New Elements

What does it take to make something which has never existed on Earth before? The search for element 120 on the periodic table has begun at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

Cosmologist Andrew Pontzen, who is used to studying the processes of creation, visits the 88-Inch Cyclotron facility at Berkeley where the next new element may be created very soon.

To uncover what motivates scientists to pursue something that is possibly only produced in the violent explosions of stars he speaks with the scientists trying it now, with the scientists who last made an element at Berkeley 50 years ago, and with a historian about the fraught history of element discovery - from flying through mushroom clouds to faking elements.

The answer is not as straight forward as he suspected.