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Mendeleyev's Dream: The Quest For the Elements

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I loved learning about the origins of alchemy and how it transcended into chemistry, and I also really enjoyed reading about the discovery of all the different elements. Alas, chemistry has lost much of that excitement, but Strathern does an excellent job revitalizing the drama of its volatile mix of ideas and substances. As Mendeleyev’s eyes ran once more along the line of ascending atomic weights, he suddenly noticed something that quickened his pulse.

Strathern is an entertaining guide, capable of marshalling a colourful cast of thinkers and experimentalists. From ancientphilosophy, through medieval alchemy to the splitting of the atom, this is the true story of the birth of chemistry and the role of one man's dream . The wondrous and illuminating story of humankind's quest to discover the fundamentals of chemistry, culminating in Mendeleyev's dream of the Periodic Table.One of the few things most of us remember from that long-ago high school chemistry class is the periodic table, with the elements laid out like cards in a game of solitaire, the alkali metals running down the left-hand side, the noble gases down the right, and so on.

From that perspective one could say that the first part of the book is about alchemy and the second part about chemistry. Others, in particular the German chemist Julius Meyer, were also puzzling over the tantalizing patterns that Mendeleyev had begun to discern in his early arrangements of the known elements. The book starts and ends with the story of Dmitri Mendeleev's arrangement of the known elements to form the original periodic table. In its pages there are more asides, anecdotes, ammunition for pub quizzes, personal information about alchemists, scientists, chemists, and charlatans, and touches of humor than the reader has a right to expect.Indian mathematical genius and dreamer Srinivasa Ramanujan often dreamt of a Hindu goddess, named Namakkal, who would appear and present mathematical formulae which he would verify after waking. Paul Strathern is a Somerset Maugham Award-winning novelist, and his nonfiction works include The Venetians, Death in Florence, The Medici, Mendeleyev's Dream, The Florentines, Empire, and The Borgias, all available from Pegasus Books. 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. On the basis of the facts and anecdotes Strathern skilfully weaves together here, the whole historical drama of chemical science, from the Four Elements of the Greeks, through the gold-hunting alchemy of the Arabs, to the near-misses ( Phlogiston) of the Enlightenment, had been a kind of narrative prologue, building up to that seminal February day in Moscow and Mendeleyev's discovery of the Periodic Table. One of Bill Gates' Top Five Book Recommendations* The wondrous and illuminating story of humankind's quest to discover the fundamentals of chemistry, culminating in Mendeleyev's dream of the Periodic Table.

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