The world around us is full of variety.
Different materials, different textures; how did they all arise?
I helped to show that the universe had a simple beginning,
as a single point in the big bang
The guestion is, how did everything we see get made from that?
Science has found ways to find out...
...how things began
We cosmologists we try to recreate the history of the universe
in a sense very much like an archaeologist
We have some clues about the universe as it was a long time ago
And based on those clues we try
to trace back its history to as close to the beginning as... possible
We can push back the frontier of what we know of the universe
to very very close to zero time eguals zero
At that time the universe was indeed simple
A tiny point from which everything exploded
in a giant burst of energy we call the Big Bang
But that in itself does not explain the cosmic alchemy that
created galaxies and stars, our planet and even ourselves
The matter that makes up all this is tangible stuff,
not the heat and power of an explosion
And its infinite variety suggests the very opposite of a simple beginning
But for the big bang to have made everything we know,
every single piece of matter in the universe
must have evolved from one primal source
Centuries ago...
the first alchemists believed
they could discover the way everything in the universe was made
They called it transmutation
To the alchemist the process of alchemy was almost as important as the goal
some alchemists would say if I can see the secrets of creation...
...in my work, if I can look into my vessel and see
...the mysteries of the creation unfolding then that is the most significant thing
The man who lived here at Owlpen Manor was called Thomas Daunt the 7 th...
...and he was the last of a long line of alchemists
Alchemy is about the search to make gold.
Its about taking some primal substance and subjecting it to various operations...
...which change the substance to eventually
become the most perfect substance of all, gold
The alchemists believed that
energy could transform one kind of matter into another
And that everything in the universe could be
made from rearranging four fundamental elements
Alchemists took on board...
...the Greek idea of the elements which was that
...everything in the universe is composed
of the four elements earth water fire and air
...Earth is seen as giving form to things giving substance
Water is like a universal solvent, it connects it flows
...it dissolves things
Fire brings energy and light and heat. It helps to create the...
vital inner fire that everything is said to have
And air gives some space it gives some movement
It is... the medium of communication between things
Alchemists followed the line that
if you shift around that balance of elements, that if you
change if you change those proportions
then you'll change the actual identity of the substance you've got
The alchemists believed that everything on earth or
in the heavens came from different combinations of these four basic elements
This sense that
everything might have a common origin would prove uncannily accurate
But by the end of the 17 th century
the alchemists vision seemed too dependent on mysticism to be believed
Thomas Daunt...
lived in the 18th century so he was practising...
...very late for an alchemist really because the so called
modern scientific view of the world had taken hold by then
This age of reason
wanted less magic
and more experimental proof
A new breed of scientists thought the alchemists practised a mysterious
and dangerous form of witchcraft
That's possibly why Thomas Daunt
got himself a rather bad reputation locally. He was thought of as a... magician
After his death the little room
where he worked was sealed up along with all his books and papers
But local people got rather about this too in case it was going to have an even,
an evil influence so they got summoned
the parson to open the doors and burn the books
When the parson burnt the books a flock of birds flew out
The attitude of the new scientists coming along...
...disagreed with the practices of alchemy
but the vision of it that everything has come from one source,
that there is a basic elemental form to life and that
you can actually rearrange the structure of matter seems
very pertinent to science today
Mystic beliefs and a greed for gold are not a good basis for science
The alchemists had little interest in how matter was created
when the universe began
But the idea of transmutation,
allowing all varieties of matter to evolve from the primal source,
was, perhaps accidentally, a step in the right direction
The alchemists established technigues for breaking down and studying matter,
which were passed on
when alchemy gave way to the more rational study of chemistry
In the mid nineteenth century,
in the Siberian glass factory run by his mother...
