Unleashing the Power. Creating Chemical Compounds and Splitting Atoms

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Description

Once scientists succeeded in identifying and organizing the 92 naturally occurring chemical elements, the challenge then became how to manipulate them into amazing new configurations - and how to tap their essentially limitless energy. A tale of struggle meeting serendipity and of accident meeting design, this program focuses on element-related flashpoints in modern science history: the discovery of molecular isomers, the discovery of carbon bonding, plastics and the mastery of synthetic chemistry, radioactive decay and the transmutation of nitrogen to oxygen, the discovery of neutrons, nuclear fission and chain reactions, the Manhattan Project and the first atomic bomb, and the creation of synthetic elements such as neptunium, plutonium, and copernicium.