[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JONIECE ABBOTT-PRATT: Helium. Revolt. There is no shelium. Yes, he is pronoun and element, top right king, the most noble gas. But if there was shelium, how fine, wise, light she might be.

JAD ABUMRAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab, and today? Elements.

ROBERT: Yeah.

SAM BRESLIN WRIGHT: I carried your oxygen, and you walked beside me through the lobby, commenting on the décor when you needed to stop for breath. Your hand ran light and steady, by the ocean of breath, twice I remember. I carried your oxygen. It was heavy, a bleak alloy. Steel.

JAD: This hour is a collaboration with poets like the ones you heard, and will hear more of.

ROBERT: Musicians.

JAD: Reporters.

ROBERT: And of course the periodic table of elements.

JAD: Speaking of which, our producer Soren Wheeler, whose sodium-sparked brain conceived of this entire show, he will lead us off.

SOREN WHEELER: So this one starts with a story I heard from Jamie Lowe. She's a writer in Brooklyn, and at the heart of this story is this particular 24-hour period in Jamie's life that she is uneasy about.

SOREN: Let's just set it up for one second, so what are we about to watch?

JAMIE LOWE: I'm not actually exactly sure where it starts, but we're about to watch, I think, the night before Valentine's Day, 2001.

SOREN: I eventually convinced her to sit down with producer Latif Nasser and sort of just walk us through the tape.
LATIF NASSER: Go for it, you're in control there with the space bar.

JAMIE LOWE: All right.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, student: Yeah, I'm on?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Loew: You're on.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, student: Hi.]

JAMIE LOWE: These are the kids in the corner.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, student: Hey you should marry Jamie. Are you going to marry Jamie, Mike?]

SOREN: The video starts, it's nighttime. Jamie and her friend Mike, he's the one filming, they're outside his apartment in Brooklyn, and the camera is pointed at a bunch of high school students who were just walking by.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: So what's the deal? Tell me. So you want to be an actress, right?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, student: Yeah.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Tell him what you need to tell him.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, student: I love acting and Shakespeare. ]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Good for you.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: Hell yeah. Really?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, student: Yeah.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: That's so cool.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Romeo ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, student: Thy name is my enemy, thou art thyself though not a Montague. What's Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot, nor arm, nor face, nor any other part belonging to a man.]

JAMIE LOWE: Somehow I'm, like, egging them on to recite it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, student: Retain that dear perfection which he owes without that title. Romeo doff thy name, and for thy name, which is no part of thee, take all myself.]

JAMIE LOWE: This is the part that you can kind of—see I'm screaming.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: You ladies are all right. So wait ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: I notice you were saying ...]

SOREN: The camera eventually turns to Jamie. She's sitting on the stoop, huge curly hair, wide eyes, and she starts to sing the kids a song.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: It goes, [singing], "You don't call me yesterday, because I can't see you.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, student: All right.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Even if I …]

JAMIE LOWE: I was pretty convinced that I was, like, a great singer and rapper.

MIKE RYAN: She likes the sound of her own voice.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, student: Yeah you're good.]

SOREN: Wait, do you sing a lot in ...

JAMIE LOWE: No, never.

SOREN: Never?

JAMIE LOWE: I am not a singer.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Wow, I just started singing like, I don't know, what was it, like three weeks ago?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, student: Was that the one around the corner?]

MIKE RYAN: It was fun to watch people react to her. She made people really happy wherever she went.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Do you guys live here?]

MIKE RYAN: We went to flea markets and she would talk to people, and she would pull this spark out of them. It just felt like New York loved her.

SOREN: That's Mike Ryan, the guy holding the camera. He'd only met Jamie just three weeks earlier, not long after he moved to New York, and they pretty much instantly became friends.

MIKE RYAN: She was so positive. As I recall, she's talking to some little kids on a stoop. But 

then that next four or five hours was pretty defining.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: I don't know if I can remember it, though.]

MIKE RYAN: Okay cut to ...

JAMIE LOWE: Mike's apartment, I think.

MIKE RYAN: You're just walking around.

JAMIE LOWE: In a bra and open dress, sparkly red bra and plastic bag.

MIKE RYAN: Plastic bag on the ...

JAMIE LOWE: On the stomach? Belly dancing? You might have to shield your eyes, Latif.

LATIF: [laughs]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Okay, here we go.]

SOREN: Fast forward about four hours.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: That's Mike, he's sleeping.]

