All language subtitles for BBC.The.Story.of.Science.2of6.What.is.the.World.Made.of.HDTV.x264.AC3

There are some great questions
that have intrigued

and haunted us
since the dawn of humanity.

What is out there?

How did we get here?

What is the world made of?

The story of our search
to answer those questions
is the story of science.

Of all human endeavours,
science has had the greatest impact

on our lives - on how we see
the world, on how we see ourselves.

Its ideas, its achievements,
its results are all around us.

So how did we arrive at
the modern world?

Well, that is more surprising
and more human than you might think.

The history of science is often told

as a series of eureka moments,

the ultimate triumph
of the rational mind.

But the truth is that power
and passion,

rivalry and sheer blind chance have
played equally significant parts.

In this series,
I'll be offering a different view
of how science happens.

It's been shaped as much by what's
outside the laboratory as inside.

Whoa! Whoa!

This is the story
of how history made science

and science made history.
And how the ideas that were
generated changed our world.

It is a tale of power,
proof and passion.

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This time, delving deep
to find order and beauty.

What is the world made of?

Appearances deceive.

Beneath the surface,
our world is stranger
than we can possibly imagine.

Standing here, it certainly feels as
if I am standing on a solid surface.

But this is an illusion,
however convincing.

Nothing is really solid.

And you and I? Well, we consist
almost entirely of empty space.

If you took the entire population
of the world, all six billion of us,

and removed that empty space,
then we could be squeezed into
a cube smaller than that.

And it gets stranger.

Mobile phones and other electronic
devices which we rely on.

Well, they rely on particles that,
by any normal definition,
simply don't exist.

These insights all come from
our attempts to find out
what the world is made of.

Over the millennia, our
understanding has moved ever deeper,

revealing new layers
that make up the material world.

It may seem like an academic,
esoteric quest.

It's anything but.

Every time
we've gone down a layer and achieved
a deeper understanding of matter,

that knowledge has spawned
new technologies and huge amounts
of wealth and power.

The first people who systematically
tried to unlock the secrets

of what the world is made of, and
to alter it, were the alchemists.

They flourished
in the late Middle Ages,

working in secret, protecting their
knowledge with codes and ciphers.

It's easy to dismiss
the alchemists as deluded mystics,

forever trying
to turn lead into gold.

Or, perhaps, conmen,

who used simple chemistry
to impress the gullible.

But the roots
of a scientific investigation

of what the world is made of,
lie in their secret laboratories.

The alchemists' beliefs about matter
were largely based on ideas

that had come down from the ancient
Greeks, who believed that,

well, pretty well
everything around you was made up
of earth, fire, air and water.

Theirs was a system
of beguiling simplicity.

Everything in the world
was a combination of just
four idealised elements...

Earth. Water.

Air. Fire.

Now, they were completely wrong
in that, but the central principle,
that you can explain a complex world

by just simple building blocks
or elements, that was important.

But what really interests
me about the alchemists
is their practical abilities.

I want to try and repeat
a bizarre experiment,

performed by one of
the last of the alchemists,
a German called Hennig Brand.

Brand believed
he was on the brink of
discovering the philosopher's stone,

a substance that reputedly
turned base metals into gold.

He thought he could find it
in human urine.

How long have you had this?
Well, we've not had it...

Whoa! Jeez, yeah, no, I
got a good waft of that one!

But it gets worse. Gets worse!

I suspect Hennig Brand was not
tremendously popular with the girls.

Having boiled down our starting
material, we will then,

sort of, reduce it to a solid.

Finally, we'll distil it and see
if we can get something interesting.

Let me try and bring you into
the mindset of the alchemists.

They believed that everything
on Earth was in some way alive -
and that included metals.

Metals would grow
in the earth like seeds and,

like the human body decomposing,
they would also decompose.
They would rust.

But metals could also be improved.

They could be made better.
They could be purified.

And if that happened, they became
gold, the purest metal of all.

