The Dark Truth Behind the World's Most Important Invention

Fritz Haber won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for pulling ammonia out of thin air. That one reaction still feeds about half the people on Earth. He also ran Germany's poison gas program in World War I and earned the name "father of chemical warfare."

I call it the worst Nobel Prize ever. Here is the chemistry, the history, and the hard lesson about knowledge versus wisdom.

Original video: https://youtu.be/AotqljjfXwo

0:00 The controversial prize
1:04 Nobel committee blunders
2:22 Introduction to Fritz Haber
3:48 The Haber-Bosch process
5:29 Nitrogen and life cycles
7:15 Feeding the global population
9:14 Chemistry of ammonia synthesis
12:58 Knowledge vs. wisdom