...a Russian child marvelled at chemistry at work
He was Dmitri Mendeleev
Mendeleev wrote in his diary that first impressions of
...chemistry has got just at this glass factory having seen
these combinations how the glass is formed and
how the addition of guite different salts changed the colour of the glass
The industrial revolution-and processes like the mass production of glass-
...created a practical need to understand more precisely
what things were made of
The new chemists soon left behind the Greek vision of only four elements-
...earth, air, fire, and water
In their experiments
they reduced complex chemicals to parts which seemed fundamental
These simpler parts
have been called elements so that
there were absolutely no possibility to divide them further
In Mendeleev's time, chemists
...believed there were about 65 elements-including gases
liguids and solids
They thought...
...each element had unigue properties
which would be present in every one of their atoms. An atom...
...from the Greek word for uncutable,
was as small as you could go in dividing up any element
The atom was thought to be fundamental. But before Mendeleev got to grips...
with these ideas, the glass factory caught fire
Well Mendeleev has got his first acguaintance
with chemistry at the glass factory
But well suddenly the factory was burned
So the only hope of his mother was to give education to her youngest son...
That's why she took him on a very long journey
to St Petersburg from the middle of Siberia
The young Mendeleev and his mother travelled
one thousand four hundred miles across Russia
to enrol him at Saint Petersburg University
In a few years he became one of Russia's most prominent chemists
By then, scientists felt that one element differed from another
because of differences in the nature of their atoms
They'd seen that a large amount of one element
could weigh the same amount as a small amount of another;
so their atoms had to have different weights
Mendeleev wondered whether the weight of
each element's atom might have an even deeper significance
So what was important that
Mendeleev has associated the changes in properties of elements
This uh changes from metallic character to non-metallic character
just with the changes in atomic weight. So this was his revolution
Mendeleev was convinced
there was an underlying order to all the elements on the earth
One night in 1869, he shut himself into his cottage by...
...the Black Sea determined to discover the secret pattern of matter
Mendeleev was very fond of patience games and
that's why he has used pieces of paper as cards
He tried to move them on the table with the idea to find an initial arrangement
This idea to order them with the increase of their atomic weight
has come to his mind only early in the morning
As he shuffled the cards he became convinced...
he could create a logical order. Hydrogen had the lightest atoms...
and so came first
As he worked his way through to uranium, at the time the heaviest known...
element, he grouped together...
any elements with similar chemical properties
With elements in the same group,
the difference between one atomic weight and the next was almost the same...
every time
Where the pattern was broken,
Mendeleev predicted that in time
an element would be discovered to fill in the gap.
In Russia, Mendeleev's...
arrangement of elements was called the Mendeleev table
We know it as the Periodic table
The periodic table suggested for the first time
a fundamental pattern for the different elements
Although no one realised it then,
Mendeleev was pointing towards a common origin for all matter in the universe
His work was the basis for all future developments
Let us say he put so many guestions that a lot of scientists has tried to answer
and by this manner he of course stimulated
the development of idea of evolution of elements er well the origin of matter
Mendeleev urged others to study uranium
But he could not have imagined its cosmic significance
It would lead us to the inner secrets of the atom
and a possible primal source of everthing in the universe
The stage was set for the birth of particle physics and
the pioneering work on radiation
of a young french scientist Marie Curie
I am the daughter of Irene and Frederik Joliot Curie and
the grand daughter of Pierre and Marie Curie
In 1897, Marie Sklodowska was a Polish student studying in Paris,
when she met and married the well known physicist Pierre Curie.
At the time she was trying to find a subject for her doctoral thesis
Just months before, a French scientist...
Henri Becguerel had made an extraordinary... discovery
Beguerel placed some uranium on top of a photographic plate
The plate was wrapped in thick paper, no light could get in.
The uranium and the plate were put in a draw
Three days later Beguerel developed the plate and examined it
He found that it had been mysteriously effected
He concluded that the uranium...
must be emitting some invisible rays,
and that these had fogged the photographic plate...
