Cosmos: Possible Worlds (2014–…): Season 2, Episode 10 - A Tale of Two Atoms - full transcript
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.
He set his vision of a nuclear
war between England and
Germany in the impossibly
distant future of the 1950's.
In 1933, the
Hungarian physicist,
Leo Szilard, was contemplating
becoming a biologist.
Dr. Szilard?
Are you quite all
right in there?
He read Wells' novel
and it started him thinking.
Szilard knew that
atoms are made of protons and
neutrons on the inside.
And a skittering veil of
electrons on the outside.
Suddenly, awaiting for
the light to change at this
intersection in London, he
was struck by the thought,
if he could find a
sufficiently large amount of
an element that would emit two
neutrons when it absorbed one,
it would sustain a
nuclear chain reaction.
Two would produce four,
four would produce eight
and so forth.
Until enormous amounts of
energy in the nucleus itself
could be liberated.
Not a chemical reaction,
but a nuclear one.
This was the
moment our world changed.
Leo Szilard also knew the
power of exponentials and
if a neutron chain reaction
could be triggered down there
in world of the atom's nucleus,
then something like Wells'
imaginary atomic bomb
might be possible.
He shuddered at the thought of
this destructive capability.
It was just the latest
development on a continuum
of violence that began
long long before.
50,000 years ago,
all humans were roving
bands of hunter-gatherers.
They communicated
over limited areas by
calling to one another.
That is, at the speed of sound.
Around 750 miles per hour.
But over longer distances,
they could communicate only
as fast as they could run.
Around 12,000 years ago,
about the same time as the
invention of agriculture,
they developed the power to
kill at a longer distance.
The kill radius expanded
to the arc of an arrow
launched by a bow.
And they could kill one
person with a single arrow.
Our ancestors were not
particularly warlike because
there was so few people and
so much room back then that
moving on was
preferable to armed conflict.
Their weapons were used
almost entirely for hunting.
Their identification
horizon was likely small.
Only with the other
members of their band of
50 or 100 people.
But their time
horizon took a giant leap.
They worked long and hard
planting crops in the here and
now, so several months later,
they could harvest them.
They postponed present
gratification for later advantage.
They began to
plan for the future.
By about 2,500 years ago,
there was a new kind of war.
The conquered territories
of Alexander stretched from
Macedonia to the Indus Valley.
There were now many on planet
Earth who owed allegiance to
groups composed of millions.
Over long distances,
maximum speed of both
communication and transportation
was the speed of the
sail and the horse.
Archidamus III, King of Sparta,
was famed for his
unflinching courage.
He relished taking part in hand
to hand combat with the enemy.
It is said that when he first
saw a projectile hurled by a
Balista, he cried
out in anguish.
"Oh Hercules!
The valor of man is lost!"
Both the kill range
and the kill ratio
had increased exponentially.
Now, ten corpses lay
where one would have been.
And the soldier who released
the lever on the siege engine
never even saw their faces.
He remained far removed from
the carnage on the other side
of the city wall.
Today, the maximum speed of
transportation is the escape
velocity from Earth.
25,000 miles per hour.
The speed of communication
is the speed of light.
The identification horizons
have also expanded enormously.
For some, it's a
billion or more.
For others, it's
our whole species.
And for a few, it's
all living things.
The kill radius, in
the worst case scenario,
is now our global civilization.
How did we get here?
It was the result of a deadly
embrace between science and state.
And there was one scientist
for whom no amount of
destructive power was enough.
It's hard to pinpoint
the precise moment when the
first nuclear war began.
Some might trace it all the
way back to that arrow sailing
over the treetops.
Others might say it
started much later,
with three messages.
In 1939 on Adolf
Hitler's birthday,
one of his
brightest young scientists,
Paul Harteck, had a special
gift in mind for his Führer.
Harteck wrote a letter
to the Nazi war office,
he 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.