It was the legendary
philosopher's stone

that the alchemists believed could
bring about this transformation.

Here it is. Here it is. We've been...

It looks absolutely putrid,
I have to say.

Well, I can tell you that,
even as a chemist, and I've smelled

a lot of stuff, this is seriously,
seriously unpleasant. OK.

So we've boiled down about
half a litre of urine

to this and you can see that
it's starting to get a bit pasty.

There's all sort of white solids.

Oh, God! Oh, God that is bad!

That is really bad! Oh.

But what he would have had to do
was to transfer it into this retort.

So we're going to pour
it in through the top.

I'm just going to run it down
this glass rod.

And the next thing presumably
is extreme heat?

And now, the trial by fire,
if you will.

It involved great technical skill.

Controlling temperature, making
the furnace and glass retorts.

But his strong constitution
and persistence produced
strange results.

So what had he extracted
from the urine?

I can show you and, if you look,
we've actually got it stored

under water, much as Brand
probably would have stored it.

I think what we should do
is see what happens when it burns.

Oh! Whoo! Whoo! Whoo!

You can see the plumes of white
smoke. Good Lord! Am I OK to touch?

You can, in fact, lift it, yes.

Good Lord. It's beautiful and I
think terrifying at the same time.

It is phantasmagorical, isn't it?

I mean it really is unearthly.

It's magic of the highest order.

Brand, of course, never found
the philosopher's stone.

His discovery was named
"Giver of Light", or phosphorous.

It became rather important.

It was later used to make the match.

It's tempting to think of the
alchemists as a bunch of mystics
who made a few lucky discoveries,

but if you look at the
equipment behind there,
it tells a very different story.

You have scales, oven, retort -

equipment you would find
in any modern chemistry lab.

I have absolutely no doubt that the
quest to understand what the world

was made of was hugely helped
by the work done down the years
by the alchemists.

But by Brand's time,
the alchemists were on the wane.

And the ancient idea of a world
made up of just four forms of
matter was about to be demolished.

As Europe
moved out of the Middle Ages,
new forces started to shape science.

Powerful, absolute monarchies
ruled the continent.

They were hungry for weapons
as they battled for supremacy.

That led to a strategic interest
in more and better metals.

The hunger for metals was insatiable
and the dirty business

of getting metal ores
out from deep underground
became ever more important.

Mines were one of the places
where challenges to the age-old
beliefs started to emerge.

Air had long been considered
a single indivisible substance,

a basic building block of the world.

But as Europe industrialised,
it became increasingly obvious
that this was far from the truth.

People realised,
from personal experience,

that there were
lots of different airs,
with very different properties.

There was bad air,
which killed men down mines and
mysteriously extinguished candles.

There was fire damp, which ignited
below ground without warning.

And the wonderfully-titled
Phlogisticated Air,
produced by combustion.

All of this raised questions.

What were these airs?

How many were there?

Across Europe, experimenters
went looking for answers.

In Yorkshire, the challenge
was taken up by the natural
philosopher Joseph Priestley...

..a man who set out to probe
the hidden mysteries of nature.

Joseph Priestley
was a precocious youth.

By the age of four,
he could recite perfectly

all 107 questions and answers in
the Westminster Shorter Catechism.

He joined the church, but he also
became a brilliant experimenter.

He was looking for God, not just in
the Bible, but in the natural world.

Priestley was among the foremost
air experimenters of the day.

And it was these new airs or gases
that would help create a new vision
of what the world is made of.

Priestley set out to study airs
by heating different substances...

..including an old
alchemist favourite, red calx.

I love the way the colour changes,
as it's going from a sort of
orange to a very rich red.

Priestley heated it to a high
temperature and the orange powder
transformed into a shiny metal.

Mercury.

And with a new piece of equipment,
the pneumatic trough,
he collected a new air.

OK, and here it is.

A precious container full of
mystery gas. Now, to test it.

Turn it upside down

and then quickly remove the lid. OK.

Ready? Lid.