Unlike the alchemists nineteenth century scientists had always believed that
an element could never be fundamentally altered or changed
But Beguerel's discovery seemed to contradict this basic assumption
The uranium was not reacting with any other chemical yet on its own
it was releasing a new and invisible kind of energy
With Beguerel's discovery, Marie Curie had found a subject for her thesis
She decided to try and find a way to measure the power of the rays from uranium
Beguerel had already shown that
they could conduct an electric current through air
but the strength of the current was less than a single amp
It's something ten to minus eleven smaller
Try to understand what is ten to minus eleven smaller
Divide by ten and ten and ten and see that
it is really the kind of thing you cannot measure with ordinary apparatus
at all so you have to build a special one
So she did.
At one end of this piece of eguipment
Marie Curie allowed the rays from a sample of uranium to carry
as big an electrical current as it could from one metal plate to the other
At the other end she put stress on a special kind of crystal, using weights,
to generate a current whose strength she could measure
The bigger the weight she used, the stronger the current would be
If the pointer settled on zero Marie Curie knew that the current...
from the uranium matched the currents... she had produced with the weights
She... succeeded in calculating the energy... from the uranium
At a million millionth of an amp
it was extraordinary... achievement
The Curies then wanted to see if anything else would give off rays
with a similar power to uranium
They decided to test pitchblende,
the crude material from which uranium had been extracted
Unrefined it was expected to give off a much smaller charge than pure uranium
What they found amazed them
And what happens... was that the current was much higher
At least four times higher than with uranium,
with the corresponding amount of uranium
And that was incredible because none of the impurities
or elements participating in pitchblende
have shown any sign of having the same property
The Curies separated out the chemicals in the pitchblende,
and eventually found that
the much larger current coming from it was caused by two new elements
The Curies called the first polonium, after Marie's home country Poland
They called the second element radium
Before the discovery the Curies have discussed
about the possible physical properties of the new elements
And Pierre Curie have told I wish it have a beautiful colour
So what they found that with enough amount of radium,
it emit light, more beautiful than just being a beautiful colour
So sometimes they come back in the evening just to see the radium lighting
and just look at it in the evening
It was not the best thing to do
Radium was so highly radio-active that it was extremely dangerous
Marie Curie eventually died from leukaemia,
almost certainly as a result of her exposure to radiation
But while the Curie's had managed to measure the radiation that
these elements gave off they were no closer to understanding
what the radiation actually was...
That was left to a young New Zealand scientist Ernest Rutherford
In 1899 Rutherford set out to understand
what was happening when rays came out of radium
helped by his partner, Frederick Soddy
They set up a physical experiment in which they tried to measure
the rate at which this emanation would defuse from one point to another
If the emanation was radium in vapour form
it would have a similar atomic weight to radium
but it turned out to be vastly different
The emanation could not possibly be radium in vapour form in the way that
say mercury gives off a vapour
Therefore it had to be something different,
and the only rational conclusion was that one element, radium,
was somehow producing another element which was not radium vapour
but was a completely different element with a different atomic weight
Rutherford and Soddy had discovered the alchemist's dream of
transmutation happening spontaneously
One element was naturally being transformed into another,
releasing energy in the process
If one element could naturally arise from another
perhaps all the variety of matter in the universe could evolve from a single source
But why should energy be released in the process?
The answer was surprisingly close to hand
In 1905, in his Special Theory of Relativity,
a German scientist published an extraordinary eguation
He was Albert Einstein; and the eguation was E = mc2.
One of the major guestions... in cosmology and astrophysics
is how the chemical elements came to be... in the universe
It was not immediately clear how E = mc2 would help
lts predictions seemed somewhat bizarre, ...apparently suggesting that matter,
like heat and light, is just another manifestation of energy
So energy is never lost or infact gained
its just transformed from one form into another
You cant actually prove that mass can completely be converted
into energy using special relativity...
...but Einstein made that conceptual leap and conjectured that was in fact true
According to Einstein's eguation,
matter was a bit like a battery; a form of stored energy
But could this ever be proved; and if so, would it help explain the origin of...
everything in the universe?
Rutherford resolved to probe...
...more deeply into the heart of the atom
We need to discover the inner workings of the atom, if we are
...to understand how matter was made at the beginning of the universe
I would have taken a theoretical approach to the problem...
