NOVA

What's it take to make our modern world?

Ah!

That's amazing!

I'm David Pogue.

Join me on a high-speed chase

through the elements...

and beyond.

Oh, my God!

As we smash our way into the materials,

molecules,

and reactions...

It's a really cool enzyme

because it makes life on Earth possible.

That make the places we live,

the bodies we live in,

and the stuff we can't seem to live without.

The only thing between me and certain death...

is chemistry?

From killer snails...

Just when you think you've heard of everything,

nature will surprise you.

And exploding glass

to the price a pepper-eating Pogue pays.

There's got to be some easier way to learn about molecules.

In this hour, we'll dig into the surprising ways

different elements combine together

and blow apart.

Come for the chemistry,

but stay for the bacon blowtorch.

The power of bacon!

"Beyond the Elements:

Reactions"... Right now on "NOVA."

Imagine that you're about to take your first shot

in a game of pool... the break.

But when the cue ball hits the other balls...

...they all turn into a rat.

Or imagine you snap a pencil in two...

and it becomes a flower... and a fork.

That's how weird and surprising some chemical reactions are.

You can take something as dangerous as the element sodium,

which explodes on contact with water...

combine it with a lethal gas, the element chlorine,

and end up with something utterly different:

sodium chloride...

table salt for your fries.

Transformative chemical reactions are everywhere,

they're going on all the time.

They put the bang in explosives...

That's a reaction!

Round 2.

And the "heat" in hot peppers.

What am I doing?

Learning how to harness them

has given us some control over our world

and maybe even helped to make us human.

And few folks know more about chemical reactions...

This is not normal fire.

Than my old friend Theo Gray.

Today, I've come to his mad scientist lair in Illinois

to find out more about one of the most powerful weapons

in our reaction arsenal...

Oh ho, ho, ho!

Fire.

Fire is a chemical reaction,

plain and simple.

It happens to be the most important chemical reaction

ever, times ten... bar none.

When you think about the importance of fire

to human beings becoming who we are,

it's kind of the start of civilization almost,

discovering how to control this amazing thing... feeds us,

chases away the bears, it lights up the night.

There's almost nothing you could name

that's more important than fire.

So what is fire, anyway?

You may have learned this in school.

To make fire, a kind of combustion,

you need fuel plus heat plus oxygen.

That formula is simple...

but what's happening isn't.

And what's actually happening here is kind of subtle.

The wood itself isn’t really burning.

You see the flames?

Yeah... Most of the reaction is happening

up in the air above the wood

because it needs to mix with air.

Like, there's no air in the wood.

And what's happening is the heat of the flames here

are breaking down

and evaporating compounds in the wood,

bringing them up into the air.

Those gases from the wood are complex molecules

made mostly of hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen.

When the rising gases enter

the high temperature area of the flames,

they're joined by oxygen from the air

in a swirling cauldron of complicated reactions.

The gases break down, and their atoms rearrange.

If the gases burn completely,

they'll form water and carbon dioxide.

More often, incomplete burning produces

a variety of other molecules.

Importantly for us, the reactions also release energy...

the light you see and the heat you feel.

And that, at its heart, is what happens in chemical reactions...

The breaking and making of bonds

and the shuffling around of atoms.

You take two different things, you smash them together,

they rearrange themselves,

and then you get... something else comes out.

And one of the big-time players in the game...

Is oxygen.

You ready?

With enough heat it reacts with just about anything,

as Theo soon shows me in his barn.

This powerful cutting tool is called a thermic lance.

It uses pressurized oxygen fed through a metal rod.

This one's made of iron.

We don't normally think of iron as something that can burn,

but when lit in the flow of oxygen,

it does, generating so much heat...

Wow!

...that you can cut through a brick or concrete.

Demolition crews use large thermic lances

to slice up all sorts of big, unwieldy things...

from bridges to ships to machinery.

But does the rod that burns in the stream of oxygen

need to be metal?

I shudder to ask...

why you've got plates of bacon here.

Well, because bacon is the funniest thing

that you can form into a tube and shoot oxygen through.

Unfortunately actual American-style bacon

doesn't hold together well enough.

We need the engineering grade.

This is Italian prosciutto.

Theo has already baked some tubes of prosciutto.

The next step is to wrap them in yet another piece

to create one large hollow tube,

which he hooks up to his oxygen tank.

Okay, so now, what can we do with this?

The same thing you do with any sort of thermic lance.

You cut something with it.

Uh, we're going to cut steel...

- because, why not? - No!

You're going to cut steel with bacon?

Yes, a steel baking pan.

Wow. You just have to get it hot enough.

The power of bacon!

That's amazing!

Yeah, I mean that's, that’s a good amount of cutting there.

I've heard of steel-cut oatmeal for breakfast, but...

Bacon-cut steel?

Gaining control over fire has had an immeasurable impact

on human civilization.

In fact, the most popular construction material

in the world has its roots

in one of the oldest pyro technologies:

roasting a certain kind of rock.

We know it as concrete.

Modern concrete is a mixture of aggregate...

materials like sand, gravel, and crushed stone...

With a binder... These days, most often cement.

And that's key.

Because people are always confusing concrete...

and cement.

Cement is the glue, concrete is the end product.

Cement sidewalks?

No, that's concrete!

Cement trucks?

Uh-uh, they carry concrete!

But cement is the key ingredient.

And that's why I head to the Lafarge Holcim Cement Plant,

the largest in the U.S., located outside St. Louis, Missouri.

We shoot rock every day.

My day with plant manager John Goetz

begins with a bang.

Fire in the hole!

Is it safe to go down there?

Not quite.

How's that for you?

That's a reaction. That's awesome, huh?

Do it again!

Now that, my friends, is a lot of limestone.

That's a lot of rock.

Before long, this will be holding together

America's buildings and sidewalks and...

That's right,

we're going to turn this limestone into cement.

But what exactly is limestone?

It's mostly calcium carbonate... A compound that,

as its name says, has two parts.

There's a calcium atom that has given up two of its electrons,

making it a positively charged ion.

The other part is carbonate, made up of three oxygen atoms

that are sharing electrons with a carbon atom.

Sharing electrons is called covalent bonding.

The two electrons from the calcium have joined the party,

making the carbonate a negative ion.

The positive calcium ion and the negative carbonate ion attract,