JAMIE LOWE: Oh boy.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: [Inaudible].]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Good morning. It's Valentine's Day, 2001.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: Good morning.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: That's kumquats and avocados. The kumquats were picked with my grandpa from their kumquat tree about three or four days ago.]

JAMIE LOWE: That's true.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: There's three breakfast bars.]

LATIF: What is all that stuff on the cutting board?]

JAMIE LOWE: They're cut-up power bars.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: A bow from the present I gave you, that's hiding a cup of wine that we're gonna drink for Valentine's.]

JAMIE LOWE: And a cup of wine, of course, at 7:40 in the morning.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: So do you need a nap or anything at noon? Or do you just keep pumping?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: If I'm tired I'll sleep. Oh, here's a dollar!]

JAMIE LOWE: Oh, poor Mike.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: So Jamie ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Yeah?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: What's gonna happen today?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Today I'm gonna contact MTV to debate Gore, Bush, Nader, for Iraq.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: And Fidel Castro.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Yeah, him too. He's an amazing man.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: Debate Fidel though, seriously.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Okay.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: It has to be about ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: It can be about anything.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: Right.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Anything goes. Do you want to taste this one?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: Yeah.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Peanut butter and chocolate.]

LATIF: Were you meaning that literally? That you were gonna go on MTV and debate Gore v. Bush, and then ...

JAMIE LOWE: I was. That is exactly what I had in mind for the day.

MIKE RYAN: I thought it was make-believe. It seemed harmless. It just didn't occur to me that what I was seeing was somebody who had deviated substantially from who they wanted to be.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: We have to change the world. Jesus Christ, Mike.]

SOREN: Eventually Mike got up, had to go to work. Jamie took off for a while, and then later that day she showed up at his office. And at first everything seemed sort of fine.

MIKE RYAN: But within 20 minutes she said, "Hey, tell you what, can we go to the roof really fast?"

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: What?]

MIKE RYAN: And that immediately got me uncomfortable.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Can't tell you yet.]

JAMIE LOWE: So okay, overpants, floral wraparound skirt. We are now going to the roof.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Are you ready to be blown off your feet?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: No, I'm not.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Okay.]

JAMIE LOWE: You can hear he's done. Like, the day has been insane. This is at the end of that day. Snowy 7th Avenue rooftop.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: What is this?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Any finger.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: What is that?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: It's a piece of yarn.]

LATIF: What is it?

JAMIE LOWE: A piece of yarn.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Mr. Mike Patrick Ryan, will you come tonight to a party?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: I can't. I have to work.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Okay. At 5:20, on top of the world, at the World Trade Center, where I want to marry you.]

JAMIE LOWE: Yeah.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: If you want to.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: Tonight?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Yeah. It's all set up.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Jamie ...]

JAMIE LOWE: That's the end. At that point he was like, "Done. We're done."

LATIF: Wow!

JAMIE LOWE: Yeah. I mean, yeah.

MIKE RYAN: That's when it hit me that there was no way that any of this reflects what she would actually want. I don't know if 'delusional' is a kind word here, and if it's not I apologize, but if she is delusional enough to think that we should get married, is she delusional enough to think she can fly? Will she be distraught when I say, "No?" And will she—would she jump? And so I lowered the camera, and I said, "I'm afraid of heights and I want to go downstairs immediately." And I felt, for the first time, just fear. And I called her—I believe I called her mother first, Leanne, and I just said, "My name is Mike. I'm a friend of Jamie's, and I think she may be going through something, and I don't know what I'm dealing with. I'm in over my head, here."

LEANNE LANTOS: When Mike called I just got on a red eye that night.

SOREN: That's Leanne Lantos, Jamie's mom.

LEANNE LANTOS: It was my job to get her to go back to her therapist so that we could get some medication in her.

SOREN: For Leanne, this episode was not entirely a surprise. It had happened once before when Jamie was in high school.

LEANNE LANTOS: At that time, she was not sleeping at night.

MARK D'ANTONIO: Spinning around the room, talking non-stop about how she had to save Central America from disaster.

SOREN: During that first episode, Jamie ended up at a place called the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA, and she ended up being treated by this guy, Dr. Mark D'Antonio. He's a psychiatrist.

MARK D'ANTONIO: She was in a very acute, manic psychotic state.

JAMIE LOWE: I remember being sort of tackled by nurses to actually take my meds because I refused to.

