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.

We'll dig into the surprising way

different elements combine together and blow apart.

In this hour,

we swing from the molecular chains

and surf the atomic webs that give some materials

unique abilities.

Ow...

The moldable molasses of molten glass.

Come on!

The built-in boing of rubber.

The G-forces are indescribable.

And the menagerie of modern plastics

that these days is both a miracle...

Oh!

And a menace.

People want to do the right thing,

but it's really difficult

to know exactly what to do.

"Beyond the Elements: Indestructible"...

right now, on "NOVA."

Ah, the periodic table...

the "Who's Who" of atoms!

The stuff everything is made of

with familiar names like hydrogen,

oxygen, carbon, and iron.

But what if every substance were made

of just one kind of atom, just one kind of element?

What if a human...

were made only of carbon?

What if water...

were made only of hydrogen?

And what if salt...

were made only of poisonous chlorine?

Luckily, nearly all elements like to stick together.

It's through the combination of different elements

that our world exists.

And we've made it an even richer place by learning to harness,

and even make those combinations,

to create new materials that have shaped our modern world,

such as rubber, or plastic...

materials we've come to depend on

but that sometimes come

with difficult environmental downsides.

But let's start with one of the oldest

and most chemically interesting.

Look at the buildings in any city today

and you'll see... Or see through...

one of the signature materials of our times:

Glass.

The Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York,

is home to an internationally famous collection of glass,

with examples that range from antiquity

to contemporary art.

From the functional...

to the fantastic.

The museum also runs

demonstrations of glassblowing.

She's applying glass color to that molten glass.

By holding it to the ground,

gravity takes hold and she gets that beautiful ruffled edge.

Some include opportunities

for novices like me

to get into the act.

We're going to be making something

we call a Roman bottle.

Good, keep going,

keep going...

all right, stop.

The kind of glass I'm working with is the most common sort,

soda lime glass,

the stuff of windows, drinking glasses, and glass bottles.

Give the pipe a tap...

Whoo-hoo!

I am good at this.

Eric Meek,

one of the hot glass program managers,

breaks down the ingredients in soda lime glass for me.

So these are the raw materials

that we use to make glass.

The first main ingredient is silica sand.

You can see this is a beautiful white, pure silica sand.

This will make really nice, clear glass for us.

Silica is a network of silicon and oxygen atoms,

where each silicon atom shares electrons

with neighboring oxygens,

in what are called covalent bonds.

To get this to melt at a lower temperature,

we add soda ash, so that's sodium carbonate.

Sodium carbonate...

two sodiums electrically attracted to three oxygens

sharing electrons with a carbon atom.

If we melted pure silica

it would melt nearly at 4,000 degrees.

If you add soda ash, it drops the melting temperature

down to around 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

So easier for us to bring about.

Easier for us to bring about.

And then the final ingredient over here

is crushed limestone, or calcium carbonate.

Like sodium carbonate...

but with a calcium instead.

Calcium carbonate will help

to stabilize the glass over time. Wow!

And you just sort of mix that up in a pot.

Yup. And put it over a medium flame and...

It's that easy.

You mix these together, put it in a crucible,

melt it at about 2,000 degrees and you have glass.

At high temperatures,

all those powdery ingredients melt together

to form a viscous liquid that cools into glass.

But there's more to the story.

Most solids are crystalline, like frozen water,

the ice in your glass.

In ice, the water molecules are arranged in a regular pattern.

If we heat it to its melting point,

ice quickly turns to liquid,

with water molecules sliding past each other.

And then, if we drop the temperature,

the water refreezes

and the regular crystalline structure of ice returns.

Silica sand, the primary ingredient in common glass,

typically also has a regular crystalline structure.

As you heat it up, it too will melt just like ice does,

more or less all at once transitioning

from a solid to a liquid, with the network of silicon

and oxygen atoms sliding around chaotically.

But this is where glass gets weird.

When you cool our liquid silica down,

it doesn't find its way back into a crystalline structure.

Instead, it becomes an increasingly viscous liquid

with jumbled rings of atoms.

When it finally cools down enough,

that warped irregular structure becomes locked in place

into what's called an amorphous solid.

The range of temperatures in which glass remains

a viscous, goopy liquid that we can manipulate

is one reason it’s such an important material,

and has made possible the amazing art of glassblowing.

When most of us talk about glass,

we mean silica-based glass,

ordinary glass.

But glass is also the term scientists use

for any material that exists as an amorphous solid,

materials that, unlike a crystal,

have an irregular structure,

and when heated pass through a phase

that's not exactly liquid and not exactly solid.

A phase I call... gooey.

So glass comes in many forms.

Eric Goldschmidt,

a flame worker,

demonstrates that glass doesn't have to be, well, glass,

using a piece of hard candy.

And it actually acts a lot like glass

that we use out of our furnaces here.

So I'm softening this material with some heat,

getting those atoms moving around,

and it simply will never have the opportunity

to come back to a crystalline network.

So we can soften it a little bit.

Start to inflate it.

Start to inflate it?

Come on!

Dude, you're making a Roman bottle out of a Jolly Rancher!

In theory, it can be shaped into just about anything

because of its ability to sort of transition

from really fluid to fairly,

fairly rigid.

Would this still taste like candy?

I don't think

we've cooked the sweetness out of it.

Is it too hot?

It should be cool enough to touch.

Excuse me.

My gosh, I feel like I'm eating the wrapper.