NOVA

Why do bombs go boom?

You have created fire!

I could feel that puppy!

How much gold is in 400 tons of dirt?

There's about a million and a half dollars there.

Oh, man!

What's that gorilla doing there?

And how come rare earths,

the metals that make our gadgets go,

aren't that rare at all?

Watch out with the hammer. What are you... ?

Oh yeah, cerium, lanthanum, praseodymium.

We live in a world of incredible material variety.

Yet everything we know--

the stars, the planets, and life itself--

comes from about 90 basic building blocks.

You have a periodic table table!

All right here on this remarkable chart:

the periodic table of the elements.

It's a story that begins with the Big Bang

and eventually leads to us.

And we're made almost entirely

of just a handful of ingredients,

including one that burns with secret fire inside us all.

Join me as I explore the basic building blocks of the universe.

Oh!

From some of the most common, like oxygen...

How do you feel at this stage?

...to the least--

man-made elements that last only fractions of a second.

Strange metals with repellant powers.

And you're saying that this will repel the sharks.

Oh my gosh!

Ugh!

Poisonous gases...

Isn't chlorine deadly?

Absolutely.

...in stuff we eat every day.

And now we can even see what they're made of.

The dots are actual atoms?

If you're like me,

you care about the elements and how they go together.

Oh, the humanity!

Because more than ever...

Incoming neutron!

... matter matters.

Copper is king.

Commodities! Copper at 80 cents a pound!

Can we crack the code...

...to build the world of the future?

Join me on my hunt for the elements.

Right now, on NOVA.

Major funding for NOVA is provided by the follo Far from prying eyes, the ground erupts.

Heavy equipment moving millions of tons of earth

in search of... something.

A secret deep underground.

I'm David Pogue.

I've managed to talk my way into this hidden lair.

Probably almost a mile from where we first came in.

Boy, I hope I can talk my way out.

This area here has been back-filled.

They tell me that so much money flows out of this place,

it's like a gold mine.

Wait a minute...

Itis a gold mine!

But where's the gold?

It turns out that nature has concealed

thousands of pounds of the stuff

under billions of cubic feet of earth.

By digging, these guys are hoping to strike it rich.

But that's not why I'm here.

I'm on a quest to understand

the basic building blocks of everyday matter.

They're called the elements.

These symbols represent the atoms

that make up every single thing in our universe.

118 unique substances arranged on an amazing chart

that reveals their hidden secrets

to anyone who knows how to read it.

It's a journey that dives deep into the metals of civilization,

marvels at the mysteries of the extremely reactive,

reveals hidden powers,

and harnesses secrets of life,

from hydrogen

to uranium and beyond.

I'm starting with one of humanity's

first elemental loves:

gold.

Au.

Like all elements, gold is an atom

that gets its identity from tiny particles--

positively charged protons in the nucleus

balanced by negatively charged electrons all around,

plus neutrons, which have no charge at all.

Gold has been sought since ancient times,

yet all the gold ever mined would fit into a single cube

about 60 feet on a side.

Gold is unique among the metals.

It doesn't rust or tarnish.

It's virtually indestructible, yet also soft and malleable.

It was a sacred material to ancient people.

And it's never lost its luster.

The problem is, it's exceedingly rare stuff in the earth's crust,

and it's getting harder to find all the time.

Here at the Cortez Mine in Nevada,

high-tech prospectors are moving mountains,

closing in from above and below.

This rock face is about a quarter mile below the surface.

And according to John Taule, it's loaded with gold.

Somewhere...

And what would it look like?

Like yellow, metallic streaks in the walls?

No, it's really hard to tell from the rock,

because it's microscopic, you can't see the gold.

The gold is microscopic?

Yes, you can't see it with the naked eye.

So we're way past the days

of finding big gold nuggets sticking out of the wall, going,

Hey Bob, I got one here!

We're past that now, huh?

That's correct.

Which raises a question:

if the gold is invisible to the naked eye,

how do they even know if they're digging in the right place?

That's where Gayle Fitzwater and the assay team come in.

Every day, she receives hundreds of samples of earth

taken from the mine.

Her job is to figure out

how much gold is in them there rocks.

To get at the color, it has to be crushed...

Do you want ice cream with this?

... shuffled like a deck of cards...

I think I've seen one of these machines at Starbucks.

... then pulverized to the consistency of baby powder.

I don't see any more rocks in here.

But the bad news is, I don't see any gold in here, either.

The good news is that we haven't finished.

There may be still gold hiding in the mix.

The sample, mixed with a lead oxide powder,

goes into a furnace heated to 2,000 degrees.

It's a 500-year-old process called a fire assay.

Using extreme heat, gold atoms are gradually coaxed away

from the powdered rock.

So after all that pulverizing

and crushing and weighing and firing,

what we're left with is this, these little teacups?

What you're going to be able to see in here

is a gold bead that was recovered

from that sample that you crushed.

Um, no.

Okay, come on.

This is like the emperor's new teacup.

There's nothing in here except that little tiny piece of dust.

That's a piece of gold.

That actually weighs about a half a milligram.

So all that work gave you only a half a milligram of gold?

It equals out

to about one ounce per ton.

An ounce of gold for every ton of rock?

That's right, and...

That's a terrible business!

You'll never make any money.

When you went in the mine

and you were able to see the trucks that we had,

those are 400-ton haul packs.

If you had 400 tons of material at one ounce per ton...

400 tons and one ounce of gold for each ton.

At that rate, that's 25 pounds of gold for every truck.

And at $1,800 an ounce...

$1,800 times...

$720,000 a truck!

This is a fantastic business!

How do I get in on this?

Turns out that an ounce per ton

is pretty much optimal for the underground mine.

The surface mine produces less, about half an ounce per ton.

To see what it takes

to get something bigger than that tiny bead,

I visit the processing plant where the ore ends up.

Just another day in the gold refinery.

Here too, extraction begins with crushing

in these huge tumblers.

And that sets the stage for the trickiest step:

coaxing the microscopic gold out of the rocky ore.

About three quarters of the elements are metals.

And gold is one of the most standoffish.

How an atom reacts chemically depends on how willing it is

to share electrons with others.

And gold is not very social.

Like Greta Garbo,

it wants to be alone.

So do other so-called noble metals--

silver, platinum, palladium, osmium and iridium--

all located in the same quiet neighborhood

of the periodic table.

Using cyanide to react with the gold

allows them to gradually reduce

40,000 gallon tanks of pulverized sludge...

to this.

Three trays full of... mud?