LEANNE LANTOS: We didn't know if we would ever see our Jamie again. You know, that was the scariest part.

JAMIE LOWE: Everyone around me, I think, was really, really worried that I wouldn't come back.

SOREN: But she did come back, and it's what brought her back that is actually the reason I got so interested in this story. So, shortly after she was admitted Dr. D'Antonio told Jamie's parents ...

MARK D'ANTONIO: We know what this is and we know how to treat it.

LEANNE LANTOS: And he said she's a classic case of bipolar.

MARK D'ANTONIO: There was no question.

LEANNE LANTOS: And the drug of choice is lithium.

MARK D'ANTONIO: Is lithium.

SOREN: Which is not even a drug, but just this salt.

LEANNE LANTOS: And he explained to us, you know, that she would need to ...

MARK D'ANTONIO: Take three tablets of lithium. Three tablets of this salt.

SOREN: And it could bring her back.

MARK D'ANTONIO: When it works, it's just remarkable.

SOREN: Do you have memories of, like, what it was like to come back like that? What you were thinking, or what it felt like?

JAMIE LOWE: It's really hard to describe. It's a little bit of, like, a slow realization of, like, "Oh, that was a weird thing that I did a week ago." Like, "Why did I do that?"

LEANNE LANTOS: The first time she was actually lucid, and coming back to herself again ...

SOREN: Mm-hmm.

LEANNE LANTOS: ... the first words out of her mouth were, "Mom, it's not me," and I just—that just killed me.

SOREN: Within a few weeks it was like the incident never happened.

JAMIE LOWE: It's so bizarre. I mean, I felt like here was this thing that's a salt that I get to just take three of a day and that was it.

MARK D'ANTONIO: Totally normal, no side effects, no issues.

SOREN: She went off to college.

JAMIE LOWE: And just, like, flourished, and it was great.

SOREN: Things were good for a long time.

MARK D'ANTONIO: Then after about six years she said, "You know, I've been on this pill for six years. I've had no problems. I'd like to go off it."

LEANNE LANTOS: “Why don't we try to go off gradually?”

MARK D'ANTONIO: Then about a month after she was totally off lithium she was whack.

SOREN: In Mike's apartment, up all night.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: You were so tired just a minute ago.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: That's because you told me I had to leave, but now I'm still here aren't I?]

MARK D'ANTONIO: A totally manic episode all over again.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Because I am whatever you say I am.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: Oh God. That's it.]

SOREN: One of the things that kind of makes lithium, that effect that lithium has, so spooky—and you hear this from a lot of people that have taken lithium to treat bipolar—is that lithium itself is so simple.

BEN LILLIE: Lithium is an element, right? It's a single atom.

SOREN: This is Bem Lillie. He's a writer, runs the Story Collider podcast. He's had some personal experience with psychiatric drugs, and he's written about lithium.

BEN LILLIE: That, to me, was fascinating, that a single atom can change what we think of of who we are. I mean it's not even—not just an atom, it's atom number three. It's the third element in the table.

SOREN: Hmm.

BEN LILLIE: It's one of the simplest atoms, right? So it's just three protons, four neutrons, three electrons.

SOREN: That's a pretty simple bit of matter. I mean, it doesn't get much ...

BEN LILLIE: It really is. This had never struck me when I was on Lexapro or Wellbutrin, which is the other one they put me on. You know, if you look at them, they look like what you expect a pharmaceutical drug to look like. There's a ring of carbon atoms, and some other things stuck on it, and they look like these big complex molecules. And you're like, "Oh yeah, I'm complex. My brain's complex. It takes this complicated thing to change it." And then you're confronted with just this atom. It was found by accident that it works. It's not complicated to make. It's just a salt that you distill out, and yet it has this profound effect. The other thing I know about lithium that is profoundly weird is that you're not just saying, "My mind, my personality, is being changed by an atom." It's being changed by an atom that was created directly in the Big Bang itself. So you have this atom formed in the Big Bang, goes through whatever it does, winding path, to come onto the Earth. Gets dug up, turned into a pill, given to someone, and that changes their affect in the world. And that, to me, is just—it's this profound reminder that the forces that shape everything in the universe are the same as the forces that are shaping who we are and what we do, and what our identity is.

SOREN: It's possible that these forces shape not just the people with bipolar disorder, but all of us. I ended up talking to a clinical psychiatrist, Anna Felz, who told me about these studies.

