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A frenzied celebration of the periodic table of chemical elements through "tales of the true story madness, love and the world"

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the heart of the book by Sam Kean is a refreshing idea: tell the story of the periodic table almost entirely in terms of material scarcity folly, greed and obsession partisan elementary

The field is vast, one might say universal. Some of these stories have been told repeatedly (no historian, however eccentric, could fail to Mendeleev or Rutherford or Pierre and Marie Curie), but look for things Kean rarest substances. Of course, it will (or rather, no notes suggest that a friend for another book on the pictures sent items) for the small Swedish colony in a career Ytterby feldspar which gave its name to four rare earth elements (ytterbium, yttrium, terbium and erbium, pub quiz demons). Then there is Stockholm holmium, thulium for Thule, and gadolinium, after the worker Finnish Johan element Gadolin hunter.

The theme of each chapter - the politics, money, war, arts, health, toxins, radiation, and so on - that is prescribed by the groups of elements in the periodic table and the things we say about the nature of matter, the origins of Stardust from the elements, of compounds that do and why some elements are more reactive than others, and why the table falls into a pattern so obvious (to some) that his spawn were able to predict the characteristics of elements not yet identified. The pace is enthusiastic, the tone and language of young people took to the chemicals or not, and examples are pleasantly unexpected. Did you know that the longest word in the language (1185 words) describing a virus protein snuff mosaic? Or the mixture of antimony pentafluoride and hydrogen fluoride results in a superacid is "one hundred thousand billion billion billion times stronger than stomach acid and eat through the glass, as ruthless as the water through paper '? On the same page we learn that Newton was obsessed with the sexual properties of antimony, which is probably Mozart's death to take too much to combat a high fever, and based boron carborane is both "soft acids and high in the world."

well lead to another: gold and ruthenium Parker 51 pen tips Mark Twain is a Remington typewriter, then in 1904 Twain tale about one who is on the radio, but isolates the heat of its own with a suit of Poland, with the consequence that, Satan says, "I burn. suffering inside! "Polonius never retained the heat of a critical mass of radio, Kean said, before participating in the lithium and the dark moods of the poet Robert Lowell.



gallium, which sits next to aluminum in the periodic table, melts at low temperature: the title of Kean was named after a joke with a purpose laboratory teaspoon gallium disappears when immersed in a cup of hot tea. Then, knowing that the melting point of metals has created problems for the gunners who wanted to launch projectiles of larger and larger to the enemy, which leads to an instructive history of the Portuguese dictator Salazar and how he sold tungsten for both sides during the Second World War.

Tim Radford Book reflection