Everything in between were all about the characters and some significant persons who had contributed on the development of chemistry.

i think mendeleyev wouldn’t be TOO shocked about how much we rely on his ‘Periodic Law,’ but he’d be a lil amazed about what we’ve found out by using it and developing it each decade. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). Framing this history is the life story of the 19th Century Russian scientist Dmitri Mendeleyev, who fell asleep at his desk and awoke having dreamed the periodic table - the template upon which modern chemistry is founded, and the event which marked chemistry's coming of age as a science.Strathern conjures up from the dusty past, and richly fleshes out for us, the long line of extraordinary characters, their lives, influences, and contributions that eventually produced modern chemistry that has so profoundly shaped the modern world. It would be a good history, but the author irksomely takes an interest in the gossip on each famous scientist. On a wintry February day in 1869 the great Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleyev fell asleep at his desk after a marathon game of patience. Otto Loewi, the German-born physiologist who won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1936 for his work on the chemical transmission of nerve impulses, dreamed the design of an experiment to a hypothesis of chemical transmission that he had worked on 17 years earlier.

The best part goes from chapter 11 until the end of the book: the lives and contribution of Lavoisier, Dalton, Berzelius, de Chancourtois and Newlands, key precursors of our hero and his masterpiece. Strathern points and laughs about how wrong they were, how far from the true path of objectively true scientific thought. Where there were missing elements in his early tables, Mendeleyev postulated that these represented elements not yet discovered.Strathern's diverting style of writing fleshes out the scientists who labored to define what the elemental building blocks of the universe are. what drove an already very busy man like Lavoisier to spend his Sundays in the laboratory doing rather tedious measurents? Besides too frequently delving into unrelated gossip, the author too often (for a nonfiction work) inserts his own negative views on the motivations of each scientist. From ancientphilosophy, through medieval alchemy to the splitting of the atom, this is the true story of the birth of chemistry and the role of one man's dream .

Chemistry has been a neglected area of science writing, and Mendeleyev, the king of chemistry, is a largely forgotten genius. a witty, complexity-free confection that makes nonsense of the idea-we need to make our science books more demanding and headache-inducing. From the philosophical guess-work of the ancient Greeks (the Four Elements), to the metaphysical musings of the Alchemists (who still managed to discover a useful thing or two), to the brilliant insight of Mendeleyev in creating a framework to organize the expanding list of elements, which the new science was discovering in the 19th century. While the book was quite lengthy, I couldn’t help but feel that the part about Mendeleyev’s story was rather concise. Boyles Sceptial Chemist, with his concept of elements as particles, was one of the first coherent refutations of the Aristotelian theory and its chokehold on progress.In this way the marriage managed to survive, without the cohabitation which is the ruin of so many relationships. In the Prologue, Strathern sets the scene in Mendeleyev’s country house on a cold winter’s day of February 1869. Five if you count aether, which Aristotle invented to explain the movement of the planets and which reappeared in various guises down the ages. There is always a risk that ‘history of science’ books concentrate on the ripping historical yarns at the expense of explaining the science. Mendeleyev had already written the definitive textbook on organic chemistry while working as a lecturer at the Technical Institute in St.

Framing this history is the story of 19th-century Russian scientist Dmitri Mendeleyev, who dreamed the periodic table - the template upon which chemistry is founded. 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.When Kirchhoff had studied sunlight with his spectroscope, he had detected a number of unaccountable dark bands in its spectrum.