Original subtitles

[announcer] For those who stretch their imaginations,

who envision a future where technology

serves the greater good...

their mission is our mission.

At Lockheed Martin, we never forget

who we're working for.

[narrator] Looks like an ordinary city.

We know what we'll see on these streets, inside these walls.

Or so we think.

The people living in this apartment building

are surrounded by things they can't see.

All of us are.

Everywhere.

Things too slow for our eyes to detect...

or too fast to follow.

By things that can be seen

only through light waves invisible to us.

Bye, Mom.

Have fun.

[blow dryer whirring]

[narrator] A day in their lives would look a lot different

if they could see all the light waves around them.

[various conversations and sounds overlapping]

Or see other worlds around us

-[dog whines] -that are too small...

microscopic...

or smaller yet...

down to the heart of matter itself.

[buzzing]

Imagine if, for one day,

we could see what they can't--

all that's too slow, too fast, too small...

[thunder cracks]

Or simply invisible.

It would forever change our understanding

of the planet we live on.

On this day, we'll see beyond the limits of human vision.

Normally, we see light waves

that bounce off objects.

They beam into our eyes...

and onto our retina at the back of our eye,

where an upside-down and backward image appears.

It's turned into electrical impulses

that race to the brain...

which allows us to see what we need to survive.

[horn blaring]

But there's a lot we miss.

We only see the rainbow of light waves called visible light.

But that's just a fraction of the millions of wavelengths

in the vast electromagnetic spectrum.

Some of this invisible light

has waves longer than the rainbow's,

such as infrared...

microwaves...

and radio waves.

Others are shorter,

including ultraviolet...

X-rays...

and gamma.

These waves radiate from the sun...

space...

from everything around us.

[various voices and conversations]

[buzzing]

On the rooftop, there are creatures

that can see other light waves.

A bee can view the world through ultraviolet light.

It can see UV markings on flowers

that guide bees and other pollinators

right to their pollen.

All of this is invisible to you.

You just see a bee feeding on nectar.

Even a mosquito has an advantage over you.

Through infrared vision,

it can see the heat patterns on your body.

Warmer spots means more blood near the surface.

We have cameras that can see like a mosquito...

revealing what's hot...

and what's not.

[sizzling]

The brighter something looks,

the hotter it is.

Some wavelengths can pass right through objects.

Wonder what's going on inside the apartment building?

Gamma rays can show you.

With X-ray vision, you could see an egg hidden within a quail...

the mechanics of an animal in motion...

and what's going on inside anyone's body.

Radio waves can also pass through us.

An MRI can use them,

along with magnetic energy,

to show your heart beating.

[heart beating]

The more invisible light waves we can see,

the more secrets we uncover about the world around us.

But that's only the beginning.

Some things happen too slowly for our eyes.

In the 1930s, an amateur scientist in Chicago

wanted to see how flowers move.

John Nash Ott had the idea of shooting a single frame of film

at regular intervals...

15 minutes apart.

[camera clicking]

By projecting the pictures at the normal speed of movies--

24 frames per second-- Ott saw that flowers move dramatically

as they react to light.

He also had some fun.

[orchestra plays lively classical melody]

We call it "time-lapse photography,"

and through it, we discover movement

Where our eyes see none.

We can see how organisms emerge and grow.

How a vine survives by creeping from the forest floor

to reach the sunlight.

A passion-flower vine tosses its tendrils

like a grappling hook,

wrenches itself up,

and throws open its sun-catching blossom.

We can see living things decompose...

providing resources that allow new life to flourish.

Dead matter can be food for slime molds,

among the simplest life-forms.

Time-lapse shows that they are constantly on the move.

One slime mold is astonishingly complex.

When individual cells run out of food,

they group together and form stalks

with spores at the top.

The spores can be picked up by the wind or passersby

and carried to a place with more food.

Good boy.

[narrator] On a grander scale,

time-lapse allows us to see our planet in motion.

We can view not only the vast sweep of nature...

but the restless movement of humanity.

