
01:31Resting this knowledge from nature is a cosmic rite of passage.
01:35The beings of any possible world clever enough to travel this deep into nature's labyrinth
01:42better take care.
01:44The secret of starlight is nothing to fool with.
01:48Like fire, it can bring a civilization to light, and it can burn it to the ground.
01:53To the ground.
02:23The light has another's that fast ì—s시는 where it may not bound my semblance to light.
02:24To the forest.
02:25moderated.
02:26The light has tener fat forever, and it can burn it in a more 숨.
02:27Remember thatgio demands not to creep into the ground?
02:30It only refuses to 알?
02:31You will have to feel ata so often.
02:33The perceiving the fairest and otherićness is nothing to do.
02:36I really think a littleë‹´ter.
02:39You guys will not rule the floor with fear.
02:42No.
02:43I'm sitting to the?,
02:44To do rely on your slate.
02:46Sure and tomorrow.
02:47Once the fame is united,
02:49Unwives of many mysterious sources
02:50what is an atom what are they made of how are they joined together how could something as
03:16small as an atom contains so much power where do atoms come from the same place we do when we
03:28seek the origin of atoms we are searching for our own beginnings this quest takes us to the depths of
03:36space and time i want to tell you a tale of two atoms come with me
03:52long ago before there was an earth there was a wisp of cold thin gas it was made of the simplest atoms
04:03and they were gravitationally attracted to one another so the cloud grew
04:13the atoms contain small but heavy particles in their nuclei the hydrogen had protons the helium
04:21had neutrons as well they both had a skittering veil of electrons in orbit around them
04:28the atoms in the interior of the cloud moved ever faster as gravity pulled them ever closer together
04:35until the whole thing collapsed in on itself
04:39this collapse raised the temperature so high that the cloud became a natural fusion reactor
04:45in other words a star atoms operating according to the laws of physics met and fused in the unbroken
04:58darkness and then there was light in this froth of elementary particles the nucleus of one of the atoms
05:09a helium atom was formed
05:11after billions of years the star is now elderly having converted all of its available hydrogen fuel
05:21into helium now that it's time for the star to die it resumes the turning inward of its infancy
05:29can you find our helium atom it joined with two others to become one of our heroes
05:41a carbon atom that's what happens in the hearts of stars
05:45soon our carbon atom will tumble out of this red giant star into the interstellar ocean of space
05:51we've tinted this atom blue so you can find it in the vastness meanwhile in another part of the galaxy
06:08the stars were born and died the other atom of our tail was formed in the heart of this dying star
06:23in the catastrophic process of going supernova 226 protons and neutrons became fused to a carbon atom
06:31turning it into a uranium atom we've tinted our other hero atom red so that you can follow it
06:37on its odyssey through space and time
06:51as chance would have it after wandering the vast milky way galaxy our two atoms both happened on the fiery
07:11birth of a small solar system ours our carbon atom has traveled far to become part of a small planet
07:29after billions of years it joined an extremely complex molecule which has the peculiar property
07:36of making virtually identical copies of itself the carbon atom plays its tiny role in the origin of life
07:46through all its incarnations our carbon atom has had no self-awareness no free will it is merely an
07:54extremely minor cog in some vast cosmic machinery working in accord with the laws of nature
08:02and that other atom the uranium atom made in the supernova what has become of it
08:13our world was born in fire and this tiny atom was drawn to it maybe it rode the explosive wave of a
08:22supernova or perhaps it was attracted by the gravity of our sun and pulled down deeper and deeper into the
08:29interior which was even more of a hell the earth's surface soon cooled but the interior remained molten
08:39the magma slowly circulated and our uranium atom found itself carried over the ages from the deep interior
08:48back all the way up to the surface despite the high temperatures and pressures deep within the earth
08:55our atom's integrity was never threatened atoms are small old hard and durable
09:08everything is made of atoms including us but until the last years of the 19th century we didn't know
09:16about the frenzied activity inside the atom and this is where our two atoms from opposite ends of the milky way
09:23galaxy finally met it happened in paris
09:38our carbon atom became part of the retina of one of the world's greatest scientists
