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The infectious tales and astounding details in The Disappearing Spoon follow carbon, neon, silicon, and gold as they play out their parts in human history, finance, mythology, war, the arts, poison, and the lives of the frequently mad scientists who discovered them.
Kean's book has the structure of a Christmas tree. The trunk is a history of the classification of the elements, an effort that begins in the nineteenth century.
[...]The ornaments on this Christmas tree are the people and personalities behind the chemistry and physics. The usual suspects are here, like Marie Curie (and her radioactive journey to the discovery of polonium and radium) and William Shockley (who is credited, not exactly justly, with the discovery of the silicon transistor). Kean also tells good stories of more obscure characters like Paul Emile François Lecoq de Boisbaudran, whose discovery of gallium, a metal with a low melting point, gives this book its title: a spoon made of gallium will disappear in a cup of tea. [...] The Disappearing Spoon is bedecked with such intriguing and edifying accounts.
| Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
| $99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub |
Ben Maikan
reviewed The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements on January 06, 2012
The Disappearing Spoon
My GR friend Jason writes sturdy and trustworthy reviews, but I must take exception with him here :
The Disappearing Spoon is quick, light reading out in the sun. It handles complex theory in a comfortable, approachable way.
Yes, it is all that, IF such stuff as this makes sense to you :
The strongest solo acid is still the boron-based carborane (HCB11C111) And this boron acid has the best punchline so far : it's simultaneously the world's strongest and gentlest acid. To wrap your head around that, remember that acids split into positive and negative parts. In carborane's case you get H+ and an elaborate cagelike structure formed by everything else (CB11C111-) With most acids it's the negative portion that's corrosive and caustic and eats through the skin. But the boron cage forms one of the most stable molecules ever invented. Its boron atoms share electrons so generously that it practically becomes helium, and it won't go around ripping electrons from other atoms, the usual cause of acidic carnage.
Well, this could be part of the rules of Quidditch for all the sense it makes to poor general reader me, so I think The Disappearing Spoon is really for science geeks who think stuff about German chemists being hornswoggled out of a Nobel Prize for Alchemy by some Californian sharpies in 1951 or a neat account of the crucial properties of the biomolecule which are called handedness is the very thing for those moments on the beach when there isn't any eye candy around.
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