The Disappearing Spoon : : and Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World From the Periodic Table of the Elements
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Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout |
546 Ke | 4-week checkout | Due 05-01-2024 |
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Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout |
546 Ke | 4-week checkout | Due 05-16-2024 |
The periodic table of the elements is a crowning scientific achievement, but it's also a treasure trove of passion, adventure, obsession, and betrayal. These tales follow carbon, neon, silicon, gold, and all the elements in the table as they play out their parts in human history. 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)--but the more obscure characters provide some of the best stories, 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 melt in a cup of tea.--From publisher description.
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COMMUNITY REVIEWS
awesome submitted by lilveela on June 25, 2013, 2:03pm As a chemist, I thoroughly enjoyed the book. I read it with my book club and some of the non-chemist members really enjoyed the book as well. It contains a lot of interesting history behind periodic table. I would definitely recommend it to anyone.
couldn't get through it submitted by sarahyost on August 12, 2013, 9:29pm The book is written at a good level and presents a lot of interesting backstory to the periodic table and discovery of the the elements. Then I reached the chapter than included a bit about solar system formation and how different planets got different compositions - and the presentation didn't really follow the basic cloud-collapse picture of how planetary systems form. I read a bit more, but couldn't really get back into the book after that. I kept on wanting to check whether the book was actually fully explaining other things.
PUBLISHED
New York : Little, Brown and Co., c2010.
Year Published: 2010
Description: vi, 391 p. : ill. ; 25 cm.
Language: English
Format: Book
ISBN/STANDARD NUMBER
0316051640
9780316051644
SUBJECTS
Chemical elements -- Miscellanea.