ANNA FELZ: Huge epidemiologic studies. The biggest one, I think, was in Japan. One was in Austria, one was in Greece, a famous one in Texas, in which they looked at communities that had different levels of lithium.

SOREN: Lithium in the water supply, and we're talking about tiny, tiny amounts.

ANNA FELZ: Micrograms, those are a thousandth of the amount in a milligram.

SOREN: If you think of like a pill of lithium, well we're talking about amounts like ten- thousandths of a pill. Like, that's the amount that we're dealing with here. And these studies found, by and large, in towns that had a tiny bit more lithium in the water, suicide rates were lower, in some cases as much as 30 percent.

ROBERT: Wow!

ANNA FELZ: I should say the Texas study, which is astonishing, also shows that the towns that have the highest lithium level have lower felonies, thefts, rapes. And these are reputable, published studies.

SOREN: Now these studies are, you know, only showing us correlations, but there does at least seem to be some kind of connection and ...

JAD: I mean, if there is a connection, what the hell is it doing?

ROBERT: Do they know why it works in the brain? Like, do they know what it does?

SOREN: Well, essentially ...

MARK D'ANTONIO: No.

SOREN: ... it's still kind of a mystery. But here's Mark D'Antonio's theory. He says we know that bipolar disorder involves a defect in a certain part of the brain.

MARK D'ANTONIO: It's an area of the brain that has to do with controlling mood. So believe it or not, there's neurons in the brain that keep your mood even.

SOREN: These neurons, they do their job by sort of passing electricity back and forth, and that electricity is carried by sodium ions. So the whole system is pretty much based on sodium.

MARK D'ANTONIO: Lithium is very similar to sodium.

SOREN: So if you have lithium in the brain, the neurons will use that to communicate. They'll send lithium ions back and forth. And here's what's interesting: lithium works just like sodium.

MARK D'ANTONIO: But not as well. Lithium is similar enough in properties that it can be an imposter, but whatever it does it just doesn't work as well.

SOREN: That's the key, he says.

MARK D'ANTONIO: So then this area of the brain, the defective area of the brain that makes these moods flip on and off so intensely doesn't work as well, and that stops the bipolar episode.

JAD: That's so interesting that maybe its sluggishness is what makes it good.

MARK D'ANTONIO: Yep, yep.

SOREN: Although he says that same trick where it can be a sort of sodium imposter but slower, that can also cause issues.

MARK D'ANTONIO: Slight tremors in your hand. You can have nausea. They can affect the kidneys. The balance of sodium in your body is regulated partially through the kidneys, and somehow lithium replacing it can be toxic to the kidneys.

SOREN: Which actually brings us back to Jamie.

JAMIE LOWE: Yeah, so before I went ...

SOREN: After that episode in New York with Mike and the video, she went back on lithium, and again she was fine. In fact, for the last 16 years she's been completely normal. But then a couple months ago ...

JAMIE LOWE: I went to a new primary physician, mostly because I'm lazy and I didn't want to go to the Upper West Side to see my other doctor, and this doctor basically took my blood pressure and was like, "You're gonna die. You need to go to the ER."

SOREN: Turns out her kidneys were failing, and so she suddenly had to make this choice.

JAMIE LOWE: That I could sort of just stay on lithium and, you know, go to dialysis and get a transplant, or that I had to switch. And that now would be when I would switch. That I had enough function left that I could.

SOREN: You are in the middle of that decision now, you feel like? Or do you feel like it's decided?

JAMIE LOWE: I think I'm gonna switch. I think I made that decision. It's just that every psychiatrist in New York leaves for August, because I don't know why, but they all disappear for August, all of August. And mine said, "You should probably wait to switch until I come back." But I feel like I have a good group of people around me. I have a solid job. It's terrifying to court mania, but I also feel like there are a lot of effective drugs, and that one of them is gonna work. It won't be as cool as lithium, though. Depakote sounds like—oh God. It's like, "Wah-wah, you're on Depakote."

SOREN: As she was in the middle of that decision, Jamie did one last thing. She actually took a trip to Bolivia, which is where much of the world's lithium comes from. There's this place you can go and literally see these massive salt flats which are just covered in mounds of lithium.

JAMIE LOWE: I just wanted to see them. I wanted to experience them. I wanted to be near them, so I went. It just looks like a hallucination. It looks like somebody could not have conceived of this landscape. You know, you have red lakes, and you have flocks of flamingos and this, like, long salty expanse that goes on forever. Like, it's just huge, it's enormous.

