Chaper 19 DS summary

90 percent of the particles in the universe are hydrogen and the other 10 percent is helium, leaving the rest of the elements in the universe almost just a rounding error. Out of these elements, astatine is the rarest natural element. But this is a paradox, because you'd think that there would be less of the most radioactive elements because they decay so quickly, but there is actually more francium, which is more radioactive, than there is astatine. This is because of the two forces fighting inside an atom, the strong nuclear force (which is attractive) and the electrostatic force (which repels particles). When you get to a certain point the nuclei get too big for the nuclear force to hold onto and the atom decays. Interestingly enough, though, the lifespan on elements does not necessary constantly decrease as the seize of the nucleus gets bigger - scientists call these elements that actually are more stable than their predecessors the island of stability. There is a theory that Einstein developed that suggests that as the ratio of the number of protons and alpha approaches one, electrons fly faster and faster and may even reach the speed of light.

Ultimately, the way we see the periodic table, like a castle with turrets, is just one variation that we've grown accustomed to, but in regality there are hundreds even thousands of other ways we could have arranged the table that contains so much human history.

Chapter 18 DS summary

It is the job of every standards bureau to keep an exact measurement of everything and the international standard for this is right outside of Paris. One of the jobs of the BIPM is keeping the International Prototype Kilogram - the world's official kilogram made platinum and iridium. But because of the ridiculous nature of having standards set by physical objects that can be damaged or lost of gain a few atoms here or there, the standards for measurements have shifted towards things that can be emailed. Like a mater if now 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of light in any vacuum rather than a metal rod. And time is kept by a cesium clock that relies on separating and timing electrons falling between energy levels rather than a hypothetical distance around the sun. Although the scientific constant alpha, which is responsible for how closely bound electrons are, seems to not only be completely arbitrary and unexplainable as well as being responsible for the presence of life, but some scientists think that there may be evidence that it is actually changing. The idea that alpha may not actually be a constant completely changes the way scientists view the universe, especially in the context of the possibility of other life.

Chapter 17 DS summary

Not every scientific discovery has been exotic though. While at a pub in 1952, Glaser developed a theory about bubbles and tracking their movements. He first tried this in the lab with beers, although quickly switched to liquid hydrogen. Bubbles provide an excellent "net" across a large variety of lab experiments. Calcium, for instance, foams up and that principle has been instrumental in both the formation of limestone and the subsequent histories that go along with the existence of limestone caves etc. Scientists have often developed theories about specific bubbles in specific situations but scorned the study of them itself. Rutherford used bubbles to study radioactivity and develop the theory about alpha and beta decay. This idea about decay led to a much more accurate estimation of the age of the earth. During WWII Lord Rauleigh discovered that submarine propellers were being eaten away by the bubbles they were creating. Putterman found that sound waves can transmute bubbles into light, especially with noble gases in a study called sonoluminescence.

Chapter 16 DS summary

Extreme cold often causes elements to behave in completely unpredictable ways. The band of Englishman led by Robert Falcon that were determined to be the first to reach the south pole discovered this when not only having just discovered that the Norwegians had beat them by just a month but the return team found that the fuel that they had stored in tin-soldered containers had completely leaked out and all over the food supplies. All of them ended up dying because of this mishap but this showcases an interesting property. When tin gets extremely cold its atoms arrange themselves in different ways and when tin shifts into its weaker state in extreme cold a "white rust" is form and the tin crumbles and erodes away. Cold also brings up the idea that there are actually far more specific states of matter in the universe than our simple "solid, liquid, gas" deviation has accounted for.  For instance, when noble gases get forced into a solid state, even they will often start to bind with other elements. It wasn't until 2000 that Finish scientist were able to force argon into a solid compound. At extremely low temperatures there seems to be different rules for subatomic particles. Electrons will metamorphose in superconductors and whole elements themselves will begin to overlap in a state called coherence. Coherence can best be understood in the context of light and the way lasers work by coordinating the electrons jumping around in energy shells. But one thing that bugs scientists more than anything is the dual wave-particle nature of light and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle doesn't neatly able to the photons of light but when viewed as waves it is a little different. But that principle does able in the context of atoms getting cold enough to form the Bose-Einstein condensate that in theory could produce a single atom that had begun as thousands of separate ones.

