Mendeleyev's Dream: The Quest For the Elements

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Paul Strathern’s first contribution to the popularisation of science was as the author of a series of witty, fast-paced and lucid science booklets published under the broad title of “The Big Idea”, with subtitles such as “Archimedes and the Fulcrum” and “Hawking and Black Holes”. But on the other hand, he did pioneer some of the methods of modern chemistry, so maybe he's sort of okay. a witty, complexity-free confection that makes nonsense of the idea-we need to make our science books more demanding and headache-inducing. After a while I started feeling like I should mark down the major figures he is covering in the book. what drove an already very busy man like Lavoisier to spend his Sundays in the laboratory doing rather tedious measurents?

That said, it was enjoyable to hear his relentlessly scathing attitude to religion, spirituality and mysticism, all of which were roundly condemned as holding the human race back from making fundamental discoveries. I'm reading this book to learn about science: I didn't want to know about the sex lives of famous scientists. earlier, the French positivist philosopher Auguste Comte had pronounced that certain kinds of knowledge would remain forever beyond the reach of science. Strathern's diverting style of writing fleshes out the scientists who labored to define what the elemental building blocks of the universe are.It goes all the way back to the Ancient Greeks and how Aristotle proposed a theory in which matter was composed of four elements—fire, earth, wind, and water. He struggled to find an underlying principle that would organize them according to sets of similar properties and eventually reaped the benefits of the pattern-recognition that fuels creativity. Even though Strathern prose is pleasant and the content interesting, I prefer the former more direct approach. On a wintry February day in 1869 the great Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleyev fell asleep at his desk after a marathon game of patience. This wonderful story reminds us that the birth of modern chemistry and particle physics can both be linked directly to Mendeleyev's discovery of the periodic table, published 1869.

This, however, does not detract from the amazing story behind the distillation of modern chemistry out of the quagmire of beliefs and false starts - era after era - finally culminating in Mendeleyev's periodic table of the elements and the birth of modern chemistry. Strathern is the author of several novels, including A Season in Abyssinia, which won a Somerset Maugham prize, and Mendeleyev's Dream: The Quest for the Elements.Here he briefly attended lectures by Gustav Kirchhoff, said to have been the most boring lecturer in all Germany at the time. Reading how scientific though emerged from this obscure practice is thrilling and understanding how scientists reasoned to get us to where we are today is incredible. Indeed, in 1875 Paul Lecoq identified gallium, which had all the properties needed to fill the gap between aluminium and uranium. Trailblazing chemist Dmitri Mendeleev (February 8, 1834–February 2, 1907) came to scientific greatness via an unlikely path, overcoming towering odds to create the periodic table foundational to our understanding of chemistry.

Besides too frequently delving into unrelated gossip, the author too often (for a nonfiction work) inserts his own negative views on the motivations of each scientist. The book guides us through the labyrinth of dead ends and discoveries from Thales of Miletus in ancient Greece, through Mendeleyev of mid 19th century Czarist Russia that precipitated the identification and classification of the known elements. First there was the seeking of direct profitable results (gold, philosopher's stone, life elixers), and this seems to change in looking for rather more abstract results ('knowledge', fame, status). The author narrates the origins of chemistry from Ancient Greece to the present time in an almost vivid way that makes the story highly interesting and very informative. Otto Loewi, the German-born physiologist who won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1936 for his work on the chemical transmission of nerve impulses, dreamed the design of an experiment to a hypothesis of chemical transmission that he had worked on 17 years earlier.

Dmitri Mendeleyev was not the only scientist to find the answer to a puzzle in the murky world of the subconscious. uses the creation of the periodic table by the great Russian scientist Dmitri Mendeleyev, who literally dreamed it up, to bookend a journey through the history of chemistry. While the book was quite lengthy, I couldn’t help but feel that the part about Mendeleyev’s story was rather concise. Beginning in the early 17th century, men like Robert Boyle began to put chemistry on a footing we would today recognize as scientific.