He was trying to give an
atomic bomb to Adolf Hitler.
But Hitler would never get
his hands on a nuclear weapon,
he had murdered, imprisoned
or exiled many of the great
physicists in his territories.
Those who happened to
be Jews or liberals and
many who were both.
Exactly a month
before the war began,
Leo Szilard made a pilgrimage
to the house Albert Einstein
was renting on Long Island.
The physicist who usually
chauffeured Leo Szilard on
trips out of Manhattan was
unavailable that August day in 1939.
So, Szilard enlisted the services
of a fellow Hungarian emigrate,
a young scientist
named Edward Teller.
Persecution in Budapest
sent him and his family to
take refuge in Munich,
where he lost his right foot
in a traffic accident.
In the early 1930s, Teller
and his family were forced
to flee once again.
Just as Harteck felt it
his duty to inform Hitler.
Szilard wanted President
Franklin Roosevelt to know
the awesome power
of such a weapon.
There was no scientist on
Earth whose prestige and
influence was
comparable to Einstein's.
Einstein's nightmare was
imagining Hitler with a
nuclear weapon at his disposal.
But what would be the
long-term consequences of
this dangerous new knowledge?
Which, once unleashed,
could never be taken back.
Einstein would take
no role in the U.S.
effort to build the atomic bomb,
which became known as
"The Manhattan Project."
But he did alert the President
to the potential use of
atomic nuclei in warfare.
After the war was over, he
told a reporter that if he had
known the Germans would fail
in developing in an atomic
bomb, he never would
have signed the letter.
But Edward Teller had
no such ambivalence.
He couldn't wait to get
started on weaponizing the atom.
The Russian physicist, G.N. Flyorov
had tried for years to alert his leader,
Joseph Stalin, to the possible
military applications of a
nuclear chain reaction.
But the Soviet Union was
under siege by the Germans.
And an atom bomb project was
likely to take years to complete.
With their backs
against the wall,
it seemed too impractical
to even think about.
In 1942, Flyorov had
published a scientific paper
on nuclear physics.
Now, he was excited to see
what the eminent physicists
in Europe and the United
States had to say about it.
Flyorov was puzzled.
None of the physicists of
the International Scientific
Community thought his
paper worthy of comment.
At first, he was hurt, but
then he realized what was
really happening.
American and German scientific
journals were being scrubbed
of any nuclear physics papers
as both nations secretly
worked on building the bomb.
It was this absence
of published data,
the dogs that did not
bark, that moved Flyorov to
re-double his efforts to
convince Stalin to start his
own nuclear weapons program.
In 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.
The U.S. Department of War
chose the remote location
of Los Alamos, New Mexico
as the headquarters for the
atomic bomb research project.
It had been recommended
by the project's director,
physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer,
who had recuperated there
from an illness as a teenager.
But 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.
A thermal nuclear weapon.
What Teller affectionately
called, the super.
If Edward Teller had a polar
opposite in the scientific community,
it would have been
Joseph Rotblat.
Rotblat was born in
Warsaw to a wealthy family,
who like Teller's,
had lost everything.
In the summer of 1939, just
before the Nazis invaded,
he was invited to England to
take a research position at
the University of Liverpool.
At the last minute
before his departure,
his beloved wife, Tola had
an emergency appendectomy.
She was forced to remain
behind until she was
well enough to travel.
Tola insisted that Joseph go on
ahead to prepare their new home.
It would just be a matter
of weeks, she told him.
The challenge, was to
find a chemical fuse that
would light the
nuclear chain reaction,
first imagined by
Leo Szilard in London.
The scientists and engineers
told themselves that they
would be averting a grave
danger by building a bomb
of unprecedented
destructive power.
Their government
could be trusted.
They would never use
such a weapon in an act of
aggression, not like
those other governments.
These atomic scientists
were the first to see
building nuclear weapons as
a deterrent to using them.