Ah! And it reinflames...
Gorgeous. Right. ..quite nicely.

Goes out again and then it burns.

He described what he'd collected
as "good air".

And he was enchanted
by its fiery properties.

It turned out
to be the most important
of the new airs yet discovered.

In 1774, Priestley went on
a fateful trip to Paris.

Now, he could never ordinarily have
afforded such a thing, but on this
occasion he went as the guest of a

British aristocrat and he took with
him knowledge of his new discovery.

When he arrived in Paris,
Priestley was invited to dine

with the golden couple
of French experimental science,

Antoine and Marie-Anne Lavoisier.

They had created the best-equipped
private laboratory in Europe,

dedicated to
measurement and precision.

He had a vaulting ambition to define
a new science - of chemistry.

His contribution to how we
live now is arguably as great
as that of Newton or Darwin.

When he was a young man, Lavoisier
said, "I am avid for glory".

And he achieved that,
though at huge personal cost.

They couldn't have been less alike,
the Paris sophisticate and
the working-class Yorkshire man.

I imagine that Priestley was
rather overwhelmed by the occasion,

by the magnificent setting,
the fine wines, by Antoine Lavoisier
and by his brilliant guests.

As he later wrote to his wife,
"most of the philosophical people
of the city were present".

And, as evening developed,
the conversation turned
to the subject of airs.

Priestley soon told them
about his recent discovery,
an air with fiery properties,

and then he also told them
exactly how to make it.

Across the table,
Lavoisier listened intently.

As Priestley later noted,
"everyone round that table
expressed great surprise".

Armed with Priestley's
knowledge, Lavoisier set off
to repeat the experiment.

And was soon boasting
of his discovery,

the same air, but with a new name.

Lavoisier called it "oxygen".

It is the gas of life.

But what Lavoisier did next is,
I think, a defining moment
in the story of science.

He decided to run
the Priestley experiment in reverse,

the gas and the shiny metal
recombined to form red calx.

Now, the really significant bit...

He found it weighed
exactly the same as before.

This was to become a fundamental
principle of modern chemistry.

This was momentous.

Lavoisier had discovered
that everything balances.

You can take a substance,
split it down into simple elements

then recombine those elements and
you get back to where you started.

For me, this marks the beginning
of a modern understanding of matter,
of how the world is really made.

The science of chemistry
now emerged.

Out of connections.

Between the practical skills
of the alchemists.

The discovery of new gases.

And a dedication
to precise measurement.

The new chemistry
would help create a new vision
of what the world is made of.

Meanwhile, outside the laboratories
of the rich, science was developing

a taste for the spectacular,
powered by the new interest in airs.

We're about to re-enact
a very important moment
in the history of science.

There should be flames,
shouts, screams and,

obviously, this is why we're
all wearing funny costumes.

In the small French town of Annonay,
descendents of a famous family of
papermakers, the Montgolfiers,

recreate the time
when an ancient dream of taking
to the skies became a reality.

It's incredibly hot
and smoky under there.

The Montgolfier brothers, when they
originally did this experiment,
they had no idea about the theory.

They were practical men
who wanted to make money and they
thought what was happening to straw,

producing something called
Montgolfier Gas, which contains
levity, which is what lifts it up.

And now we're cooking! Whoa!
This is... This is seriously hot.

That was a sight.

It was great fun. We know about
flight, but imagine you had never
seen anything fly like that before.

It would blow your mind.

The first balloon,
made entirely out of paper,
soared a mile into the heavens.

The race was now on
to carry a man into the skies.

And in November 1783, two
brave volunteers took to the air.

The first humans to look down
at the surface of their own planet.

But very soon,
the hot air balloon had a rival,

backed by the scientific
establishment of France.

Just ten days later,
another balloon rose.

This was driven by
a newly-discovered gas,
called inflammable air.

It was 13 times lighter than normal
air and considerably less dangerous
than using a blazing pile of straw.

It had huge lifting power.

This was science as public event.

Half the city of Paris
turned out to watch.

