Cosmos: Possible Worlds - First Season

The kingdom of matter stores it treasures

on my many levels.

Until recently, we thought there was only one.

We had no idea there were others.

When we strike a match, a chemical reaction liberates

energy stored in the molecules.

Old chemical bonds break and new ones are forged.

Now, the adjacent molecules begin to move faster and the

temperature increases.

Soon, the process becomes self-propagated,

a kind of chain reaction.

The energy represented by a flame has been locked,

perhaps for many years, in chemical bonds between atoms.

Mediated by the electrons that revolved around their core.

When we make a fire,

we release this hidden chemical energy.

But there is a deeper level of matter that

houses another kind of energy.

Inside the heart of the atom, its nucleus.

This hidden treasure was forged billions of years ago

in distant stellar furnaces.

Long before Earth was formed.

It's what powers the stars.

Wresting this knowledge from nature

is a cosmic rite of passage.

The beings of any possible world clever enough to travel

this deep into nature's labyrinth better take care.

The secret of starlight is nothing to fool with.

Like fire, it can bring a civilization to life and it

can burn it to the ground.

What is an atom?

What are they made of?

How are they joined together?

How could something as small as an atom

contain so much power?

Where do atoms come from?

The same place we do.

When we seek the origin of atoms,

we are searching for our own beginnings.

This quest takes us to the depths of space and time.

I want to tell you a tale of two atoms.

Come with me.

Long ago, before there was an Earth,

there was a wisp of cold thin gas.

It was made of the simplest atoms.

And they were gravitationally attracted to one another.

So, the cloud grew.

The atoms contained small,

but heavy particles in their nuclei.

The hydrogen had protons, the helium had neutrons as well.

They both had a skittering veil of electrons

in orbit around them.

The atoms in the interior of the cloud moved ever faster

as gravity pulled them ever closer together.

Until the whole thing collapsed in on itself.

This collapse raised the temperature so high,

that the cloud became a natural fusion reactor.

In other words, a star.

Atoms operating according to the laws of physics met

and fused in the unbroken darkness.

And then there was light.

In this froth of elementary particles,

the nucleus of one of the atoms,

a helium atom, was formed.

After billions of years, the star is now elderly.

Having converted all of its available hydrogen fuel to helium.

Now that it's time for the star to die,

it resumes the turning inward of its infancy.

Can you find our helium atom?

It joined with two others to become one of our heroes,

a carbon atom.

That's what in the hearts of stars.

Soon, our carbon atom will tumble out of this

red giant star into the interstellar ocean of space.

We've tinted this atom blue so you can find it

in the vastness.

Meanwhile, in another part of the galaxy.

Similar processes were unfolding as stars were

born and died.

The other atom of our tale was formed in the heart

of this dying star.

In the catastrophic process of going supernova,

226 protons and neutrons became fused to a carbon atom.

Turning it into a uranium atom.

We've tinted our other hero atom red,

so that you could follow it on its odyssey

through space and time.

As chance would have it,

after wandering the vast Milky Way galaxy,

our two atoms both happened on the fiery birth

of a small solar system.

Ours.

Our carbon atom has traveled far to become part of a small planet.

After billions of years, it joined an extremely complex

molecule, which has the peculiar property of a making

virtually identical copies of itself.

The carbon atom plays its tiny role in the origin of life.

Through all its incarnations,

our carbon atom has had no self-awareness.

No free will.

It is merely an extremely minor cog in some vast cosmic machinery,

working in accord with the laws of nature.

And that other atom?

The uranium atom made in the supernova?

What has become of it?

Our world was born in fire.

And this tiny atom was drawn to it.

Maybe it rode the explosive wave of a supernova.

Or perhaps, it was attracted by the gravity of our sun and

pulled down deeper and deeper into the interior,

which was even more of a hell.

The Earth's surface soon cooled,

but the interior remained molten.

The magma slowly circulating and our uranium atom found

itself carried over the ages, from the deep interior,

back all the way up to the surface.

Despite the high temperatures and pressures deep within the

Earth, our atom's integrity was never threatened.

Atoms are small, old, hard and durable.

Everything is made of atoms, including us.

But until the last years of the 19th Century,

we didn't know about the frenzied activity inside the atom.

And this is where our two atoms from opposite ends of

the Milky Way galaxy finally met.

It happened in Paris.

Our carbon atom became part of the retina of one of

the world's greatest scientists.

This was just a few years after the discovery of x-rays.

Marie Curie and her husband and research partner,

Pierre, wanted to know how a piece of matter could make it

possible to see through skin and even walls.

The knowledge that there were rare places in the world where

rocks, rich in uranium, possess these strange

properties inspired Marie on her scientific quest.

The dull brown ore, still mixed with pine needles,

came from the part of Eastern Europe that is now the Czech Republic.

But this material was very rare.

And even to distill a tiny amount of it required

the most lengthy and labor intensive efforts.

She was later to write,

"we lived in our single occupation, as in a dream."

They worked under the worst possible conditions to

purify the ore into a mineral called pitchblende,

which was 50 to 80% uranium.

This was quite an achievement, but Marie and Pierre were

hunting for something far more rare.

It took them three years to process tons of ore.

To isolate a mere tenth of a gram of a substance she named radium.

Marie and Pierre had discovered a completely new element.

The Curies showed that the radium was entirely

unaffected by extreme temperatures.

That was strange.

Most things subjected to such intense heat would

change drastically.

And, there was something else.

It spontaneously emitted energy.

Not through chemical reactions,

but through some unknown mechanism.

Marie Curie called this new phenomenon radioactivity.

She and Pierre calculated the energy that spontaneously

flowed from a lump of radium would be much greater than

burning the same amount of coal.

Radioactivity, to their astonishment,

was millions of times more potent than chemical energy.

The difference between liberating the energy that

resides in molecules and the far greater power

stored deeper down.

Between Marie, Pierre, little Irene and the man

she would later marry,

the family would win five Nobel prizes in science.

The bottles, tubes and flasks of pitchblende that

they had refined, left a residue of radium particles.

They were so potent, that they lit up the lab at night.

As Marie wrote years later, "they were like Earthly stars,

these glowing tubes in that poor rough shack."

Marie leapt to the correct conclusion that the

luminescence was due to something happening inside

the nuclei of radioactive atoms.

For thousands of years, it had been thought that atoms were

the smallest unit of matter.

Curie's earthly stars were evidence that within the atom

was a possible world where even smaller

particles were interacting.

100 years after this magical night,

Marie Curie's cookbooks still glowed with the exquisite

radioactivity she had discovered.

But it took a little time for the darker implications of

this deeper understanding of nature to dawn in the mind of

a visionary named H.G. Wells.

A writer, who was a genius at turning the

new revelations of science into stories

that captivated the world.

And foreseeing as no one else, their gravest consequences.

The writer H.G. Wells,

who first imagined time machines and alien invasions

had a nightmare of a future world where atoms

were weaponized.

In his book called The World Set Free written in 1913,

he coined the phrase atomic bombs.

And loosed them on helpless civilian populations.