The fear of Hitler with an
atomic bomb was the driving
rationale for the
Manhattan Project.
And yet, when Germany
surrendered and Hitler was no more,
of the thousands of scientists
who worked on the bomb,
only one resigned.
It was Joe Rotblat.
In 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.
He 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.
With its end in Europe
came his chance to go
and search for her.
But, he never found her.
Except as a name on
a list of the dead.
Tola had perished
in the Holocaust.
Exterminated at the
Belzec concentration camp.
Although he lived
another 60 years,
Rotblat never remarried.
Of the three nations that
pursued wartime research
into building the bomb,
only the U. S. succeeded
before the war's end.
And historians believe that
was because America had
taken in so many immigrants.
Of the leading figures
in the Manhattan Project,
only two were native born.
And only one got
his PhD in the U.S.
Atomic bombs were dropped
on the Japanese cities of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
ending the second World War.
Two months later, President
Truman invited Oppenheimer
for congratulations
in the Oval Office.
But to Truman's dismay,
Oppenheimer was in
no mood to celebrate.
Mr. President, I feel like I
have blood on my hands.
Don't be a fool.
If anyone has blood on
their hands, it's me.
And it doesn't bother me at all.
How long do you
think it will be before the
Russians get the bomb?
Never!
Don't you ever let that
cry baby scientist anywhere
near me again, do you hear?
Less than four years later,
the Russians exploded
their own atomic bomb.
And shortly after, both
nations went on to create
Thermonuclear hydrogen bombs.
The nuclear arms race begun
by those three letters from
scientists was off to
a terrifying start.
After the war, Teller's dreams
of greater and greater killing
power were to come true.
The early 1950s, when the
Communist witch hunts began
in the United States, he
was perfectly happy to hint
that Robert Oppenheimer,
his former boss,
who had brilliantly run
the Manhattan Project,
should be stripped of
his security clearance,
thereby ruining
Oppenheimer's career.
Despite dramatic reductions
in nuclear arsenals,
the specter of nuclear
war haunts us still.
How can we sleep so soundly
in the shadow of
a smoking volcano?
In another time, there
were others who faced a
grave danger as if
immobilized in a dream.
Let me tell you a story.
Two men walk into a bar.
And they got into a fight.
Allez!
Louis-Auguste Cyparis
was arrested and taken to the
Saint Pierre Prison, where
he was locked in the dungeon.
This all happened on
the French colonial island of
Martinique in the
Caribbean in 1902.
In the midst of an
election campaign.
On this April morning,
Fernan Cleric stepped outside
to admire the view.
He was master of
all he surveyed.
The factories that turned the
island's trees into furniture.
And the fields of
sugar cane and coffee.
That's strange.
Why would there be frost on
such a sunny warm morning?
But it wasn't frost, it
was ash from the volcano,
Mount Pelée.
When the ash began to fall,
Claire Apprentice, wife
of the American Council
considered going
home to Massachusetts.
No, but that was
out of the question.
There was the gala she planned
for the following week,
postponing it was unthinkable.
And there were many who were
too poor to leave their meager
possessions and flee the
city of Saint Pierre for a
safer part of the island.
Others, with the means to do so,
departed on boats.
Mayor Fouché worked
late into the evening,
drafting detailed plans for the
Ascension Day Banquet and Ball.
Meanwhile, below...
Servants cleaned ash
from the banquet hall
in preparation for the event.
The closest thing to a scientist
on the island of Martinique
was an elementary school
teacher named Gaston Landes.
Landes actually made a
pilgrimage to the newly
awakened volcanic crater and
shared his observations of
heightened activity
in the newspaper.
But Landes was more
concerned about his
forthcoming trip to Paris.
He was to display samples of
the island's plant life along
with the lecture he
had been asked to give.
But, with the ash
falling at this rate,
his specimens
would all be ruined.
Mayor Fouché mustered enough
resolve to create a new poster.
