Periodic Tales: The Curious Lives of the Elements

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Aldersey-Williams’s retelling of history and science is quite compelling, yet he often digresses into tangents that detract from the overall thrust of the book. From ancient civilisations to contemporary culture, from the oxygen of publicity to the phosphorus in your pee, the elements are near and far and all around us. Several of these elements are very familiar, for example nitrogen and oxygen, and metals such as gold and silver.

Periodic Tales by Hugh Aldersey-Williams - Eyrie Review: Periodic Tales by Hugh Aldersey-Williams - Eyrie

Mākslinieki meklēja veidus, kā šo novitāti iekļaut savos darbos, jaunie elementi kļuva par modes simboliem un beigu beigās par sacensību elementu, lai noteiktu, kura sabiedriskā iekārta ir pārāka – komunisms vai kapitālisms. This book definitely tells a different story about the elements than what I, with a chemistry background, usually got.One person can't assess the cultural significance of neon lights, the treasure of the Incas, water fluoridation and the work of Agatha Christie among many, many other things, and it's sort of ridiculous to try.

Periodic Tales: The Curious Lives of the Elements eBook Periodic Tales: The Curious Lives of the Elements eBook

Mr Aldersey-Williams’ select bibliography now strongly and helpfully points me in the direction of I Nechaev’s 1942 book “Chemical Elements” (or rather of the translation from the Russian), as being my long-lost book. Physicists then started bombarding existing elements with high-energy particles to create synthetic ones.Along the way we learn about the history and commercial usefulness of things like plutonium, lead, iodine, tin, and cadmium.

Periodic Tales - Hugh Aldersey-Williams

Only 92 chemical elements are stable; the 20-odd others are not, and sooner or later decay radioactively. Autors pastāsta arī dažus savus eksperimentus, uz kuriem viņu ir pamudinājusi grāmatas sarakstīšana. Instead, the book is a cultural history of some of the chemical elements, dwelling on both their material presence in our lives and their figurative presence in art, literature, language, history and geography. One difference from Kean's book is that Aldersey-Williams' book is more autobiographical and outlines a number of personal household experiments which he carries out to illustrate the properties of the elements under discussion - such as pouring molten lead into water to produce weird shapes from which one's fortune can be told and extracting phosphorus from one's own urine. Of great importance in chemistry are the fundamental building blocks of matter, the chemical elements, each made of only a single, characteristic type of atom.You may think of them as the inscrutable letters of the periodic table but you know them much better than you realise. Daļu no stāstiem es jau biju dzirdējis – skābeklis un flogistons, Kirī pāris un viņu vājību pēc vakariņām vērot radioaktīvo elementu spīdumu, Mendeļejevs un viņa periodisko elementu tabula, Napoleons un arsēna krāsas tapetes , gallija karotes, tie ir tikai daži. Periodic Tales– A Cultural History of the Elements, from Arsenic to Zinc by Hugh Aldersey-Williams presents an introduction to the elements of the periodic table, their properties, their history, and the stories that surround them. Unlocking their astonishing secrets and colourful pasts, Periodic Tales is a voyage of wonder and discovery, showing that their stories are our stories, and their lives are inextricable from our own. From memories of gathering as many elements of the periodic table during his childhood, to drawn out stories of how a present day person is producing charcoal, to historical tales of elements, and then to the author personally experimenting to abstract an element.

Periodic Tales | Financial Times Periodic Tales | Financial Times

His ingots — worth a dozen times more than silver — were admired at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1855 by Emperor Napoleon III of France, who offered financial support to Deville. There follow his years at boarding school where, though unhappy, he developed the intellectual curiosity that would shape his later life. The Pleasure of Finding Things Out collects the best short works of rule-breaking genius Richard Feynman, showing his passion for knowledge and sense of fun at their most infectious.Who knew, for example, that the British general Wellington was known as the “Iron Duke” not for his prowess in battle but because he had installed iron shutters on the windows of his London home as protection against the mob? His first periodic table was rotated ninety degrees from the one we are familiar with, so that our rows and columns were reversed, and when the first noble gases were discovered he found it hard to accept that an entire new section would need to be added to the table. While their chemical properties of the elements in the periodic table are important it is the cultural baggage these substances have accumulated that the author is most concerned with. My aim in this book has been to show that the elements are all around us, both in the material sense that they are in the objects we treasure and under our kitchen sinks, but also around us more powerfully in a figurative sense, in our art and literature and language, in our history and geography, and that the character of these parallel lives arises ultimately from each element’s universal and unvarying properties. Within the pages of this book I experienced the very same interest, excitement, and knowledge which first sparked my interest in chemistry (and associated sciences) all those years ago.