Each streaking dot represents a passenger plane.

By turning air traffic data into time-lapse imagery,

we can see something that's above us constantly...

but invisible--

the vast network of air travel

over the United States.

We can do the same thing with ships at sea--

turn data into a time-lapse view.

Decades of data give us a view of our entire planet

as a single organism,

sustained by currents circulating through the sea...

by moisture and warmth,

swirling through the atmosphere,

pulsing with lightning,

adorned by the Aurora Borealis.

It may be the ultimate time-lapse image--

the anatomy of Earth, brought to life.

[narrator] At the other extreme of time,

there are things that happen too fast for our eyes.

But we have technology to see that world, too.

[film narrator] Introducing Dr. Harold E. Edgerton

of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

His stroboscope light, my friends, is really something,

and it's put' the "super" in super-speed photography.

While normally film runs through the average movie camera

at .90 feel' a minute,

Edgerton's flicker box can handle 125 feel' a second.

In normal speed movies, a bullet' shot' from the muzzle

of a high-pa wered air gun is invisible-

Now Edgerton really photographs a bullet' in flight'-

Watch it come in from the left'-

Here, fascinating patterns of movement.

And when you recall that all the action of this bulb smashing

actual! y took place in the fraction of a second,

you realize that here is speed in movie photography, indeed!

[narrator] High-speed cameras do the opposite of time-lapse.

They shoot images thousands,

or even millions of times faster than our vision.

When played back at 24 images per second...

they show us remarkable things we normally miss.

[screech echoing]

When you see drops hit the water,

here's what you don't see.

Every drop bounces like a ball.

Held together by surface tension,

it continues to get smaller

and smaller.

This happens every time a raindrop hits a puddle.

[thunder rumbling]

A hundred times every second,

lightning strikes somewhere on Earth.

Little was known about lightning

till high-speed cameras turned the research upside down.

Literally.

[thunder rumbling]

What our eyes see is energy flowing downward

from the clouds.

Now we can see that electricity also moves

upward from the ground.

[thunder rumbling]

If we can see lightning bolts...

[crashing, rumbling]

We can see almost anything that's lightning-fast.

When a dragonfly flutters by,

you may not realize

it's the greatest flyer in nature.

It can hover...

fly backwards...

and even upside down.

No one knew the secret.

But high speed shows that a dragonfly can move

all four wings in different directions

at the same time.

No aircraft can do this.

If we can see how nature's ingenious devices work...

we can imitate them.

By tracking markers on an insect's wings,

we can visualize the airflow they produce.

What we learn could lead us to new kinds of robotic flyers

that expand our vision of important events

in remote places.

How many secrets remain to be discovered

in the super-fast worlds of nature?

We move through the landscape like giants,

unaware of the wonders too small for us to see.

Long ago, we noticed that a glass sphere

made things appear larger.

Grinding it down into a lens magnified objects even more.

Stacking lenses in a tube greatly multiplied the effect,

and the compound microscope was born.

It let us peer into a world we'd never seen before.

Suddenly, we could see creatures in common pond water

that we didn't even know existed.

But there is a limitation to the compound microscope.

We can't see down into the scales of the butterfly's wing

because visible light waves are too big.

Everything smaller goes out of focus.

We needed a microscope

that used something smaller than visible light.

The scanning electron microscope fires electrons,

smaller than atoms, creating an image

that magnifies things by as much as a million times.

It shows that deep inside the tiny scales

of a butterfly's wing

are even smaller structures

which are shaped to reflect only pure blue light waves,

giving the wings of a Morpho butterfly

one of the most brilliant blues in nature.

The electron microscope reveals things

both bizarre and beautiful.

Guess what this is.

A butterfly egg.

The skin of a shark.

A caterpillar's mouth.

The eye of a fruit fly.

An eggshell.

A tomato stem.

A flea.

A snail's tongue.

We think we know most of the animal kingdom,

but there may be millions of tiny species

waiting to be discovered.