"Fellow citizens, be not afraid."
No lava flows could reach
the city in the near future.
We have seven kilometers
between us and the volcano.
The amount of lava would
have to be impossibly huge
to cross the two immense
valleys and the swamp
"between us and Mount Peleé."
In the early hours of May 7th,
the people Saint Pierre awoke
to thundering seismic tremors
and volcanic lightning near the
mouth of the hellish volcano.
Now, mass panic began to spread.
Troops were dispatched to
try and calm the public.
And then...
Just before the dawn
of Thursday morning.
May 8th.
The volcano became utterly calm.
The air was cool and fresh.
And the sea like glass.
When Mount Pelée
erupted at 8:02 AM on
May 8th, 1902, the explosion
produced a sound so loud
it was heard 500 miles
away, in Venezuela.
The massive pyroclastic flood,
a death cloud of
super-heated gasses,
crossed the valleys
to the city in minutes.
The explosion was the
equivalent of just one
strategic nuclear warhead.
Three days after the eruption,
men from the other
part of the island,
combed the still smoking
streets of Saint Pierre.
To collect the bodies and burn
what the volcano had failed
to consume completely.
Few have ever experienced what
Louis-Auguste Cyparis
endured and lived to tell.
When the volcano erupted,
he heard the screams of his
captors briefly before
a terrifying silence.
And then, a fierce heat
came blasting through the
tiny vent in his cell.
He hopped and jumped
around to avoid it,
but was still severely
burned up to his shoulders.
For three days he
suffered in agony with
no other sustenance than the
moisture on the walls of his cell.
His sentence to solitary
confinement in the thick
walled dungeon
had saved his life.
He was one of only
two survivors of the
30,000 citizens of Saint Pierre.
What about us?
Would we know when
to sound the alarm?
Can we see what's coming?
Can we awaken in time?
We're back on the
trail of one of our two atoms.
The uranium atom.
A uranium atom is
inherently unstable.
Sooner or later, it decays.
A particle from its
nucleus breaks away,
transforming the uranium atom
into an entirely
different element.
Thorium.
We're flying through the
crossfire of radioactive decay.
Subatomic particles move
like bullets through the
fine structure of life.
Shearing electrons
from their molecules.
This is how ionizing radiation
affects living things.
Those chromosomes
never had a chance.
This is why atomic weapons
are so much more dangerous
than conventional ones.
Ionizing radiation is all
around us and even inside us.
At low levels, it
poses no threat.
But at higher levels,
it's a different story.
In the near term, exposure to
lethal levels of radiation can
cause a runaway reaction
of the cell that makes it
multiply exponentially.
Cancer.
But its power to harm can also
echo down the corridors of time.
When the radiation tore
into the chromosomes of the
butterfly, it left a trail of
destruction in its wake that
changed the destiny of the
butterfly's unborn offspring.
A mutation in its genes.
We have a lot in
common with butterflies.
Any change in the DNA
architecture will be copied
over and over again in
succeeding generations.
The damage is passed on.
Vandalizing our future.
We are made of atoms that were
born in stars thousands of
light years away in space and
billions of years ago in time.
The search for our own
origins has carried us
far from our epoch in our world.
We are star-stuff,
deeply connected with
the rest of the universe.
The matter we are made of
was generated in cosmic fire.
And now, we, ambulatory
collections of seven billion
billion billion atoms
intricately assembled over
eons has devised a means
to tap that cosmic fire,
hidden in the heart of matter.
We cannot unlearn
this knowledge.
And tragically,
insanity runs in our family.
The letters that the
scientists wrote to begin
this nightmare were
followed by another.
This one, a
letter to the planet,
stating that this new
understanding of physics
demanded a new way of thinking.
"Shall we choose death because
we cannot forget our quarrels,"
we appeal as human
beings to human beings.
"Remember your humanity
and forget the rest."
And what of our other atom?
The carbon atom?
