Best book on the periodic table

When you walk into my office, the first thing you see is a giant copy of the periodic table. Includes examples or representations of 118 objects, such as a glow-in-the-dark clock Requests for radium and a bottle of Pepto-Bismol for bismuth. (Sometimes it’s the visitors Equal attention to the table As they are in everything we discuss – and I don’t blame them!)

Besides being a neat work of art, the periodic table reminds me how one discovery can lead to countless other discoveries. All the complexities of the universe arise from the properties of this graph. Because we understand atoms, we can make chips, and therefore we can make software, and therefore we can make artificial intelligence. It all goes back to the periodic table.

But how exactly did the periodic table come about? Anyone who took a science class in elementary school will remember that it was first introduced by the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev. But the table was actually the culmination of two thousand five hundred scientific discoveries.

Nice book by Paul Strathairn Mendeleev’s dream He traces this trip back to ancient Greece, when people began to wonder why the world was the way it was. It’s hard to imagine a time before science. But until Thales of Miletus discovered that the presence of shell fossils on Earth must mean the entire world was once a sea, Strathearn reminds us that people were more focused on religious matters than scientific matters.

Strathairn devotes much of his book to exploring the roots of chemistry, which was an early form of science. For centuries, many of the brightest minds, including Isaac Newton, have been fascinated by the idea of ​​turning raw materials into gold or an elixir that will make you immortal. Though science has been proven wrong, alchemy has inspired generations of scientists to think about how substances interact with each other.

Mendeleev’s dream It feels like a thick book, but Strathern keeps it light by writing about the many outrageous characters who have studied alchemy and alchemy over the years. One of the funniest chapters is on Paracelsus, a Swiss physician and alchemist in the 1500s. Paracelsus made major contributions to toxicology and medicine. He was also an eccentric character with a flair for the dramatic. During one of his lectures, Strathearn wrote: “Parcelsus began by declaring that now he would reveal the greatest mysteries of medical science. And then he dramatically uncovers a bowl of shit. (He IS a man after my heart).

Mendeleev was also an extraordinary man. He was known to be so angry that he danced “with a fury like Rumplestiltskin”, and the title of the book refers to his claim that the periodic table came to him in a dream. Regardless of its origins, the significance of this hack is indisputable. Other scientists have hinted at repeating patterns in the atomic weights of elements, but Mendeleev was the first to discover them and fill in the gaps. He accurately predicted the presence of gallium and germanium before any of the elements were discovered. For the first time, humanity had a roadmap to understanding the building blocks of the universe.

Mendeleev’s dream It’s the best book I’ve read on the periodic table. It helps you understand how it all fits together and why it’s so useful. It’s also a fascinating look at how a new science can develop. Strathairn calls the history of the periodic table “a bizarre example of human aspiration” and I agree with him. The history of chemistry tells us as much about the development of human thought as it does about the science of matter.