09:53this was just a few years after the discovery of x-rays
10:07marie curie and her husband and research partner pierre wanted to know how a piece of matter could make it
10:15possible to see through skin and even walls
10:18the knowledge that there were rare places in the world where rocks rich in uranium possessed these
10:25strange properties inspired marie on her scientific quest the dull brown ore still mixed with pine
10:33needles came from the part of eastern europe that is now the czech republic but this material was very rare
10:41and even to distill a tiny amount of it required the most lengthy and labor-intensive efforts
10:54she was later to write we lived in our single occupation as in a dream
11:01they worked under the worst possible conditions to purify the ore into a mineral called pitch blend which
11:13was 50 to 80 percent uranium
11:19this was quite an achievement but marie and pierre were hunting for something far more rare
11:25it took them three years to process tons of ore to isolate a mere tenth of a gram of a substance
11:36she named radium marie and pierre had discovered a completely new element
11:44the curies showed that the radium was entirely unaffected by extreme temperatures
11:50that was strange most things subjected to such intense heat would change drastically
11:58and there was something else it spontaneously emitted energy not through chemical reactions
12:05but through some unknown mechanism marie curie called this new phenomenon radioactivity
12:12she and pierre calculated the energy that spontaneously flowed from a lump of radium would be much greater
12:21than burning the same amount of coal radioactivity to their astonishment was millions of times more potent
12:29than chemical energy the difference between liberating the energy that resides in molecules
12:34and the far greater power stored deeper down
12:37between marie pierre little irene and the man she would later marry the family would win five nobel prizes in science
12:50the bottles tubes and flasks of pitchblend that they had refined left a residue of radium particles
13:10they were so potent that they lit up the lab at night
13:14as marie wrote years later they were like earthly stars these glowing tubes in that poor rough shack
13:28marie leapt to the correct conclusion that the luminescence was due to something happening
13:33inside the nuclei of radioactive atoms for thousands of years it had been thought that atoms were the
13:40smallest unit of matter curie's earthly stars were evidence that within the atom was a possible world
13:49where even smaller particles were interacting 100 years after this magical night marie curie's cookbooks
13:59still glowed with the exquisite radioactivity she had discovered but it took a little time for the
14:06darker implications of this deeper understanding of nature to dawn in the mind of a visionary named hg wells
14:15a writer who is a genius at turning the new revelations of science into stories that captivated the world
14:24and foreseeing as no one else their gravest consequences
14:28the writer hg wells who first imagined time machines and alien invasions had a nightmare of a future
14:41world where atoms were weaponized in his book called the world set free written in 1913 he coined the phrase
14:49atomic bombs and loose them on helpless civilian populations he said his vision of a nuclear war
14:57between england and germany in the impossibly distant future of the 1950s
15:11the world set free written in 1913 he said his vision of a nuclear war
15:31in 1933 the hungarian physicist leo zilard was contemplating becoming a biologist
15:38Dr. Zillard? Are you quite all right in there?
15:43He read Wells' novel, and it started him thinking.
15:54Zillard knew that atoms are made of protons and neutrons on the inside,
15:58and a skittering veil of electrons on the outside.
16:02Suddenly, while waiting for the light to change at this intersection in London,
16:07he was struck by the thought.
16:10If he could find a sufficiently large amount of an element
16:13that would emit two neutrons when it absorbed one,
16:17it would sustain a nuclear chain reaction.
16:21Two would produce four, four would produce eight, and so forth,
16:26until enormous amounts of energy in the nucleus itself could be liberated.
16:32Not a chemical reaction, but a nuclear one.
16:37This was the moment our world changed.
16:55Leo Zillard also knew the power of exponentials,
16:58and if a neutron chain reaction could be triggered down there in the world of the atom's nucleus,
17:04then something like Wells' imaginary atomic bomb might be possible.
17:08He shuddered at the thought of this destructive capability.
17:11It was just the latest development on a continuum of violence that began long, long before.
17:1850,000 years ago, all humans were roving bands of hunter-gatherers.