It's inside one of you.
Captioned by Cotter
Captioning Services.
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.
He set his vision of a nuclear
war between England and
Germany in the impossibly
distant future of the 1950's.
In 1933, the
Hungarian physicist,
Leo Szilard, was contemplating
becoming a biologist.
Dr. Szilard?
Are you quite all
right in there?
He read Wells' novel
and it started him thinking.
Szilard knew that
atoms are made of protons and
neutrons on the inside.
And a skittering veil of
electrons on the outside.
Suddenly, awaiting for
the light to change at this
intersection in London, he
was struck by the thought,
if he could find a
sufficiently large amount of
an element that would emit two
neutrons when it absorbed one,
it would sustain a
nuclear chain reaction.
Two would produce four,
four would produce eight
and so forth.
Until enormous amounts of
energy in the nucleus itself
could be liberated.
Not a chemical reaction,
but a nuclear one.
This was the
moment our world changed.
Leo Szilard also knew the
power of exponentials and
if a neutron chain reaction
could be triggered down there
in world of the atom's nucleus,
then something like Wells'
imaginary atomic bomb
might be possible.
He shuddered at the thought of
this destructive capability.
It was just the latest
development on a continuum
of violence that began
long long before.
50,000 years ago,
all humans were roving
bands of hunter-gatherers.
They communicated
over limited areas by
calling to one another.
That is, at the speed of sound.
Around 750 miles per hour.
But over longer distances,
they could communicate only
as fast as they could run.
Around 12,000 years ago,
about the same time as the
invention of agriculture,
they developed the power to
kill at a longer distance.
The kill radius expanded
to the arc of an arrow
launched by a bow.
And they could kill one
person with a single arrow.
Our ancestors were not
particularly warlike because
there was so few people and
so much room back then that
moving on was
preferable to armed conflict.
Their weapons were used
almost entirely for hunting.
Their identification
horizon was likely small.
Only with the other
members of their band of
50 or 100 people.
But their time
horizon took a giant leap.
They worked long and hard
planting crops in the here and
now, so several months later,
they could harvest them.
They postponed present
gratification for later advantage.
They began to
plan for the future.
By about 2,500 years ago,
there was a new kind of war.
The conquered territories
of Alexander stretched from
Macedonia to the Indus Valley.
There were now many on planet
Earth who owed allegiance to
groups composed of millions.
Over long distances,
maximum speed of both
communication and transportation
was the speed of the
sail and the horse.
Archidamus III, King of Sparta,
was famed for his
unflinching courage.
He relished taking part in hand
to hand combat with the enemy.
It is said that when he first
saw a projectile hurled by a
Balista, he cried
out in anguish.
"Oh Hercules!
The valor of man is lost!"
Both the kill range
and the kill ratio
had increased exponentially.
Now, ten corpses lay
where one would have been.
And the soldier who released
the lever on the siege engine
never even saw their faces.
He remained far removed from
the carnage on the other side
of the city wall.
Today, the maximum speed of
transportation is the escape
velocity from Earth.
25,000 miles per hour.
The speed of communication
is the speed of light.
The identification horizons
have also expanded enormously.
For some, it's a
billion or more.
For others, it's
our whole species.
And for a few, it's
all living things.
The kill radius, in
the worst case scenario,
is now our global civilization.
How did we get here?
It was the result of a deadly
embrace between science and state.
And there was one scientist
for whom no amount of
destructive power was enough.
It's hard to pinpoint
the precise moment when the
first nuclear war began.
Some might trace it all the
way back to that arrow sailing
over the treetops.
Others might say it
started much later,
with three messages.
In 1939 on Adolf
Hitler's birthday,
one of his
brightest young scientists,
Paul Harteck, had a special
gift in mind for his Führer.
Harteck wrote a letter
to the Nazi war office,
he 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.
He was trying to give an
atomic bomb to Adolf Hitler.
