Prof. Jim Al-Khalili presents - 1001 Inventions: Journeys from Alchemy to Chemistry

you [Music] [Applause] [Music] in your school there's a good chance that you'll find a poster on the wall with all the chemical elements and their symbols from hydrogen to uranium and if it's really up to date one then there should also be other newer elements that you most likely won't even have heard of this classification of elements is called the periodic table and it was first created by a Russian chemist called Dmitri Mendeleev if there isn't such a poster at your school then tell your chemistry teacher to get one these elements represent all the different currents of atoms that can exist and scientists now understand very well how all these atoms fit together to make our world including our own bodies that's what we call chemistry but how and when was the science of chemistry first invented the ancient Greeks trying to explain what the world was made of but when he came to chemistry they could have done better [Music] then a thousand years later came a man who helped change everything he was known as Jabbar The Alchemist but his real name was Jabba even hey Yong he lived in the 8th century and spent most of his life in the town of Kufa back then it was one of the many multicultural centers of learning in the vast Islamic empire during medieval times chemistry was mixed up with a mysterious practice called alchemy in fact jabra himself was thought of as a bit of a mystic but this was more to do with the way he wrote you see the experiments he carried out in his lab were recorded in his books in a very complicated way but underneath all the gibberish was some amazing science so amazing in fact that we now think of Jabba as one of the world's first real chemists because of his detailed experiments in your chemistry class you might use test tubes and other strangely shaped glass containers in which you mix or heat chemicals a lot of these vessels were in fact developed by Jabba he drew inspiration from a range of scholars but he was one of the first and a long list of great scientists from that Golden Age of Arabic science and thanks to Chinese scholars who passed on the technology of paper making books could be written to spread those new scientific ideas lots of chemical processes developed by Jabba were used in industries at that time one of the biggest chemical industries during this period was soap at that time fragrance solid bars of soap were new two centuries after Jabba another brilliant scientist took chemistry to the next level his name was arising and in his famous book of secrets he carefully organized substances into long lists according to their chemical properties it was a long way from the four basic elements of the ancient Greeks the work of scholars like jarba and ever Ozzy got translated into Latin and spread around Europe by the time modern science was born the list of true elements was getting longer but many of the chemical methods that carried on being used were often those first invented by jarba Rubin heya so far we know of 118 different elements and that number is growing but the way new elements are made is no longer done in test tubes but in giant laboratories called nuclear accelerators in which of beams of atoms are slashed together that tremendous energies I wonder what Jabba would have thought of them [Music]

Channel: 1001Inventions

Views: 210,732

Rating: 4.9466667 out of 5

Keywords: Professor Jim Al-Khalili, Alchemy, chemistry, Ahmed Salim, 1001 inventions, unesco

Id: U9muF-Ebcqw

Length: 4min 45sec (285 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 07 2019