SOREN: Do you go up to a pile and put your hand on it or ...

JAMIE LOWE: Yeah, you can. You stand on it, and you jump off the pile. And I was making kind of lithium angels. And it was awesome. I know I have to go off of it, but I really am—I mean, gratitude is, like, not even the word. I feel like this thing allows me to be me. It doesn't define me, but it allows for, you know, functionality, and that sounds kind of wonky but it's like every day I get to work and it's because of that—like, everything. You know, I'm just—I'm grateful to it for its service. I feel like it's done—it's done a lot for me. It worked so hard to get to me too, from the Big Bang to now.

JAD: Producer Soren Wheeler. Now Soren is made of elements, though not of lithium, which we should say only some of which was made in the Big Bang. Some of it was also made in a supernova, and we'll have one of those coming up. Special thanks to Ben Lillie, Ann Harrington, Kay Redfield Jamison, Steve Lowe, and of course Jamie Lowe. Jamie is working on a book about her experiences with bipolar. It will be called Grand Delusions.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, "Jamie’s Song" – Sylvan Esso: [musical intro].]

JAD: This is a song from the band Sylvan Esso. We played them the last story in progress, and they wrote a song about it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, "Jamie’s Song" – Sylvan Esso: [singing]. It's not me you're talking to, gently dancing in my room. Through the light beam ark, I'm all stops and starts, I'm all space and stars. I'm a brilliant machine, composed of softer things: compression ache, scale bends and sways, another nova on the way. Though the constant is constant, I'm breaking up. The choices I make will all fade to dust. While the metal is shifting I'm waking up. I remember, I remember what I thought I was. It's not me you're watching move, slam dancing around my room, faster, faster till I bloom. Keep on blooming, keep on blooming, dragging me down though I keep moving. Keep on blooming, keep on blooming, dragging me down though I keep moving. Though the constant is constant I'm breaking up. As I glow I'm so tired, that I'm too big to stop. While the metal is shifting, I'm breaking up. I remember, I remember what I thought I was. Though the constant is constant, I'm breaking up. As I grow I'm so tired, but I'm too big to stop. While the metal is shifting, I'm waking up. I remember, I remember what I thought I was.]

JAD: That was Sylvan Esso with "Jamie's Song."

RANDY FAROGAWA: You want to talk bang? Hydrogen was there at zero hundred hours in the coke-colored velodrome of dark matter, gases checking gases ad infinitum. Chartreuse flair, then a deafening birth. Ions of cosmos cartwheeling pink, red, yellow, green, purple, blue, black in the sphere of night. First I was a star, then a stain of water, then a kindergartner.

ROBERT: These poems, by the way, come from two events that we held in New York City. We went to Emotive Fruition, which is a wonderful organization run by Thomas Dooley, who is himself a poet. He summoned poets from all around the metropolitan area, and for two nights they came to the Bell House in Brooklyn, Botanic Lab in Manhattan.

JAD: And so far we have heard "Hydrogen," by Sarah Salas, read by Randy Farogawa. 

ROBERT: "Helium" by Christine Quintana, read by Joniece Abbott-Pratt.

JAD: And "I Carried Your Oxygen," a poem by David McLoghlin read by Sam Bresslin-Wright.

ROBERT: So next up ...

DEREK MULLER: I'm going to give you three claps. I don't know if you need that, but just in case you need to ...

ROBERT: Okay.

DEREK MULLER: ... sync it there you go.

ROBERT: Like a TV guy.

JAD: Okay, so a while back we ended up talking to a guy named Derek Muller who makes a YouTube channel ...

DEREK MULLER: Called Veritasium.

JAD: Super-popular channel about science and engineering. And we called him because he's making a documentary about uranium. We got to talking about what happens when you take two protons or neutrons and you just—whack!—put them together.

DEREK MULLER: Yeah, it's absolutely nuts.

JAD: And that led to this really interesting conversation about the beginning of all elements.

DEREK MULLER: I mean, I feel like a little bit of back story is worth saying here. One really important thing to know is that combining nuclei gives you energy.

JAD: He says when you slam two particles together they get squished, and in the squishing they lose a little mass.

DEREK MULLER: That mass gets emitted as energy. This is E=mc2. That's what's happening in the sun right now. So the sun is taking protons, individual protons, and smashing them together, combining them, and that gives you energy, the energy of the sun. Their lost mass is the sunlight that we bask in. It was mass.