17:29They communicated over limited areas by calling to one another.
17:34That is, at the speed of sound, around 750 miles per hour.
17:39But over longer distances, they could communicate only as fast as they could run.
17:44Around 12,000 years ago, about the same time as the invention of agriculture,
17:49they developed the power to kill at a longer distance.
17:54Their kill radius expanded to the arc of an arrow launched by a bow.
17:59And they could kill one person with a single arrow.
18:03Our ancestors were not particularly warlike,
18:06because there were so few people and so much room back then
18:09that moving on was preferable to armed conflict.
18:12Their weapons were used almost entirely for hunting.
18:16Their identification horizon was likely small,
18:19only with the other members of their band of 50 or 100 people.
18:23But their time horizon took a giant leap.
18:32They worked long and hard planting crops in the here and now,
18:36so several months later, they could harvest them.
18:39They postponed present gratification for later advantage.
18:45They began to plan for the future.
18:52By about 2,500 years ago, there was a new kind of war.
18:57The conquered territories of Alexander stretched from Macedonia to the Indus Valley.
19:02There were now many on planet Earth who owed allegiance to groups composed of millions.
19:08Over long distances, maximum speed of both communication and transportation
19:14was the speed of the sail and the horse.
19:17Archidamus III, king of Sparta, was famed for his unflinching courage.
19:23He relished taking part in hand-to-hand combat with the enemy.
19:27It is said that when he first saw a projectile hurled by a ballista, he cried out in anguish,
19:34Oh, Hercules, the valor of man is lost.
19:49Both the kill range and the kill ratio had increased exponentially.
19:53Now, ten corpses lay where one would have been.
19:58And the soldier who released the lever on the siege engine never even saw their faces.
20:03He remained far removed from the carnage on the other side of the city wall.
20:08Today, the maximum speed of transportation is the escape velocity from Earth, 25,000 miles per hour.
20:20The speed of communication is the speed of light.
20:23The identification horizons have also expanded enormously.
20:27For some, it's a billion or more.
20:30For others, it's our whole species.
20:33And for a few, it's all living things.
20:36The kill radius in the worst-case scenario is now our global civilization.
20:45How did we get here?
20:47It was the result of a deadly embrace between science and state.
20:52And there was one scientist for whom no amount of destructive power was enough.
21:15It's hard to pinpoint the precise moment when the first nuclear war began.
21:20Some might trace it all the way back to that arrow sailing over the treetops.
21:25Others might say it started much later with three messages.
21:39In 1939, on Adolf Hitler's birthday, one of his brightest young scientists, Paul Hartek,
21:47had a special gift in mind for his Fuhrer.
21:51Hartek wrote a letter to the Nazi war office.
21:55He wished to inform them that the latest developments in nuclear physics would make it possible to produce an explosive exponentially more powerful than conventional weapons.
22:06He was trying to give an atomic bomb to Adolf Hitler.
22:13But Hitler would never get his hands on a nuclear weapon.
22:16He had murdered, imprisoned, or exiled many of the great physicists in his territories.
22:22Those who happened to be Jews or liberals, and many who were both.
22:26Exactly a month before the war began, Leo Szilard made a pilgrimage to the house Albert Einstein was renting on Long Island.
22:38The physicist who usually chauffeured Leo Szilard on trips out of Manhattan was unavailable that August day in 1939.
22:44So, Szilard enlisted the services of a fellow Hungarian émigré, a young scientist named Edward Teller.
22:55Persecution in Budapest sent him and his family to take refuge in Munich, where he lost his right foot in a traffic accident.
23:03In the early 1930s, Teller and his family were forced to flee once again.
23:08Just as Hartek felt it his duty to inform Hitler, Szilard wanted President Franklin Roosevelt to know the awesome power of such a weapon.
23:19There was no scientist on earth whose prestige and influence was comparable to Einstein's.
23:25Einstein's nightmare was imagining Hitler with a nuclear weapon at his disposal.
23:30But what would be the long-term consequences of this dangerous new knowledge, which, once unleashed, could never be taken back?
23:40Einstein would take no role in the U.S. effort to build the atomic bomb, which became known as the Manhattan Project.
23:48But he did alert the President to the potential use of atomic nuclei in warfare.
23:53After the war was over, he told a reporter that if he had known the Germans would fail in developing an atomic bomb, he never would have signed the letter.
24:06But Edward Teller had no such ambivalence.
24:09He couldn't wait to get started on weaponizing the atom.
24:13The Russian physicist G. N. Flerov had tried for years to alert his leader, Joseph Stalin, to the possible military applications of a nuclear chain reaction.
24:26But the Soviet Union was under siege by the Germans, and an atom bomb project was likely to take years to complete.
24:34With their backs against the wall, it seemed too impractical to even think about.
24:38In 1942, Flerov had published a scientific paper on nuclear physics.
24:46Now, he was excited to see what the eminent physicists in Europe and the United States had to say about it.
24:53Flerov was puzzled.
24:55None of the physicists of the international scientific community thought his paper worthy of comment.
25:01At first, he was hurt, but then he realized what was really happening.
25:08American and German scientific journals were being scrubbed of any nuclear physics papers as both nations secretly worked on building the bomb.
25:18It was this absence of published data, the dogs that did not bark, that moved Flerov to redouble his efforts to convince Stalin to start his own nuclear weapons program.
25:31In all three cases, it was the scientists, not the generals or the arms dealers, who informed their leaders that a huge increase in kill ratio was possible.
25:42The U.S. Department of War chose the remote location of Los Alamos, New Mexico, as the headquarters for the atomic bomb research project.
25:54It had been recommended by the project's director, physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had recuperated there from an illness as a teenager.
26:04But for Edward Teller, an atomic bomb wasn't big enough. He dreamed of even greater lethality. A weapon in which the atomic bomb was nothing more than a match to light a fuse to the nucleus.
26:19A thermonuclear weapon. What Teller affectionately called the super.
26:25If Edward Teller had a polar opposite in this scientific community, it would have been Joseph Rotblatt.
26:33Rotblatt was born in Warsaw to a wealthy family who, like Tellers, had lost everything.
26:40In the summer of 1939, just before the Nazis invaded, he was invited to England to take a research position at the University of Liverpool.
26:49At the last minute before his departure, his beloved wife, Tola, had an emergency appendectomy.
26:57She was forced to remain behind until she was well enough to travel.
27:01Tola insisted that Joseph go on ahead to prepare their new home.
27:06It would just be a matter of weeks, she told him.
27:09The challenge was to find a chemical fuse that would light the nuclear chain reaction first imagined by Leo Szilard in London.
27:23The scientists and engineers told themselves that they would be averting a grave danger by building a bomb of unprecedented destructive power.
27:32Their government could be trusted.
27:36They would never use such a weapon in an act of aggression.
27:39Not like those other governments.
27:42These atomic scientists were the first to see building nuclear weapons as a deterrent to using them.
27:50The fear of Hitler with an atomic bomb was the driving rationale for the Manhattan Project.
27:56And yet, when Germany surrendered and Hitler was no more, of the thousands of scientists who worked on the bomb, only one resigned.
28:08It was Joe Rotblad.
28:11In the years that followed, whenever he was asked about his decision, he always rejected any suggestion that he had done so out of moral superiority.
28:20He would just smile and say the truth was that he desperately missed his wife, who had been prevented from leaving Warsaw and lost to him in the chaos of the war.
28:32With its end in Europe came his chance to go and search for her.
28:36But he never found her, except as a name on a list of the dead.
28:43Tola had perished in the Holocaust, exterminated at the Belzec concentration camp.
28:51Although he lived another 60 years, Rotblad never remarried.
28:56Of the three nations that pursued wartime research into building the bomb, only the U.S. succeeded before the war's end.
29:07And historians believe that was because America had taken in so many immigrants.
29:13Of the leading figures in the Manhattan Project, only two were native born.
29:19And only one got his Ph.D. in the U.S.
29:22Atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending the Second World War.