Even the air we breathe

is full of unseeable stuff--

pollen...

skin flakes...

insect parts...

animal hairs.

There's even matter from space,

including micro diamonds and jewels

from other planets and supernova explosions.

30,000 tons of space dust

falls to the Earth every year.

Some of it is in every breath inhaled

by all the living things on Earth,

including you.

[speaking quietly, laughing]

And it gets even more personal.

There are unseen creatures living all over your body,

possibly including mites that spend their entire lives

dwelling on your eyelashes,

crawling with their eight legs over your skin at night.

They're on some of you...

right now.

When you're unlucky enough to get a case of head lice,

this is what's living in your hair.

More than 1,000 strains of bacteria

could be in your belly button.

This is what causes stinky feet.

Some 32 million bacteria live on your skin,

most of them harmless

or even good for you.

There are far more organisms living on you

than there are people on Earth.

It turns out that the world of the really small

is full of clever things we can use.

The surface of a lotus leaf repels almost any liquid.

[girl] Whoa! That's so cool!

[narrator] A super-close look reveals the secret:

tiny hair-like bumps that cause drops

to roll right off the leaf.

Maybe we could mimic this,

making a coating to shield airplanes from ice buildup.

Once, it was a mystery

how a gecko could walk up smooth glass.

Gecko feet are covered by half a million tiny bristles

that branch into split ends,

each with a pad on the tip.

The structures build up an electrical charge

that attracts them to the surface,

adding up to incredible sticking power

and a model for a new kind of robot

that could climb almost anything.

A spider also harbors secrets.

Spider silk thread is, pound for pound, stronger than steel

and yet completely elastic.

Imagine what we might build

if we could produce a synthetic version.

The first step is getting a closer look at spider silk.

The journey could take us all the way down to what we call

the nanoworld.

The silk is 100 times thinner than a human hair.

On it, there's bacteria.

Near the bacteria, ten times smaller, a virus.

Inside that, ten times smaller,

three strands of its DNA.

And nearing the limit of our most powerful microscopes,

single carbon atoms.

Four of them are the size of one nanometer.

Welcome to the nanoworld.

This incomprehensibly small place is the new frontier.

Exploring it will lead to huge changes in our lives.

Our most advanced microscopes can now see this:

individual atoms, though fuzzy,

proving years of scientific theory, simulated here.

And not only can we see them--

with the tip of a powerful microscope,

we can actually move atoms

and begin to create amazing nano devices.

Some could one day patrol your body

for all kinds of diseases,

and clean out clogged arteries along the way.

Tiny chemical machines of the future

may even repair DNA.

One of the wildest things about the nano world,

substances here behave differently

than the same material does in our world.

To us, gold is golden in color.

But nano gold can be any color.

It absorbs light and generates heat,

leading to an idea:

injecting nano-sized gold particles

into the bloodstream...

which are chemically coded to attach to cancerous cells.

An incoming laser beam heats the gold particles...

burning the cells.

The promise of nano goes beyond medicine.

Another material with far different nano properties

is carbon,

the same breakable stuff found in pencil lead.

At the nano scale, it has mind-boggling strength.

With it, we've created the world's thinnest material,

graphene,

one carbon atom thick.

It's harder than diamonds

but nearly as flexible as rubber.

Turned into a roll, it's called a carbon nanotube,

one of the strongest and lightest materials on Earth.

With it, we could one day make things

we can only dream about today.

It may even be possible to use carbon nanotubes

to build an elevator to space.

We are on the threshold of extraordinary advances

born of our drive to see all that's hidden

in the world around us.

On a summer evening,

under an endless rain of cosmic dust,

the air full of pollen and skin flakes

and bits of everything on Earth...

people go about their lives...

- Happy birthday. -Happy birthday.

Oh!

[narrator] surrounded by the unseeable.

Knowing there's much more around us than we can see...

forever changes our understanding of the world.

[whooping, laughter]

Who knows what waits to be seen...

[utensil clinking on glass]

What new wonders will transform our lives.

[man speaking, people laughing]

We will just have to see.