Chapter 15 DS summary

William Crookes was elected to the Royal Society although he later almost got kicked out after releasing a paper that endorsed the pathological science of spiritualism. Pathological science pick out whatever "marginal and unlikely phenomenon" that appeals to them and amass scientific evidence for it, and once this has been done, the masses just have ammunition. The megalodon is a perfect example. Science discovered the shark teeth and discovered a great many things about it, although when people began to cite irrelevant evidence pointing towards the fact that it is still around it began to drift towards a pathological science. Fleischmann and Pons also provide an example of people wanting a result to be true that they ignore all the evidence to the contrary. This pair, after passing a current through a palladium electrode in a chamber of heavy water declared completely incorrectly that they had discovered cold fusion. When the rest of the scientific community essentially essentially came crashing together to prove them wrong, they completely lost their credibility and may have become known as some of the world's biggest frauds. In rare cases though, what seems like a pathological science at the start because it is so unbelievable, actually turns out to be legitimate. Rontgen discovered X-rays and valiantly spent weeks trying to prove himself wrong before he showed anyone.

Chapter 14 DS summary

Science has often been dictated by money and those with enough to afford all the equipment. But for centuries it was a more of a hobby than a profession and some, like Goethe wrote about science in their great literary works, completely unhindered by real, actual science. Goethe did make one contribution to the periodic table, albeit indirectly. Because of his prominence he was elected to choose a scientist for the open chair in the chemistry department of the University of Jena. Goethe chose J.W. Dobereiner who made significant progress in exactly weighing the elements and discovered that they often fit into groups of three, although this idea took hold and was carried a bit past where it was warranted. Maholy-Nagy later developed a theory about the difference between "forced obsolescence" and "artificial obsolescence" about the development of certain things in society. An example of artificial would be humans creating new things out of want and fads rather than need, like the Parker 51 pen that was wildly popular, even though it was just a pen. Science has often been used in literary works as in Twain's short story that characterizes Satan as made of radium. Lithium has also influenced literary works in a different way - after being prescribed to Lowell, whose life was being completely ravaged by bipolar disorder, Lowell began to get better although perhaps lithium deadened the part of him that was responsible for his literary genius.

Chapter 13 DS summary

At different points in time different elements have been used to both prevent the creation of counterfeit money as well as aid in creating the fake money itself. In an ancient legend King Midas was said to be able to turn anything into gold just by touching it. It is known understood that his kingdom had a lot of zinc and when zinc mixes with a normally bronze alloy it creates brass, which has a more golden color and would have appealed to humans' ever-insatiable desire for gold. 3 Irishman accidentally stumbled on a massive deposit of gold which caused a gold rush, although it turns out it was fool's gold. When tellurium combines with gold, it doesn't combine in whole number ratios and it creates calaverite (one of many products) which smells strongly of garlic. Because of everyone hoping to strike it rich supplies ran short and riots erupted although someone then discovered that they could actually melt the gold out of these rocks at low temperatures and the miners practically tore the town apart. Although both of these were honest mistakes, in the era of coin money, counterfeiters had an easier time than they do today by just alloying other coins. Now, though, the EU uses special ink that is treated with europium actually functions as a fluorescing dye that can only be seen under a special laser. Although elements have also held enormous value at certain points. Aluminum at one point was thought to be the most valuable element in the world until it was discovered how easy it was to refine and Hall, after founding the Aluminum Company of America successfully brought the price of aluminium down from $550 per pound to $18 per pound almost single handedly.

Chapter 12 DS summary

Science has always been inextricably tied to politics. Poland is one example - a political pawn across the centuries and often swallowed up by other countries. It was during one of these periods, when Poland wasn't even technically a country, the Marie Curie was born. Curie was one of the first people to begin to make the distinction between chemistry in physics, although she ended up winning Nobel prizes in both. The Nobel she won in chemistry was was for two new elements she had discovered. She named polonium after the latin word for Poland and hoped that it would cause a scandal, but the element itself was a dud as well as its interest to the media. She also discovered radium which did cause a big fuss because it was radioactive and it glowed. Ironically, her daughter, Irene Juliot-Curie, later died because of exposure to it during her experimenting with making artificially radioactive substances. Hevesy was another well known chemist during this time that after having first gone to work under the supervision of Rutherford and being given the impossible assignment of separating the radioactive tracers from the non-radioactive particles, went to work with Bohr. Bohr had determined that the at-the-time undiscovered element 72 was not a lutetium-like rare earth metal and Hevesy and his partner Coster found it on their first try. These new discoveries made chemistry seem quaint compared to quantum mechanics. Another successful pair was Meitner and Hahn that maintained their partnership even through threats from the Nazis. Fermi had just discovered what he claimed was a transuranic element, and even Irene remarked that it was a lot like lanthanum, but only Meitner was bold enough to suggest the possibility of fission. Despite their long relationship, though, the Nobel prize for discovering fission wen exclusively to Hahn although in an ironic twist of justice only Meitner had an element named after her.