400,000 people,
all staring upwards in amazement.

But its success laid down
a challenge to the chemist.

How could they make enough of
this new gas to fill the skies
with floating aeronauts?

It was a challenge picked up by
the champion of the new chemistry...

..Antoine Lavoisier.

Ever the experimenter, his solution
was daring, to find a way to break
apart a fundamental substance...

Water.

Hi, there. Hi.

Nice to see you again.
Good to see you, Michael.

I love this. I'm very impressed

because I've got a drawing here of
what Lavoisier's original
apparatus looked like

and I think that's
pretty damned close.

This apparatus was constructed
to test Lavoisier's idea

that water could be split
into two very different gases,

oxygen and the new inflammable air.

So what we have is a system
to essentially make rust
in a great hurry. OK.

So we have iron in the centre
and then we have water

which is trickling down,
and by raising the temperature,

what we do is,
we essentially speed up the reaction.

Right, so the oxygen in the water
is going to bind to the iron?

Absolutely. The iron is essentially
the oxygen getter in this system.

If I let a bit of
water in at this end,

that's going to get very hot
and you can see

with trained steam and that's why
we have a bit of pressure behind it.

But it's now going to drain through
and in the centre it should be
reacting with the iron. Right.

We may be able to see bubbles
down the far end. Hurray!

We've got bubbles.
Congratulations. Well done!

I'm very impressed.

And those bubbles cannot be steam.

Right. Because the steam would be
condensed here in the copper coil

and so that must be some,
let's call it non-condensable gas.

But is it inflammable air?

We're getting
anxious now, aren't we?

Well, we're ready.

We're going to put
the splint in there.

And it was definitely
hydrogen and it worked.

It was in fact that pop sound...
Yeah.

..that you do get when hydrogen
ignites. There's no question.

That was inflammable air as it
was called in the 18th century.

Lavoisier's success
encouraged Napoleon

to create a military balloon corps
powered by hydrogen gas.

These two gases that make up water,
hydrogen and oxygen,

were part of Lavoisier's bold
new vision

of what the world is made of...

Elements. 33 in all.

His list included
the newly discovered gases,

but he didn't get it entirely right.

He also included heat and light.

It was a tentative new list of
the building blocks of matter.

Lavoisier's work coincided,
tragically for him, with the
upheaval of the French Revolution.

He made money from collecting taxes.
He was a hated tax farmer.

Lavoisier must have realised
that he was vulnerable.

A member of the revolutionary
government had denounced former
tax farmers like him

as leeches on the people,
but he chose not to flee.

Here in La Place de la Concorde,

Lavoisier was put to death.

This was more
than an individual tragedy.

As one of
Lavoisier's colleagues put it,

it took just an instant to sever his
head and over 100 years would not
suffice to produce another like it.

We have now gone down
a layer in our understanding
of what the world is made of...

To a world of elements.

Each of them considered an
unbreakable building block of matter

and this new understanding
would begin to release great power.

Our journey now moves to the sublime
landscape of the Lake District.

At the end of the 18th Century
this was home to William Wordsworth,
one of the great poets of the day.

Wordsworth was a leading member
of a movement called Romanticism.

They prized feelings and intuition
over cold hard logic.

Romantic science
sounds like a contradiction in terms

but, as we'll discover, the romantic
poets had a surprisingly profound
effect on the story of science.

That might sound unlikely,

but the link can be found here
in Wordsworth's Dove Cottage.

So this is, of course, William
Wordsworth and over here we've got
another of the romantic poets.

This is Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Rime Of The Ancient Mariner
and Kubla Khan.

But the man I've really come to see
is him,

Humphry Davy,
one of Britain's greatest chemists.

So what's he doing here?

Well, Humphry Davy and the romantic
poets shared an interest in poetry,

in the power of nature and in
a certain mood-altering substance.

LAUGHTER

They called it laughing gas
and Davy generously shared it
with his romantic friends.

But the connections
went much deeper.

Isn't it gorgeous?