But Hitler would never get
his hands on a nuclear weapon,
he had murdered, imprisoned
or exiled many of the great
physicists in his territories.
Those who happened to
be Jews or liberals and
many who were both.
Exactly a month
before the war began,
Leo Szilard made a pilgrimage
to the house Albert Einstein
was renting on Long Island.
The physicist who usually
chauffeured Leo Szilard on
trips out of Manhattan was
unavailable that August day in 1939.
So, Szilard enlisted the services
of a fellow Hungarian emigrate,
a young scientist
named Edward Teller.
Persecution in Budapest
sent him and his family to
take refuge in Munich,
where he lost his right foot
in a traffic accident.
In the early 1930s, Teller
and his family were forced
to flee once again.
Just as Harteck felt it
his duty to inform Hitler.
Szilard wanted President
Franklin Roosevelt to know
the awesome power
of such a weapon.
There was no scientist on
Earth whose prestige and
influence was
comparable to Einstein's.
Einstein's nightmare was
imagining Hitler with a
nuclear weapon at his disposal.
But what would be the
long-term consequences of
this dangerous new knowledge?
Which, once unleashed,
could never be taken back.
Einstein would take
no role in the U.S.
effort to build the atomic bomb,
which became known as
"The Manhattan Project."
But he did alert the President
to the potential use of
atomic nuclei in warfare.
After the war was over, he
told a reporter that if he had
known the Germans would fail
in developing in an atomic
bomb, he never would
have signed the letter.
But Edward Teller had
no such ambivalence.
He couldn't wait to get
started on weaponizing the atom.
The Russian physicist, G.N. Flyorov
had tried for years to alert his leader,
Joseph Stalin, to the possible
military applications of a
nuclear chain reaction.
But the Soviet Union was
under siege by the Germans.
And an atom bomb project was
likely to take years to complete.
With their backs
against the wall,
it seemed too impractical
to even think about.
In 1942, Flyorov had
published a scientific paper
on nuclear physics.
Now, he was excited to see
what the eminent physicists
in Europe and the United
States had to say about it.
Flyorov was puzzled.
None of the physicists of
the International Scientific
Community thought his
paper worthy of comment.
At first, he was hurt, but
then he realized what was
really happening.
American and German scientific
journals were being scrubbed
of any nuclear physics papers
as both nations secretly
worked on building the bomb.
It was this absence
of published data,
the dogs that did not
bark, that moved Flyorov to
re-double his efforts to
convince Stalin to start his
own nuclear weapons program.
In 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.
The U.S. Department of War
chose the remote location
of Los Alamos, New Mexico
as the headquarters for the
atomic bomb research project.
It had been recommended
by the project's director,
physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer,
who had recuperated there
from an illness as a teenager.
But 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.
A thermal nuclear weapon.
What Teller affectionately
called, the super.
If Edward Teller had a polar
opposite in the scientific community,
it would have been
Joseph Rotblat.
Rotblat was born in
Warsaw to a wealthy family,
who like Teller's,
had lost everything.
In the summer of 1939, just
before the Nazis invaded,
he was invited to England to
take a research position at
the University of Liverpool.
At the last minute
before his departure,
his beloved wife, Tola had
an emergency appendectomy.
She was forced to remain
behind until she was
well enough to travel.
Tola insisted that Joseph go on
ahead to prepare their new home.
It would just be a matter
of weeks, she told him.
The challenge, was to
find a chemical fuse that
would light the
nuclear chain reaction,
first imagined by
Leo Szilard in London.
The scientists and engineers
told themselves that they
would be averting a grave
danger by building a bomb
of unprecedented
destructive power.
Their government
could be trusted.
They would never use
such a weapon in an act of
aggression, not like
those other governments.
These atomic scientists
were the first to see
building nuclear weapons as
a deterrent to using them.
The fear of Hitler with an
atomic bomb was the driving
rationale for the
Manhattan Project.