...But Rutherford was an out and out... ...experimentalist. He simply collected
...some old tubes and wires, and built a machine to break the atom apart
Sixty years later, Rutherford has an American disciple
In the true tradition of particle physics...
...I hung out at junkyards...
...to collect metal and odd bit of electronics
...that were just thrown away by everyone else...
...but were very important to me
In Memphis, Tennessee,
20 year old Fred Neill goes hunting for
scrap to help him re-stage Rutherford's experiments
He used radium...
...which was a newly discovered element at the time and he used metal cans,
glass tubes, huge amounts of wire and
...all sorts of eclectic bits that he collected from various places
Most scrapyards purchase cars and... crush them up
This scrapyard specifically purchases from the US military
...all of their surplus
They have electronic bits from world war 2, planes anything
They have everything from...
bolts to battleships literally
Er How much do you want for this old thing?
One of Rutherford's key experiments involved examining the particles
he knew were part of the emanation from radium
Rutherford knew that these particles were coming off of the radium
with an certain amount of speed
So he aimed the particles that were coming off of
the radium at a piece of gold foil
And he found that some of the particles were bouncing off of the gold foil
Rutherford was guoted saying this was some
what like shooting a 15 inch shell at a piece of tissue paper
and having it bounce back and hit you
Well this meant that there was some kind of immense force inside the atom
Discovering this force helped Rutherford
complete his theoretical picture of the atom
He then determined to overcome this force, break up the atom, and study its parts
Fred Neill carefully followed Rutherford's approach, and built his own atom smasher;
starting with a safe way to produce particles,
rather than relying on the dangerous radiation from radium
My machine just like Rutherford's used... electrical simulation of the emanations
from the radium by heating up a piece of metal electrically
Now in order to make these move I use electrostatic electricity
Now Coulomb showed that particles that
have a charge are attracted to other opposite charge
So what I do is I build up a huge amount of charge just like a battery
You hook up one end of the tube to a battery and
you hook up the other end of the tube to the opposite pole of the battery
...and you can make the particles move. And they hit a target right here
But in order to do that they can't be hampered by anything
on their journey to the end of the target
So to pull everything out that might slow the particles down
I have to take all of the air out with this vacuum pump
...Like so...
Now what you see is particles interacting with the air
Which means I haven't pulled out enough air out
So after some amount of time I've pulled out all of the air and
the particles begin to move straight to the target without any interaction
There is now nothing inside except the particles Fred Neill is firing,
and whatever particles they break out of the target
You can detect them using a tube just like this...
I am only picking up particles from the target because there is nothing else there
There's only the particles coming from the synthesised radium emanations
and from the bits of the target
But Fred Neill's Geiger counter was...
...recording particles with a guarter of the mass of the particles he is putting in
Like Rutherford before him he is splitting the atom.
The Greek philosophers had said that
the atom was this indivisible object that was the building block of all things
Well Rutherford found that it most certainly is not
The atom has building blocks of its own
He found that there is a some huge amount of energy held in electric charges that
was somehow bound together in the centre and that
there was just this myriad of particles that had never been known before
That the atom was made up of huge numbers
of bizarre odd things that had never been seen
Scientists soon found that if they accelerated particles faster,
then they could break up the atom still further - into smaller and smaller parts
...The evidence from particle
...accelerators revealed a new world of sub atomic physics
It was now that the full significance of Einstein's famous eguation,
E=mc sguared, began to be realised
Matter and energy were interchangeable
The more energy is released from particle collisions,
the more the mass of the particles is reduced
Proof it seemed, that Einstein was right...
...But a theoretician called Paul Dirac had seen something else in the maths
Paul Dirac held the...
Lucasian chair of mathematics in Cambridge
which was once held by Newton and is currently held by Stephen Hawking
Dirac made a prediction which was hard to believe
For Einstein's theory to be right he argued,
energy wouldn't just produce matter
It also had to produce a perfect mirror-image opposite; anti-matter
And just as there were particles which combine to form matter,
there would be mirror image anti-particles forming anti-matter
This anti-matter would have some extraordinary gualities
The special gualities...
that anti matter has is that
it can completely annihilate with matter to form energy
It is only when matter interacts with antimatter that
all the mass can completely annihilate and you can be left with only pure energy
To begin with, anti-matter was just a mathematical theory.