You can see why
Davy loved this place

and he shared with the romantic
poets a belief that if only you

could understand the laws of nature
and live in harmony with them, then
the world would be a better place.

Poets and men of science
stood in awe

of the hidden powers
contained within nature.

They just had different ways
of showing it.

And in 1801, Davy's social
connections landed him a post
at the Royal Institution in London.

Here he was able to carry out
research and give public lectures.

His youthful glamour
and taste for the spectacular
made him an immediate success.

Hi, there. You might need that.

Ready to perform, then? Yeah.

Show time!
As I'm sure Humphry Davy once said.

'Dr Peter Wothers is helping
to recreate the extravaganza that
Davy brought here 200 years ago.'

Carefully add a drop.
OK. Can we... Just... Yeah.

APPLAUSE

See what happens to your sheep.

There would have been
an enthusiastic crowd drawn
to these wonderful exhibitions.

Somewhere over there, some ardent
young women drawn by his charisma.

Over there you'd probably have seen
Samuel Coleridge who was drawn,
he said, to collect new metaphors.

AUDIENCE GASPS

And sprinkled throughout the crowd,
a new breed of entrepreneur and
factory owner who had come here

to collect valuable
chemical information.

Humphry Davy had
an instinctive understanding

of how spectacle and showmanship
could be used to establish science
as a powerful force in society,

controlled by a new breed
of experts, men like him.

He thrilled his audience
with his mastery
of one of the wonders of the age...

electricity.

Is this going to be dangerous?

Potentially, yes.
It's very unpleasant material.

OK. I'll button up well, then!

Davy heated an unassuming
white powder called potash

to a molten state and then
passed electricity through it.

And did Davy have any idea
what he was going to get
when he did this experiment?

I don't think he did, no.
He just did it for a laugh.

Electricity broke the potash apart

..to reveal one of
its building blocks.

A new element with a lilac glow.

He called it potassium.

The smoke you can see is actually
potassium that's been formed

but is instantly
reacting with the air.

This element was so volatile,
so reactive,

that it disappeared
almost as soon as it was isolated.

I'll just fish a chunk out.

So this is potassium. How funny.

I've never seen potassium.
It looks like a metal, doesn't it?
It looks like a metal,

but if we cut this
it's a very soft metal.

You can see what potassium
really looks like.

This is pure potassium metal. Right.

And you can see that this
is already reacting

with the oxygen from the air.

So it's really impressive that Davy
was able to do this 200 years ago.

It was quite a remarkable achievement
to isolate this reactive metal.

Davy had a real knack
for finding new elements.

Eight of them
in less than two years.

Oh, God!

There we are.
I was not expecting that.

But the significance of Davy's work
lay in far more than new elements.

It extended to science itself
and to popular culture.

There was the young author,
Mary Shelley, who was inspired
and disturbed by Davy's work.

It influenced her when she wrote
Frankenstein, a novel which created
a powerful and enduring image

of the mad experimenter who is
dabbling in forces
way beyond his control.

And then there was Davy's friend,
the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Now he actually helped
coin the name "scientist"

to describe what
people like Davy did.

Alternatives included "science man",

but it was "scientist" that stuck.

But others in the audience
had a more practical reaction.

Was chemistry useful?
Was there money in it?

Chemistry was about to become
a power in the world,

but the journey it took to get there
was wonderfully unpredictable.

It starts in the tropics with
a deadly problem that threatened
the empires of the 19th century.

In Jamaica, once a British colony,
I'm hoping to see how they
tried to deal with it.

It's quite early morning.
It's already unbelievably hot.

Yeah, man.
We have a while to go, don't we?

How high are we? Do you know?

Oh, when you reach by Cinchona,
you are 5,002 feet above sea level.

Right. Do you get mosquito up here?

Is it too high? Oh, just a few.

On the upper slopes of
the blue mountains
grows a truly remarkable tree.

I like it here. It's nice.

It's just great to get off.