29:32Two months later, President Truman invited Oppenheimer for congratulations in the Oval Office.
29:39But to Truman's dismay, Oppenheimer was in no mood to celebrate.
29:44Mr. President, I feel like I have blood on my hands.
29:48Don't be a fool. If anyone has blood on their hands, it's me. And it doesn't bother me at all.
29:55How long do you think it will be before the Russians get the bomb?
30:00Never!
30:05Don't you ever let that crybaby scientist anywhere near me again, do you hear?
30:10Less than four years later, the Russians exploded their own atomic bomb.
30:17And shortly after, both nations went on to create supers, thermonuclear hydrogen bombs.
30:24The nuclear arms race, begun by those three letters from scientists, was off to a terrifying start.
30:31After the war, Teller's dreams of greater and greater killing power were to come true.
30:39In the early 1950s, when the communist witch hunts began in the United States,
30:44he was perfectly happy to hint that Robert Oppenheimer, his former boss,
30:49who had brilliantly run the Manhattan Project, should be stripped of his security clearance,
30:54thereby ruining Oppenheimer's career.
30:56Despite dramatic reductions in nuclear arsenals, the specter of nuclear war haunts us still.
31:24How can we sleep so soundly, in the shadow of a smoking volcano?
31:36In another time, there were others who faced a grave danger, as if immobilized in a dream.
31:54Let me tell you a story. Two men walk into a bar.
32:09And they got into a fight.
32:12And they got into a fight.
32:16two men walk into a fight.
32:32Louis-Auguste Silbarri was arrested and taken to the Saint-Pierre prison, where he was locked in a dungeon.
32:51This all happened on the French colonial island of Martinique in the Caribbean in 1902, in the midst of an election campaign.
33:02On this April morning, Fernand Klerk stepped outside to admire the view.
33:12He was master of all he surveyed, the factories that turned the island's trees into furniture, and the fields of sugarcane and coffee.
33:22That's strange. Why would there be frost on such a sunny, warm morning?
33:28But it wasn't frost. It was ash from the volcano.
33:32Mount Pele.
33:33When the ash began to fall, Clara Prentiss, wife of the American
34:03consul, considered going home to Massachusetts.
34:06No, but that was out of the question.
34:09There was the gala she planned for the following week.
34:12Postponing it was unthinkable.
34:19And there were many who were too poor to leave their meager possessions and flee the city
34:25of St. Pierre for a safer part of the island.
34:29Others, with the means to do so, departed on boats.
34:40Mayor Fouché worked late into the evening, drafting detailed plans for the Ascension Day
34:46banquet and ball.
34:48Meanwhile, below, servants cleaned ash from the banquet hall in preparation for the event.
34:58The closest thing to a scientist on the island of Martinique was an elementary school teacher
35:06named Gaston Land.
35:10Land actually made a pilgrimage to the newly awakened volcanic crater and shared his observations
35:16of heightened activity in the newspaper.
35:19But Land was more concerned about his forthcoming trip to Paris.
35:23He was to display samples of the island's plant life, along with the lecture he had been asked
35:28to give.
35:29But with the ash falling at this rate, his specimens would all be ruined.
35:43Mayor Fouché mustered enough resolve to create a new poster.
35:48Fellow citizens, be not afraid.
35:52No lava flows can reach the city in the near future.
35:55We have seven kilometers between us and the volcano.
35:59The amount of lava would have to be impossibly huge to cross the two immense valleys and the
36:05swamp between us and Mount Pele.
36:07In the early hours of May 7th, the people of Saint-Pierre awoke to thundering seismic tremors
36:23and volcanic lightning near the mouth of the hellish volcano.
36:28Now, mass panic began to spread.
36:32Troops were dispatched to try and calm the public.
36:35And then, just before the dawn of Thursday morning, May 8th, the volcano became utterly
36:45calm.
36:46The air was cool and fresh, and the sea like glass.
36:56When Mount Pele erupted at 8.02 a.m. on May 8th, 1902, the explosion produced a sound
37:04so loud, it was heard 500 miles away in Venezuela.
