Watch BBC The Atom with Jim Al-Khalili (2007) Documentary Online


In this three-part BBC documentary series, The Atom, Professor Jim Al-Khalili tells the story of one of the greatest scientific discoveries ever: that the material world is made up of atoms.

The book that accompanies the Atom series is published by Icon Books.

Excerpt from the book:

All things are made of atoms, little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. This is the first popular account of the fascinating story of the atom. No one ever expected the atom to be as bizarre, as capricious, and as weird as it turned out to be. Its story is one riddled with jealousy, rivalry, missed opportunities and moments of genius.

John Dalton gave us the first picture of the atom in the early 1800s. Almost 100 years later came one of the most important experiments in scientific history, by the young misfit New Zealander, Ernest Rutherford. He showed the atom consisted mostly of space, and in doing so turned 200 years of classical physics on its head. It was a brilliant Dane, Neils Bohr, who made the next great leap – into the incredible world of quantum theory. Yet, he and a handful of other revolutionary young scientists weren’t prepared for the shocks Nature had up her sleeve.

Mind-bending discoveries about the atom were destined to upset everything we thought we knew about reality. Even today as we peer deeper and deeper into the atom, it throws back as many questions at us as answers.

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THE ATOM – EPiSODE 1 – THE CLASH OF THE TiTANS

Author and nuclear physicist Professor Jim Al-Khalili looks at what led to the discovery that everything is made of atoms. The programme looks at how the discovery affected the scientific world including the atomic energy theories of Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg and quantum mechanics


THE ATOM – EPiSODE 2 - THE KEY TO COSMOS

This episode tackles world-changing discoveries such as radioactivity, the Atom Bomb and the Big Bang, and tries to answer the biggest questions of all – why are we here and how were we made?


THE ATOM – EPiSODE 3 - THE iLLUSiON OF REALiTY

In the last in the series Professor Jim Al-Khalili explores how studying the atom forced us to rethink the nature of reality itself. He discovers that there might be parallel universes in which different versions of us exist, finds out that empty space isn’t empty at all, and investigates the differences in our perception of the world in the universe and the reality.