93 pages • 3 hours read
Sam KeanThe Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
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The Wondrous Properties of the Elements
The Disappearing Spoon is largely anecdotal, its pages filled with interesting and remarkable facts and stories about atoms.
The reader learns, for example, that uranium, when split apart, releases enough energy to power a bomb; that the metal gallium, shaped into a spoon, will melt in cup of warm tea;; that, while people breathe nitrogen in the atmosphere every day, pure nitrogen is lethal; and that some elements only exist for a few moments in a science lab.
The book explores how atoms are wonders in themselves, way too small to be seen, their tiny nuclei surrounded by clouds of electrons far enough away that even the heaviest atoms are mostly empty space. Electrons in one atom will play musical chairs with electrons in some nearby atoms, bonding the atoms together. Electrons can jump back and forth billions of times a second. Atoms are forged inside stars at temperatures of millions of degrees; heavier atoms are born from the explosions of giant stars.
Perhaps the biggest wonder is that the energy levels of atoms, electrons, and their interactions are tuned to the exactly right conditions for organic life. If the elements didn’t behave precisely as they do, people wouldn’t exist at all. In atomic theory, wonders never cease.
The Unpredictability of Scientific Success
Kean’s book emphasizes that science is hard to do, enough so that only the most determined, smart, and creative people can overcome its challenges to discover new facts about nature—and that luck and courage are also often factors. Those who ferret out the elements and solve their mysteries are a gritty, eccentric lot whose lives follow erratic and sometimes ironic paths.
For instance, chemist William Crookes performed ground-breaking work on the dangerous elements selenium and thallium, but he also took a fancy to the mumbo-jumbo of séances, even writing a monograph in support of the practice. Marie Curie made world-changing discoveries about radiation and then was killed by the atoms she explored. Gyorgy Hevesy invented the first tracer by sprinkling radioactive lead onto the dinner meat at his boarding house. Pasteur and Domagk used untested chemicals on desperate patients, risking their lives, to try to save them. (They both succeed.)
Perhaps it is daring coupled with wild inventiveness that most accounts for these scientists’ success in the hunt for new atoms and the deciphering of their mysteries.
The Endless Search for Knowledge
Scientists have ample motives to breach the frontiers of knowledge—glory, prizes, more grant money—but arguably their strongest impulse comes from curiosity and wonder. The itch they must scratch is the desire to know the answer. In science, this process is never-ending, and the book provides examples of how the quest continues apace.
Researchers spend decades trying to fill the missing boxes in the periodic table, and when that project finishes, scientists move on to the next project, the manufacture of yet more elements. This open-ended project, like so many others in science, gets stalled from time to time, until a new breakthrough accelerates the discoveries once again. The book makes clear that the challenges scientists face are nowhere near completed. More discoveries lie ahead, and, presumably, more stories are yet to be told about eccentric scientists and their adventures.
