Mendeleyev's Dream: The Quest For the Elements

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No missing or damaged pages, no creases or tears, no underlining or highlighting of text, and no writing in the margins.

That said, it was enjoyable to hear his relentlessly scathing attitude to religion, spirituality and mysticism, all of which were roundly condemned as holding the human race back from making fundamental discoveries. This is a history of chemistry, loosely organized around Mendeleyev's discovery that the elements can be understood as a periodic table. The title is slightly misleading as there’s only 30 pages dedicated to Mendeleyev but I’m not complaining since I found his story to be one of the most boring ones from all the other scientists. And it was philosophy because it used reason to reach these conclusions: there was no appeal to the gods or mysterious metaphysical forces.

By his mid-thirties, he was intensely preoccupied with classifying the 56 elements known by that point. 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.

Empedocles was to die when he leapt into the crater of Mount Etna, in an attempt to prove to his followers that he was immortal. His readable romp through the annals of chemistry conveys a remarkable amount of information about science in general.The problem is that the author seems to be grading every chemist or pre-chemist on a scale of how much progress they made to the modern view of chemistry, represented presumably by the periodic table. A promising scholar, Mendeleev — also spelled Mendeleyev in English — published papers by the time he was 20 and attended the world’s first chemistry conference at 26. Reading how scientific though emerged from this obscure practice is thrilling and understanding how scientists reasoned to get us to where we are today is incredible. It was only when he reentered his own head under the spell of sleep’s uninhibited state that the disjointed bits fell into a pattern and the larger idea expressed itself. Paul Strathern is a Somerset Maugham prize-winning novelist, and his nonfiction works include The Artist, the Philosopher, and the Warrior: The Intersecting Lives of Da Vinci, Machiavelli, and Borgia and the World They Shaped (Bantam), Napoleon in Egypt (Bantam) and Mendeleyev’s Dream: The Quest for the Elements (Thomas Dunne).

But if you have to put in the modern judgement (which may possibly be a service to modern readers), do it ONCE and do it AT THE END.He struggled to find an underlying principle that would organize them according to sets of similar properties and eventually reaped the benefits of the pattern-recognition that fuels creativity. what drove an already very busy man like Lavoisier to spend his Sundays in the laboratory doing rather tedious measurents? The argument was conducted entirely within the realms of this world, from which evidence could be gathered to prove or disprove its conclusions. Paul Strathern tells the dramatic and entertaining story of humankind's quest to discover the fundamentals of chemistry, culminating in Mendeleyev's dream of the Periodic Table. i’ve laughed, audibly gasped, and felt like i was going crazy along with all of the famous and infamous geniuses of the centuries.

On a wintry February day in 1869 the great Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleyev fell asleep at his desk after a marathon game of patience. Strathern is an entertaining guide, capable of marshaling a colorful cast of thinkers and experimentalists. The author adds some nice touches like Goethe interest in the field and how at that time general culture was not dissociated from science (as it usually happens nowadays). Framing this history is the life story of the nineteenth-century Russian scientist Dmitri Mendeleyev, who fell asleep at his desk and awoke after conceiving the periodic table in a dream-the template upon which modern chemistry is founded and the formulation of which marked chemistry's coming of age as a science.

It focuses 100 percent on the deficits of pre-modern scholars, just as doctors used to focus on the deficits of disabled people. Misguided from the start and frequently bizarre, alchemy did manage to work out a good many compounds, chemical processes and even some practical applications. While it was a scattered approach to the history of chemistry and science as a whole, Strathern does a good job telling the story of so many of the brilliant scientists before and including Dmitri Mendeleyev.