JAD: I have never thought of light as former mass.

DEREK MULLER: Yeah.

JAD: That's what a star does, he says. It smashes little atoms like hydrogen together to make bigger atoms like helium, and then bigger atoms like carbon, and then even bigger atoms like oxygen, and every little collision it's doing generates some energy which keeps the star going.

DEREK MULLER: Stars live by this process of sticking nuclei together, going from smaller nuclei, making bigger nuclei. The heavier the star, the more of this smashing and bashing they can do in their core, and the bigger and bigger nuclei they can form.

JAD: But there are limits. Six billion years ago there was a star, a giant star, way bigger than our sun, and it was just doing its thing, taking atoms ...

DEREK MULLER: And smashing them together, combining them.

JAD: You know, just taking hydrogen atoms and making helium. Taking helium atoms and ...

DEREK MULLER: Making carbon, making oxygen.

JAD: And as it's smashing all of these nuclei together it's releasing energy and getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger.

DEREK MULLER: But then there comes a point where sticking nuclei together no longer gives you energy.

JAD: And that point is element number 26.

DEREK MULLER: Iron. Once you've formed iron, if you're a star, that's the end of life as you know it.

JAD: Because iron is incredibly stable.

DEREK MULLER: One of the most stable nuclei in the universe.

JAD: Its protons are tightly packed in there, and so you can't force any more energy out of them.

DEREK MULLER: Which means you have a core which is no longer gonna give you energy.

ROBERT: You can't cook up anything higher than the iron.

DEREK MULLER: That's it.

JAD: But what happens to the star? Does it just become a big hunk?

DEREK MULLER: What happens is everything starts to collapse.

JAD: Gravity takes over.

DEREK MULLER: That's the thing. A star maintains its size by the fact that there's all this energy going out.

JAD: So this dead iron core starts pulling everything back in.

DEREK MULLER: And at this point, all of that stuff which is headed inwards ...

JAD: Aluminum, oxygen, carbon, magnesium, silicon ...

DEREK MULLER: ... starts rubbing against each other, and it starts getting real hot and real dense. And all of the sudden you get—poof!—the supernova.

ROBERT: That was the most pathetic supernova explosion I've ever heard.

DEREK MULLER: It wasn't—can you put in a sound effect to make it sound better?

ROBERT: Yes, we have to put it in.

JAD: That is actually our specialty.

JAD: So even though we know there are no sounds in space, for the purposes of your enjoyment we present to you the supernova.

DEREK MULLER: So here's the beauty of it. Here's the beauty of the supernova. In the ridiculous excesses of energy that are there in the supernova, right, in that ridiculously huge explosion, the biggest in the universe, there is so much energy there that actually what happens is you form these nuclei which would not form under any other conditions.

JAD: You know, iron hits carbon to form germanium. Silicon hits oxygen to form titanium. You start to get all of these bigger elements.

DEREK MULLER: Including, like, gold, including the gold in your wedding ring. They need that extreme ridiculous excess of energy to form.

JAD: And then it's done.

DEREK MULLER: And what are you left with? You're left with a giant field of debris. There's carbon, there's oxygen, there's iron, there's silicon, there's hydrogen, there's helium, and it starts to clump together due to gravity. And the center of that, which clumps together, is our sun, is mostly hydrogen and helium, and it's, like, 99 percent of all the mass in our solar system. And then the other chunks, other bits and pieces, start to clump together as well. And they have a bit more angular momentum so they're spinning around the outside, and those are your planetesimals, your early planets, and ...

JAD: And that is eventually how you get the Earth, and all of us.

JAD: This is where we come—so you're saying this is the birth of everything past iron?

DEREK MULLER: Yeah, exactly, exactly.

JAD: I feel like an idiot but I think I get it for the very first time. So post-supernova, like in the milliseconds post-supernova, you have lots—you have the whole periodic table hurtling through space.

DEREK MULLER: Yeah, you do. You really do.

ROBERT: You can find Derek Muller most days on his YouTube channel, Veritasium. His documentary Uranium: Twisting the Dragon's Tail will soon appear on PBS.

JAD: It has already, in fact, appeared.

ROBERT: It has even already appeared on PBS, and for some crazy reason it passed me by.

JAD: Coming up, a story that will make you wish the Cold War wasn't over.

ROBERT: Not me. Not me. I'm happy it's over.

[LISTENER: This is Hester Fuller calling from the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

 

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