Atom

BBC · 2007 · Presenter: Jim Al-Khalili

The story of the discovery that everything is made from atoms, one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs in history, and the brilliant minds behind it.

Atom on Teachers Pay Teachers

E P I S O D E S

1. CLASH OF TITANS 
The modern understanding of the atom unfolded in the early years of the twentieth century. Baffling discoveries made by ingenious experimental scientists challenged the foremost theoretical physicists of the era. Rival factions fought over competing models. The players were human, with human strengths and weaknesses. Hard-fought victories were matched by crushing defeats. At the end of it all, a contemporary model of the atom emerged. Heads up: the expletive abbreviated “BS” is uttered in this episode.

Featured scientists: Ludwig Boltzmann, Albert Einstein, Ernest Rutherford, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, and Max Born.

2. THE KEY TO THE COSMOS 
The mystery of the universe has been largely resolved by our understanding of the atomic nucleus. In less than 100 years, we unlocked the secrets of its structure and origins. The correlation between cosmic abundance and nuclear stability was astonishing and unexpected. But there were stinging philosophical between divided factions and an irreversible taint of sin visited upon scientists along the way.

Featured scientists: Marie Curie, Ernest Rutherford, James Chadwick, Robert Oppenheimer, Fred Hoyle, George Gamow, Arno Penzias, and Robert Wilson.

Heads up: the version of this episode uploaded to YouTube suffers some kind of audio codec problem that amplifies the industrial music soundtrack at the expense of the narration. I found it to be unusable.

3. THE ILLUSION OF REALITY
With models of the atom and the nucleus in place, there was need to reconcile quantum mechanics with relativity. The next step was to generalize that reconciliation more broadly. When new and exotic particles burst onto the scene, a deeper structure was called for. As we move from the work Einstein and Bohr, through Dirac, to Feynman and Gell-Mann, we exchange our notions of vacuums and subatomic particles for the curiouser notions of quantum foam and quarks. And we realize our perception of reality is an illusion.

Featured scientists: Paul Dirac, Carl Anderson, Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger, and Murray Gell-Mann.

Question sets are available for individual episodes. The complete series bundle is available at a discounted price. Student documents and answer keys are provided as Google Docs on Google Drive.