Chapter 11 DS summary

Even with the massive compilation of information about elements that we have, they continue to surprise us. Pure nitrogen gas, for instance, is a silent and peaceful killer and took the lives of two technicians working on the spacecraft the Columbia. Another surprising element is titanium - despite the fact that it is metal, our bodies seem to not reject it, making it ideal for implants of every kind. Elements can not only deceive our immune systems, but also our sensory systems. Beryllium tastes like sugar to our taste buds even though the molecules share no similarities in their shape. Potassium triggers our salt-sensing taste buds because, interestingly enough, they detect the charges on ions rather than an element or nutrient specifically. Iodine is another element that scientists have discovered has medical merit, to the point where most governments made iodized salt mandatory as it was the easiest way to prevent birth defects and mental disabilities among the masses although, ironically, Gandhi's peaceful Salt March led to a decline in this and a sharp decline in birth defects in India.

Chapter 10 DS Summary

Just as often as elements are toxic they can also be life-giving. Copper, for instance, has proved to be the simplest, cheapest way to improve infrastructure by killing fungi, bacteria, and other microbes in water and air systems. Another element that kills "small, wriggling cells" is vanadium which is an incredibly effective spermicide although it is not prescribed for human use because it is difficult for the body to metabolize and seriously raises and lowers glucose levels. Gadolinium has the maximum number of unpaired electrons and is therefore incredibly useful by being easily magnetized and used in MRI scans. Silver is another element that many use for its supposed medicinal properties. It is fabled to be an antibiotic and several people have developed a condition called "agyria" which turns the skin a silver-blue after ingesting large quantities of it to cure ailments. But the most effective medical cures are not single elements but complex compounds. Louis Pasteur discovered a property about biomolecules called handedness or chirality. Every molecules in every living organism is left-handed.

Chapter 9 Disappearing Spoon Summary

The rules that govern biological structures are much more delicate than those of chemistry. Often times, elements on the periodic table mimic minerals that living cells need for life and quietly and ingeniously kill them. These elements are found in the "poisoner's corridor" of the table. The lightest of this grouping is cadmium which first gained its infamy after being dumped into streams where it leached into the water table in Japan after it was separated from other metals being mined. As early as 1912 this caused horrific diseases dubbed "itai-itai" or "ouch-ouch" disease. A doctor studying this in 1946 discovered that cadmium often replaces zinc and occasionally calcium and sulfur in the body, yet it can't perform the same functions. The next element in poisoner's corridor is thallium - considered one of the deadliest elements. It enters through the channels that the body uses for potassium but once inside cells it unstitches essential amino acid bonds inside proteins. Interestingly enough the next element, bismuth, which sits between some of the deadliest elements on the table, is actually quite benign and will probably be the very last element to decay even though it is mildly radioactive. In fact radioactivity plays a large role in the danger of many elements including thorium and americium, two elements the Eagle Scout David Hahn used when building a nuclear reactor in the shed in his backyard in the 90's.

Chp. 8 Disappearing Spoon

When TIME published their 15 candidates for Men of the Year in 1960, it was not Seaborg or Ghiorso on the cover, but William Shockley, a scientist from a slightly previous generation that was included. Serge and Pauling were two of the most influential chemists during the first part of the 20th century and should have been on the same faculty, but as fate would have it, were not. Interestingly enough, these two men both made huge mistakes. Segre had Lawrence unwittingly create number 93 for his by requesting a strip of molybdenum that had been smashed with other elements although years later his lab published a report about a transuranic element that was disproven and Serge himself had dismissed a paper about fission that he himself had actually induced. His colleague McMillan ended up discovering that several of the elements Serge had discovered were actually rare earth metal rather than transition metal and Serge brushed this aside as well. His fellow Californian chemist Pauling also made a huge gaff. After building a reputation for his meticulous science and essentially singlehandedly discovering many of atoms and molecules' properties incorrectly predicted the shape of DNA and was disproven by a team working a Cambridge that his own son was a part of.

