Wonders of the Universe - Brian Cox [38]
We humans are also very much part of that system. As unsettling as it may sound, every atom in your body was once part of something else. It may have made up an ancient tree or a dinosaur, and you’ll be pleased to know it was certainly part of a rock. The reason this can happen – that the rocks of Earth can become living things and that living things will eventually die and become rocks again – is simple: everything in the Universe is composed of the same basic ingredients
When you are presented with the sheer magnitude of the Himalayas and the towering peak of Mount Everest, it is hard to believe that these huge mountains started off life at the bottom of an ocean.
Natural recycling at its most impressive. The Himalayan limestone has been proved to be predominantly biological, due to the quantity of fossils of sea shells and creatures that have been found at the summit of Mount Everest.
DIRK WIERSMA / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
Periodictable.com © 2010 Theodore Gray
THE PERIODIC TABLE
For many people the Periodic Table will provide a strong echo of the school science laboratory. At its simplest, this chart is a list of the chemical elements, fundamental units of matter, which were considered to be the smallest building blocks of the world. However, this table is much more than just a list. Although elemental theories of matter were first postulated in Greece, it wasn’t until 6 March 1869 that the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev finally tamed the ever-expanding list of the basic constituents of matter. Mendeleev’s genius was to arrange the list of the sixty-six then-known elements into a table according to their chemical properties. In the process, the table not only provided a neat way of grouping the elements according to their properties, but also predicted the existence of eight elements yet to be discovered. Over the next thirty years, all eight were discovered, including gallium and germanium, and were found to have the exact properties predicted by Mendeleev’s table. The number of elements continued to grow, and by 1955 the one-hundred-and-first element was discovered (named Mendelevium as a tribute to the father of the Periodic Table) by a group of scientists at the University of California, Berkeley. To date, 118 elements have been categorised, the latest of which, ununseptium, was successfully synthesized and detected by a Russian– US team in April 2010.
Starting with hydrogen and ending with plutonium, the first ninety-four elements of the Table have been found occurring naturally on Earth. These elements are nature’s building blocks; the remaining twenty-four elements, can only be created artificially and live for very short periods of time. Using these ninety-four elements you can explain all of biology and chemistry without knowing about the underlying structure of protons and neutrons, electrons and quarks. This is because you need very high energies and temperatures to break apart the elements – a condition that only exists naturally deep inside the stars.
The first step of our journey to explain where we come from is to understand the origin of these ninety-four elements. But first we must discover how we know that everything we see in the sky is made of the same stuff as us on the ground
THE UNIVERSAL CHEMISTRY SET
Surprising as it sounds, we know what every star, planet and moon in the observable Universe is made of, despite the fact that there is only one other place in the Universe that humans have actually visited in person.
On 21 July 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans