0:00 December, 1898.0:01 Tonight, a dish on my workbench glows with a faint, blue, otherworldly light.0:08 It is the ghost I have been chasing for four years, and it is more beautiful and more terrible than I ever imagined.0:18 We have named it Radium.0:20 The radiant one.0:22 Pierre and I just stood there, in the cold of the shed, not speaking.0:28 There was nothing to say.0:30 We had done it.0:32 Four years.0:33 Eight tons of pitchblende residue, a mountain of black rock, boiled down in giant cast-iron cauldrons.0:42 My hands are chapped and scarred from the acid.0:46 My lungs ache from the fumes.0:49 The scientific establishment told us we were chasing a measurement error.0:55 An anomaly.0:56 They called our shed a "stable-cum-potato-cellar," and they were not wrong.1:03 But every day, we would stir the boiling sludge, fractionating, crystallizing, purifying… searching for something that physics said could not exist.1:16 The alchemists sought to turn lead into gold.1:20 A foolish, greedy dream.1:22 We sought to find why this worthless rock was screaming with an energy no one could explain.1:31 We were not transmuting elements.1:34 We were isolating one.1:36 The difference is rigor.1:38 The difference is the electrometer, not the incantation.1:43 And the energy.1:44 My god, the energy.1:46 It does not come from the sun, or from a chemical reaction.1:51 It comes from the atom itself.1:54 The atom is not a hard, dead particle as Dalton believed.1:59 It is a world, containing its own sun.2:03 And this sun is dying, and in its death, it radiates.2:07 We have not just found a new element.2:11 We have found that the very heart of matter… it beats.2:15 It decays.2:16 It transforms.2:18 The laws of conservation are not wrong, but they are incomplete.2:23 I look at the glow.2:25 I think of Becquerel's photographic plates, fogged by uranium salts.2:31 That was the clue.2:33 The breadcrumb trail that led us here, to this shed, to this new light.2:39 This energy could be a new kind of fire.2:43 A fire to burn away the tumors that fester in the body, a tool for healing unimaginable.2:51 Or a weapon.2:52 A power to burn cities.2:54 We have summoned a spirit from the rock, and now we must learn its nature before it consumes us.3:03 My work is not over.3:04 The work has just begun.