There are lots of unpleasant
creatures in the tropics but the
deadliest by far is the mosquito.

It has killed more people
than anything else in history.

Now, it carries yellow fever,
Dengue fever, but also malaria.

And in the 19th century,
malaria was a huge problem for
empire builders like the British.

Right. Is it this way?

How big is it? About this high.

OK. And how old is it? This way.

The best defence against
this disease was the bark
of the Cinchona tree.

You know the tree? You ever seen
it before? It's that one there.

Yes. This one here. Right, this
is it. It's starts blooming there.

Yeah, this is probably
the most amazing tree in history.

It has relieved more human
suffering than anything else. Yeah.

Right, and it's the bark
we want, isn't it? Yeah.

I'm told it's fairly horrible.
Have you tried it before?
Yeah, man. Real bitter.

I've seen somebody,
when I was doing medicine,
I saw somebody die of malaria

so I have huge,
huge appreciation for this.

Right, am I going to enjoy it?

Oh, God! Oh, God!

Oh, you were right!

That is really, really bitter. Just
dries up your mouth, doesn't it?

On the grounds that something which
is horrible is doing you good

then this must be
extraordinarily good stuff.

Cinchona plantations were
established all over the tropics.

But every year the empires of
Europe needed hundreds of
tons of the bark to combat malaria.

So governments looked to chemists
to come up with a synthetic
alternative.

In 1820, a couple of French chemists
managed to isolate

the active ingredient in the bark
and they called it quinine.

What people desperately wanted
to do next was obviously produce
an artificial version of quinine.

The problem was nobody had done
anything as complex as that before.

The attempts to do so would
open the world to chemistry
on an industrial scale.

The challenge to make artificial
quinine was taken up in a makeshift
lab in London's East End...

in an attic room
by young William Perkin.

And I like to think he found his
inspiration round the corner,
in his local music hall.

MUSIC: "Boiled Beef And Carrots"

Isn't it magnificent?

Now the theatre and in fact all
of London would have been lit
by gas lights.

And the gas was produced from coal.

Now, one of the rather nasty side
products of that process was a black
viscous substance called coal tar.

A certain Charles Mackintosh
used this stuff and produced
waterproof Macs.

But Perkin was about to make
a discovery which was far,
far more lucrative than that.

The chemicals he used to try and
create quinine are highly toxic.

So I'm going to use substitutes to
show what the process looked like.

Now from coal tar,
other chemists had produced

a substance called aniline which
contains similar amounts of carbon,
hydrogen and nitrogen as quinine.

So this seemed like
a pretty good place to start.

He mixed up his aniline
with sulphuric acid

and also a substance called
potassium dichromate

which is a sort of chemical mixer.

And then he left it all
to sort of brew for a while.

What he found was black,
gunky, really quite revolting.

I'm surprised he didn't
chuck it away, but he didn't.

In his laboratory,
at the top of his parents' house,
he distilled, he mixed.

He eventually produced
a very interesting little powder.

He had not discovered
artificial quinine.

He had instead discovered something
which had never been seen before and
which he really wasn't expecting.

He had discovered the colour mauve!

He had created the first great
synthetic dye and made the world
a far more colourful place.

Perkin never did make quinine but
he did create a fashion sensation.

The rich and famous
loved his synthetic mauve.

This is really beautiful.

It's an antique Victorian dress.

Now, Perkin's mauve was more
than simply a fashion statement.

The aniline dyes, which were
used to colour this dress,

were the first to be produced
on a truly industrial scale.

So strange as it may sound, this
dress marks a significant moment
in human history, when the synthetic

took over from the natural
on a truly massive scale.

By the 1870s,
Perkin's factory was making
hundreds of tons of dye a year.

Adding Perkin's green
and Britannia violet to his growing
catalogue of vivid colours.

Perkin is rightly celebrated as
the father of industrial chemistry

but the lead soon passed to Germany
where industrial chemists worked out
how to make ammonia,

which led to artificial fertilisers

which today sustain
the global population.

But the journey that began in the
tropics with the search for quinine

also led here...to the killing
fields of the Great War.

Uniforms were coloured khaki
with artificial dyes.

Explosives were produced by the same
process used to make fertilisers.

It brought us the horrors of
poison gas, chlorine.

A gas used in the dye industry
that Perkin had pioneered.

The First World War has been
described as the "Chemist's War".

Industrial chemistry
became a force in world history,

the result of connections
between the discovery of elements,

the growth of European empires

and the colour mauve.

But the search for what the world
is made of was far from over.

In universities across the world,
researchers had been trying

to make sense of what elements
might themselves be made of.

The main theory was that every
element is made of tiny indivisible
chunks of matter called atoms.

Atoms of different elements
join together to make up everything
you see or touch.

There was just one rather tricky
problem with the idea of the atom -

proof.

Seeing is believing.
Nobody had actually seen an atom.

They're far too small.
Lots of physicists were
sceptical about their existence.

Ernst Mach, who leant his name
to the speed of sound, said,

"They are just things of thought."

The first physical evidence for the
existence of atoms would come from
a gloriously unexpected source.

From the world of the supernatural.

To the modern mind, William Crookes
is a puzzling sort of scientist.

His interests range from discovering
new elements to investigating
the world of spirits and ghosts.

Crookes' interest in spiritualism
was probably triggered by the death

of his younger brother
at a tragically young age.

At the same time, there were
photographs claiming to show
ectoplasm, spirits, apparitions.

Crookes set about a scientific
investigation of these claims.

Crookes invited some
of the leading mediums of the day
to come to his house and be tested

and they passed the test
with flying colours.

He claimed to have seen
acts of levitation,

an accordion playing by itself

and strange phantom figures,
some of which he photographed.

Was Crookes being naive?

Well, it was only decades since
the telegraph had been invented.

If you could communicate across the
world then why not with the dead?

The thing is, even in his own
laboratory, Crookes was coming

across stuff which was very hard
to explain, stuff which was really,
if you like, out of this world.

This thing here
is called a Crookes tube

and it's simply a glass tube out of
which the air has been sucked,

a couple of electrodes
and a fluorescent screen.

He passed a high voltage
across the electrodes...

and the result was
really quite striking.

Isn't that gorgeous?

Looks like a sort of green ray.

Was this a spiritual emanation?

Crookes was a careful experimenter.

He found the glow could be bent
with a magnet,

suggesting the glow
was in some way electrical.

What he did next was very ingenious.

Right.

Crookes made a new tube with another
addition, a tiny metal paddle wheel.

Let's see what happens
when we turn it on.

Ha! Spectacular.

This suggested the strange glow
was made up of moving particles,

something with
a mass to push a wheel.

Now Crookes was thrilled.

As far as he was concerned, this
proved beyond all reasonable doubt

that what was happening was a stream
of particles were making it spin.

He called this force, this stream,
"radiant matter",

and he thought it was a sort of
fourth state of being.

For all his skills
as an experimenter,

Crookes didn't have a convincing
theory of what was happening.

But his curiosity would trigger a
whole sequence of experiments that
would in turn transform physics,

chemistry and also create a whole
new way of looking at this deeply
strange world that we all live in.

Atomic theory
really started to come into focus
here in Cambridge University

in the rather unassuming
Cavendish Laboratory

with the work of the physicist,
Joseph John Thomson, known as JJ.

He realised that what was causing
the tube to glow and the paddle
wheel to spin, were a stream of

tiny charged particles, particles
far, far smaller than even atoms.

He built more accurate and
delicate versions of Crookes' tubes.

Thomson calculated the particles
causing the wheel to move were
1,000 times smaller than an atom.

It caused a sensation.

They were named electrons,
the first sub-atomic
particles to be discovered.

It was an achievement that gained
JJ Thomson the Nobel Prize
for physics in 1906.

A new layer of our understanding
of what the world is made of
opened up in the early 20th century.

The world was made of atoms

and they were made up
of three fundamental particles,

protons and neutrons packed
into a nucleus,

surrounded by electrons
moving in orbits.

A suitably grand location to give
you a sense of the world of the atom
is St Paul's in London.

It's a place where you can
start to picture the scale
and proportions inside the atom.

If you can imagine St Paul's
Cathedral as an atom,

then the nucleus,
which is at the heart of the atom,

and where almost all
the mass resides, would be smaller
than a single grain of sand.

The rest is effectively a void.

It is remarkable.

Everything you think of
as solid matter, the building,
me, you, the floor I'm standing on,

almost all of it is empty space.

That's why, if you took out the
empty space, the entire population

of the world could fit inside
the size of a single sugar cube.

And scientists soon realised
that inside the atom the traditional
laws of physics simply don't apply.

In the early days of atomic theory,
they thought of the atom as being
like a sort of mini solar system.

You've got the nucleus, the sun
at the centre and round it spun
the electrons like mini planets.

Soon, however, they realised that
electrons are nothing like planets.

The electron
is an unbelievably weird beast.

And you simply cannot pin it down.

An electron is never
just in one place.

It flits around as if it were
in many places at the same time.

By the altar,
up there in the dome,

just behind me,

all at the same time.

A new theory was required to explain
this strange sub-atomic world.

The behaviour of electrons
could only be described, not as
certainties, but as probabilities.

Not where electrons are,
but where they are likely to be.

The new theory was known as quantum.

Niels Bohr, the father
of quantum physics,

once said that if you're not
profoundly shocked
when you hear about it

then you haven't understood it.

Even Albert Einstein initially
rejected quantum theory, saying,

"God does not play
dice with the universe."

But quantum theory is nonetheless
the foundation of our modern
technological society.

1945, and the wartime generation
celebrated victory and the
possibility of peace and plenty.

They dreamt of how technology
could make their lives better.

And behind many of these dreams
was the science of the electron.

There was a brand-new world and
what made it possible were these.

Valves.

Now it is rather gorgeous, isn't it?

It's a distant cousin of the Crookes
tube and its job was essentially

to control the flow of electrons,
to amplify or to switch things.

The valve was the workhorse
of the electrical industry.

It was used to amplify
electrical signals in radios

and telephone exchanges,
and to switch binary signals
in early computers.

They were manufactured
by the million.

The trouble is, big, chunky, uses
a lot of power, gets really hot
and is incredibly...

SMASHES
..breakable!

The strange world of quantum theory
was to provide a replacement.

It was in a telephone company
that quantum theory came of age.

Bell Labs wanted a better,
cheaper way of connecting Americans.

To do that,
they needed to replace the valve.

Their research team was led
by William Shockley,

a slick, clever
and rather unlikeable individual.

And this is what Shockley's
team came up with.

It is a curious looking
beast but this is a model
of the world's first transistor.

'You can only make a transistor if
you understand how electrons behave.

'You need quantum theory.'

But essentially it was doing
what a valve does, control
the flow of electrons,

but it did so using the laws
of quantum mechanics.

Now, I would put the transistor
right up there with the ten greatest

inventions of all time, because
it utterly transformed the world.

Big, clunky valve radios
soon gave way

to small portable transistor radios,
and these in turn were replaced
by the micro-processer.

It is astonishing when you think
that in just 60 years we have gone
from this,

a single transistor, to this,
a micro-processor that contains
over two billion transistors.

For me, the micro-processor
is the ultimate expression

of the power that has been unleashed
by trying to understand
what the world is made of.

Delving ever deeper into matter
has undoubtedly changed our society.

The buildings we live in, the way
we travel, how we communicate.

In short, our modern way of life is
largely a product of the attempts
to find out what we're all made of.

Our attempts are far from over.

There will be new layers
to discover, ever more strange.

Perhaps what now seems unbelievable
is simply what we do not yet
understand.

Next time, the most
personal question we have asked.

How did we get here?

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