37:11The massive pyroclastic flow, a death cloud of superheated gases, crossed the valleys to
37:17the city in minutes.
37:24The explosion was the equivalent of just one strategic nuclear warhead.
37:29Three days after the eruption, men from the other part of the island combed the still-smoking streets
37:39of Saint-Pierre to collect the bodies and burn what the volcano had failed to consume completely.
37:46Few have ever experienced what Louis-Auguste Silbarri endured and lived to tell.
38:08When the volcano erupted, he heard the screams of his captors briefly,
38:15before a terrifying silence.
38:19And then, a fierce heat came blasting through the tiny vent in his cell.
38:24He hopped and jumped around to avoid it, but was still severely burned up to his shoulders.
38:29For three days he suffered in agony, with no other sustenance than the moisture on the walls of his cell.
38:37His sentence to solitary confinement in the thick-walled dungeon had saved his life.
38:45He was one of only two survivors of the 30,000 citizens of Saint-Pierre.
38:52What about us? Would we know when to sound the alarm?
39:01Can we see what's coming?
39:04Can we awaken in time?
39:22We're back on the trail of one of our two atoms.
39:32The Uranium atom.
39:37A Uranium atom is inherently unstable.
39:41Sooner or later, it decays.
39:43A particle from its nucleus breaks away, transforming the Uranium atom into an entirely different element.
39:50Thorium.
39:53We're flying through the crossfire of radioactive decay.
39:57Subatomic particles move like bullets through the fine structure of light,
40:02shearing electrons from their molecules.
40:04This is how ionizing radiation affects living things.
40:14Those chromosomes never had a chance.
40:18This is why atomic weapons are so much more dangerous than conventional ones.
40:23Ionizing radiation is all around us and even inside us.
40:26At low levels, it poses no threat.
40:29But at higher levels, it's a different story.
40:34In the near term, exposure to lethal levels of radiation can cause a runaway reaction of the cell
40:40that makes it multiply exponentially.
40:44Cancer.
40:46But its power to harm can also echo down the corridors of time.
40:52When the radiation tore into the chromosomes of the butterfly,
40:57it left a trail of destruction in its wake that changed the destiny of the butterfly's unborn offspring.
41:05A mutation in its genes.
41:09We have a lot in common with butterflies.
41:12Any change in the DNA architecture will be copied over and over again in succeeding generations.
41:19The damage is passed on, vandalizing our future.
41:24We are made of atoms that were born in stars thousands of light years away in space
41:30and billions of years ago in time.
41:33The search for our own origins has carried us far from our epoch and our world.
41:39We are star stuff, deeply connected with the rest of the universe.
41:44The matter we are made of was generated in cosmic fire.
41:48And now, we, ambulatory collections of seven billion billion billion atoms, intricately assembled over eons,
41:57has devised a means to tap that cosmic fire hidden in the heart of matter.
42:04We cannot unlearn this knowledge.
42:07And tragically, insanity runs in our family.
42:11The letters that the scientists wrote to begin this nightmare were followed by another.
42:28This one, a letter to the planet stating that this new understanding of physics demanded a new way of thinking.
42:36This one, shall we choose death because we cannot forget our quarrels?
42:43We appeal as human beings to human beings.
42:48Remember your humanity and forget the rest.
42:51And what of our other atom, the carbon atom?
43:01It's inside one of you.
43:21It's inside one of you.
43:23It's inside one of you.
43:24It's inside one of you.
43:25It's inside one of you.
43:26It's inside one of you.
43:27It's inside one of you.
43:28It's inside one of you.
43:29It's inside one of you.
43:30It's inside one of you.
43:31It's inside one of you.
43:32It's inside one of you.
43:33It's inside one of you.
43:34It's inside one of you.
43:35It's inside one of you.
43:36It's inside one of you.
43:37It's inside one of you.
43:38It's inside one of you.
43:39It's inside one of you.
43:40It's inside one of you.
43:41It's inside one of you.
43:42It's inside one of you.
43:43It's inside one of you.
43:44It's inside one of you.
43:45It's inside one of you.
43:46THE END