It seemed to contradict common sense. We live after all in a world of matter
One way of thinking about matter and anti matter is to think that
you have two worlds which are mirror images of each other.
The guestion is what is this antimatter it sounds very science-fiction like,
it sounds very fanciful; and it turns out that
there is a very boring aspect to antimatter and
there is a very exciting aspect to anti-matter
So starting with the boring one,
the boring one is that anti-matter is very much like matter
it really is basically the same thing
Anti-matter does not go up with gravity
it goes down with gravity just like matter does
The main difference between matter and anti-matter is the electric charge
So if you have a little particle of matter such as an electron
its anti matter particle it's going to be a positron
which will have a positive charge, and so to each particle of matter
there's going to be a particle of anti matter with opposite electric charge
The most exiting part is...
...that when matter and anti-matter come together they disappear
They become something new they become something they weren't before and
what they became is just pure energy
One of the beautiful...
...conseguences of this whole process of matter
and anti matter disintegrating into energy is that
you could also out of energy create matter and anti matter
So the process is perfectly reversible you can go both ways
So in theory at least energy could produce matter and anti-matter
But then wouldn't they instantly meet and annihilate back into energy?
...lt seemed there could be whole...
anti worlds and anti people, made of anti -matter
If you meet your anti partner, don't kiss or shake hands
You would both disappear in a tremendous flash of light
Could the reverse process, of energy turning into matter and anti matter,
have happened in the big bang?
Was that where all the matter in the universe came from?
Dirac's theory had to be confirmed
Anti matter had to be found somewhere,
if only for an instant, before it was annihilated by matter
Shortly after Dirac's proposal of anti-matter,
scientists began to observe strange new rays coming from space; cosmic rays...
Perhaps these rays would somehow reveal the elusive anti-matter
They went to mountain tops
because they were trying to get as high up a possible so that
they could get the cosmic rays before they interacted with the atmosphere
Cosmic rays come from anywhere we know... in the galaxy
And there are certain places
they think they are coming from other galaxies outside and
we are not sure how much of the universe they are coming from
To see the mirror image difference between matter and
...anti-matter, scientists used a cloud chamber,
...a kind of trap which could reveal particles by their movement
All you have to have for a cloud chamber is something you can see through...
And then you have to have something like alcohol that evaporates easily
You put it on dry ice which makes it really cold in the bottom
so it becomes super saturated, so its ready to form a cloud
Whenever some particle goes through there...
and that makes a little trail... of droplets
This is the same kind of thing that happens thin
when an aeroplane goes through the sky,
that you see the water vapour trail after the exhaust of the aeroplane
They are very temporary trails that are formed by cosmic rays
or even radioactive particles because the little droplets form
and they fall down to the bottom of the chamber due to gravity
and so it just sort of wisp past there
Supposedly on top of very high mountains
you see about one cosmic ray per sguare centimetre every second
Near sea level you see far fewer than that - maybe a few a minute.
In 1932, an American physicist, Carl Anderson
set a cloud chamber between magnets to deflect the path of a particle.
If it bent one way, it would be positively charged;
the other way meant a negative charge
And that in turn meant knowing whether the particle was coming from above or below
so he put a lead plate across the chamber to slow the energetic particle down
if you see a track going through you don't know whether it came from above
and went that way or from below and went that way and its curving
because it is a magnetic field
so they put this plate in the middle and they could tell by the curviture that
it was more tightly curved it lost energy so the magnetic field affected
it more when it had less energy
Anderson eventually saw what Dirac had predicted
With the slower half of the track above the lead bar
this particle had to be coming from below
which made it the mirror image of a known particle
It had to be its anti particle partner.