And yet, when Germany
surrendered and Hitler was no more,
of the thousands of scientists
who worked on the bomb,
only one resigned.
It was Joe Rotblat.
In 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.
He 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.
With its end in Europe
came his chance to go
and search for her.
But, he never found her.
Except as a name on
a list of the dead.
Tola had perished
in the Holocaust.
Exterminated at the
Belzec concentration camp.
Although he lived
another 60 years,
Rotblat never remarried.
Of the three nations that
pursued wartime research
into building the bomb,
only the U. S. succeeded
before the war's end.
And historians believe that
was because America had
taken in so many immigrants.
Of the leading figures
in the Manhattan Project,
only two were native born.
And only one got
his PhD in the U.S.
Atomic bombs were dropped
on the Japanese cities of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
ending the second World War.
Two months later, President
Truman invited Oppenheimer
for congratulations
in the Oval Office.
But to Truman's dismay,
Oppenheimer was in
no mood to celebrate.
Mr. President, I feel like I
have blood on my hands.
Don't be a fool.
If anyone has blood on
their hands, it's me.
And it doesn't bother me at all.
How long do you
think it will be before the
Russians get the bomb?
Never!
Don't you ever let that
cry baby scientist anywhere
near me again, do you hear?
Less than four years later,
the Russians exploded
their own atomic bomb.
And shortly after, both
nations went on to create
Thermonuclear hydrogen bombs.
The nuclear arms race begun
by those three letters from
scientists was off to
a terrifying start.
After the war, Teller's dreams
of greater and greater killing
power were to come true.
The early 1950s, when the
Communist witch hunts began
in the United States, he
was perfectly happy to hint
that Robert Oppenheimer,
his former boss,
who had brilliantly run
the Manhattan Project,
should be stripped of
his security clearance,
thereby ruining
Oppenheimer's career.
Despite dramatic reductions
in nuclear arsenals,
the specter of nuclear
war haunts us still.
How can we sleep so soundly
in the shadow of
a smoking volcano?
In another time, there
were others who faced a
grave danger as if
immobilized in a dream.
Let me tell you a story.
Two men walk into a bar.
And they got into a fight.
Allez!
Louis-Auguste Cyparis
was arrested and taken to the
Saint Pierre Prison, where
he was locked in the dungeon.
This all happened on
the French colonial island of
Martinique in the
Caribbean in 1902.
In the midst of an
election campaign.
On this April morning,
Fernan Cleric stepped outside
to admire the view.
He was master of
all he surveyed.
The factories that turned the
island's trees into furniture.
And the fields of
sugar cane and coffee.
That's strange.
Why would there be frost on
such a sunny warm morning?
But it wasn't frost, it
was ash from the volcano,
Mount Pelée.
When the ash began to fall,
Claire Apprentice, wife
of the American Council
considered going
home to Massachusetts.
No, but that was
out of the question.
There was the gala she planned
for the following week,
postponing it was unthinkable.
And there were many who were
too poor to leave their meager
possessions and flee the
city of Saint Pierre for a
safer part of the island.
Others, with the means to do so,
departed on boats.
Mayor Fouché worked
late into the evening,
drafting detailed plans for the
Ascension Day Banquet and Ball.
Meanwhile, below...
Servants cleaned ash
from the banquet hall
in preparation for the event.
The closest thing to a scientist
on the island of Martinique
was an elementary school
teacher named Gaston Landes.
Landes actually made a
pilgrimage to the newly
awakened volcanic crater and
shared his observations of
heightened activity
in the newspaper.
But Landes was more
concerned about his
forthcoming trip to Paris.
He was to display samples of
the island's plant life along
with the lecture he
had been asked to give.
But, with the ash
falling at this rate,
his specimens
would all be ruined.
Mayor Fouché mustered enough
resolve to create a new poster.
"Fellow citizens, be not afraid."
No lava flows could reach
the city in the near future.
