NOVA: Kaboom! The Sizzling Story of Explosions

Description: Kaboom!: Follow an explosive trail through the ages starting in ninth-century China where alchemists stirred up a concoction meant to provide eternal life. Instead the strange mix blew up in their faces-and the first pyrotechnics were born. Intrigued by the magical formula Roger Bacon made a bigger bang by confining the black powder inside a tube. "When the flame of the powder catcheth the soul of man" noted the medieval friar "it burneth exceeding deep." The way now paved for high explosives nineteenth-century industrialist Alfred Nobel-known variously as the 'merchant of death' and the founder of the Nobel Peace Prize-in turn pushed nitroglycerin to its dynamite potential. Carrying on this legacy physicist Robert Oppenheimer unleashed the terrible beauty of the atomic bomb ironically hoping its awesome power might render war obsolete. What will be our next experiment in search of the ultimate explosion?Fireworks!: Everybody loves fireworks-but why? Behind the dazzling displays and fiery explosions is a colorful past as well as a complex and secretive science that goes back over 1000 years. Discover the chemical secrets that put the bang in the rocket and the fizz in the Roman candle.