Anti-matter existed
When Anderson saw the first tracks
this was really exciting and
just sort of blew people's minds
because they had not ever seen antimatter before
there was no evidence for it and also this was the first particle
they had ever seen that was not found in an atom
So even though Paul Dirac had predicted there must some kind of a particle that
was the opposite to the electron nobody had believed
or though it was possible until they actually had tracks
Today modern particle accelerators can create anti-matter
and matter to produce extraordinary images of creation
You may think that this is some sort of beautiful art
and it is in a sense an art... but it is an art made by physicists
What you have is a big snapshot that captures in one moment
all of these dense particles being created and destroyed inside...
...particle accelerators so it may look like Jackson Pollock
but it is in fact a computer
...enhanced picture of a particle collisions within a detector
Each one of these particles in a sense tells a story
...or possible story of how the universe was a long long... time ago
These pictures show the collision of
countless particles of matter and anti-matter
Hidden in the detail is the answer
to how matter was formed out of the pure energy of the big bang
So here you have a detail of
what people would see in a detector in which you have the...
debris of a little bang
...creating matter and anti matter out of energy...
...and this is a photon and a photon is a little bundle of energy
that doesn't leave a track because it doesn't have an electric charge...
So it moves up here and it collides with a particle
and out of the strength of this collision you have these two spirals coming out
One of them being a particle which is matter,
and the other one being its anti-matter cousin - its anti-particle
And out of this collision you have two tracks,
this one that you can see and then you have another one
which is an invisible one which is another photon, a bundle of energy
You can see precisely that this bundle of energy
will eventually create matter and anti-matter and
this happens at this point guite suddenly, when this photon
gives birth in a sense to an electron and a positron
And that is a beautiful manifestation of matter being created out of energy...
It is in effect a miniature big bang, energy forming matter and antimatter
Well if matter and anti-matter are essentially the same
with opposite electric charges, where is the anti- matter?
How come the universe is made of matter
...We go back to the laws that control how particles and anti-particles interact,
and those laws show that the universe
is not perfectly symmetric between matter and anti-matter
The fact that we are here at all depends on an extraordinary accident of nature
If the universe was perfectly symmetric between matter and antimatter
we wouldn't be here because the universe would just be a big sea of energy
So the fact that the universe is not perfectly symmetric
is the ultimate reason for us to be here
We now know enough to piece together the story of how our universe evolved
Now we have certain clues about how the universe behaved in the beginning
The universe that we know existed then, was very rich there was a lot of energy,
there was a lot of potentiality for that energy to be translated
into particles and anti-particles
Then what we have is a picture of the universe of many, many particles
The elementary particles that are the building blocks of matter,
which are colliding with each other at a frantic rate
and they don't really bind
All you have is a dance of particles moving
around the tremendous energies colliding with each other and
hence creating more particles and
more energy out of particles in this creation and destruction dance
As the universe cools and expands the particles stop colliding so strongly
and so energetically and they have more time to look at each other
and perhaps bind and do something. So at about one...
...second of life the universe started to make nuclei,
that is protons and neutrons started to bind
At about 300,000 years or so atoms formed which means that
the nuclei bind with the electrons to form the atoms
Most of them, over all a majority, hydrogen
From those hydrogen atoms, they because of gravity form clouds,
those clouds, they start condensing
And they get denser and denser and hotter and hotter,
and as that happens those clouds start forming galaxies...
...and stars within theses galaxies
which are basically ninety nine per cent of hydrogen burning
And eventually those stars are going to have solar systems attached to them,
that is they are going to have planets orbiting around them and
maybe your going to have a planet which is close enough so that it is hot...
...but not too far enough so its not too cold
so that life as we understand it here on earth could develop
And then we could come back here and
tell the story of the life of the universe from scratch to the end
From a white hot Big Bang to planets and people,
is a long and extraordinary journey
From energy to particles, from particles to atoms,
and from atoms to everything we see...
...it is a remarkable story
It may be difficult to believe that all the matter in the universe,
came from just energy
But that is the way, the universe seems to be