We have seven kilometers
between us and the volcano.
The amount of lava would
have to be impossibly huge
to cross the two immense
valleys and the swamp
"between us and Mount Peleé."
In the early hours of May 7th,
the people Saint Pierre awoke
to thundering seismic tremors
and volcanic lightning near the
mouth of the hellish volcano.
Now, mass panic began to spread.
Troops were dispatched to
try and calm the public.
And then...
Just before the dawn
of Thursday morning.
May 8th.
The volcano became utterly calm.
The air was cool and fresh.
And the sea like glass.
When Mount Pelée
erupted at 8:02 AM on
May 8th, 1902, the explosion
produced a sound so loud
it was heard 500 miles
away, in Venezuela.
The massive pyroclastic flood,
a death cloud of
super-heated gasses,
crossed the valleys
to the city in minutes.
The explosion was the
equivalent of just one
strategic nuclear warhead.
Three days after the eruption,
men from the other
part of the island,
combed the still smoking
streets of Saint Pierre.
To collect the bodies and burn
what the volcano had failed
to consume completely.
Few have ever experienced what
Louis-Auguste Cyparis
endured and lived to tell.
When the volcano erupted,
he heard the screams of his
captors briefly before
a terrifying silence.
And then, a fierce heat
came blasting through the
tiny vent in his cell.
He hopped and jumped
around to avoid it,
but was still severely
burned up to his shoulders.
For three days he
suffered in agony with
no other sustenance than the
moisture on the walls of his cell.
His sentence to solitary
confinement in the thick
walled dungeon
had saved his life.
He was one of only
two survivors of the
30,000 citizens of Saint Pierre.
What about us?
Would we know when
to sound the alarm?
Can we see what's coming?
Can we awaken in time?
We're back on the
trail of one of our two atoms.
The uranium atom.
A uranium atom is
inherently unstable.
Sooner or later, it decays.
A particle from its
nucleus breaks away,
transforming the uranium atom
into an entirely
different element.
Thorium.
We're flying through the
crossfire of radioactive decay.
Subatomic particles move
like bullets through the
fine structure of life.
Shearing electrons
from their molecules.
This is how ionizing radiation
affects living things.
Those chromosomes
never had a chance.
This is why atomic weapons
are so much more dangerous
than conventional ones.
Ionizing radiation is all
around us and even inside us.
At low levels, it
poses no threat.
But at higher levels,
it's a different story.
In the near term, exposure to
lethal levels of radiation can
cause a runaway reaction
of the cell that makes it
multiply exponentially.
Cancer.
But its power to harm can also
echo down the corridors of time.
When the radiation tore
into the chromosomes of the
butterfly, it left a trail of
destruction in its wake that
changed the destiny of the
butterfly's unborn offspring.
A mutation in its genes.
We have a lot in
common with butterflies.
Any change in the DNA
architecture will be copied
over and over again in
succeeding generations.
The damage is passed on.
Vandalizing our future.
We are made of atoms that were
born in stars thousands of
light years away in space and
billions of years ago in time.
The search for our own
origins has carried us
far from our epoch in our world.
We are star-stuff,
deeply connected with
the rest of the universe.
The matter we are made of
was generated in cosmic fire.
And now, we, ambulatory
collections of seven billion
billion billion atoms
intricately assembled over
eons has devised a means
to tap that cosmic fire,
hidden in the heart of matter.
We cannot unlearn
this knowledge.
And tragically,
insanity runs in our family.
The letters that the
scientists wrote to begin
this nightmare were
followed by another.
This one, a
letter to the planet,
stating that this new
understanding of physics
demanded a new way of thinking.
"Shall we choose death because
we cannot forget our quarrels,"
we appeal as human
beings to human beings.
"Remember your humanity
and forget the rest."
And what of our other atom?
The carbon atom?
It's inside one of you.
Captioned by Cotter
Captioning Services.