Chapter 7 D.S. summary

Leading into the 1950's the discovery and naming of new elements was so frequent that even the New Yorker was making quips about it. Two scientists, Seaborg and Ghiorso, were, for many years, ahead of the rest of the world in discovery and creating new elements at UC Berkeley, and had the honor of naming them with nationalistic names like americium and californium. This mad dash across the globe of scientists wanting to be the discoverers and namers of elements led to much debate across the scientific community - someone would claim to have found an element, someone else reviewed it and found it faulty, the name is retracted, it it discovered years later that it may have actually been a different and still-undiscovered element, etc. In this same race Russian scientists, Flyorov, gained a name for himself in Stalin's eyes after predicting the US' plans for developing a nuclear bomb and with his team bagged 105 and 105. The team at Berkeley hotly contested all of these and desperately tried to regain their lead. After both teams produced 106 just months apart the issue over naming came to a T - both teams were naming the elements they were discovering (the same elements) their own names and it grew to the point where IUPAC had to step in although Berkeley ended up getting most of the names it wanted through stubbornness. This contest went back and forth, with much hasty and faulty evidence, as the Soviet Union and the U.S. tried to out-chemistry each other.

DS chapter 6 summary

Chemists were long baffled by seemingly random breaks in the rules that governed where elements fell on the periodic table until Henry Moseley, the son of Charles Darwin, used physics to create rules for the relationship between weight, atoms, and electrons. Although it wasn't until James Chadwick discovered neutrons did scientists truly begin to understand the anatomy of the atom and different isotopes. After Moseley's discovery, there was a mad rush to discover the rest of the missing elements on the table, but this soon died down in the wake of World War II. During this era scientists, specifically those in the Manhattan Project, developed a new method of science which essentially used random calculation to simulate tests out of necessity -  plutonium and uranium were so difficult to extract and dangerous to use that they couldn't do extensive testing on them before building the atomic bombs. Stanislaw Ulam, a Polish scientist that also worked on the project developed what he dubber "Monte Carlo" science that relied on calculation in place of physical experiments to uncover data. The complete destruction of the Eniwetok atoll in the Pacific Ocean served as testimony to the powerful results of this Monte Carlo method. Leo Szilard, another veteran of the Manhattan Project discovered/designed a bomb that utilized the instability of Cobalt-60 to create a doomsday, radioactive result that would destroy its target for more than a generation. He hoped that it would never be built and, as far as the world knows, it never has been.

Disappearing Spoon Chapter 5 summary

Chemical warfare, in various forms and with varying degrees of effectiveness, has been present since the beginning of modern society. It can be traced all the way back to Sparta laying siege on Athens and throwing burning bundles of pitch, wood, and sulfur over the city walls in an attempt to smoke the Athenians out of their city. It failed, but was an early vision of later such attempts to use gas, smoke, and other chemicals during war. A major problem with these ideas that, through World War I, using gas was hardly efficient - it would usually blow away from its intended targets long before having any effect on them. A failed attempt on the part of the French during a battle in 1914 started a race in the development of chemical weapons. The Germans soon outstriped the rest of the world due to the development of a method by Fritz Haber to isolate nitrogen and create ammonia. Although, ironically, this became the precursor to all fertilizer, which he had absolutely no interest in. Their attempts to use NH3 also failed miserably but led to the creation of, first, bromine shells, that were also met with little success and next chlorine which began a chapter of a "ruthless" phase in history during which solider had to worry about chlorine based "green cross," "blue cross," and "yellow cross" (mustard gas), gases that wreaked havoc on the body's they came in contact with. Haber both won a Nobel prize and was imprisoned for being an international war criminal for the same discovery. Germany's next most feared weapon after its gases were the "Big Berthas" - massive siege guns. Yet, these guns could only be used for short periods of time as they soon essentially destroyed themselves from the extreme heat and force they generated. The Germans turned to molybdenum, which they had almost no supply of, to temper the metal with. Interestingly enough, the largest supply of molybdenum came from a mine in Colorado. This led to a complicated economic, political, and diplomatic exchange between the previous owner of the mine, a German company in New York and the US Government realizing what was happening to late to prevent any of it. The Nazi's next turned to tungsten to build missiles with incredibly hard tips. Learning from their molybdenum disaster, they tried to stockpile it before World War II. Portugal ended up being the main supplier of tungsten, to both sides in fact, and the price of tungsten went from $1,100 per ton in 1940 to $20,000 per ton just a year later. The next two elements instrumental to wars that are discussed are tantalum and niobium, both of which are used extensively in cell phone manufacturing, are mined almost exclusively in Africa, and were significant contributors to the tribal warfare continuing there today.

Wakefield et al Lancet Summary

A study conducted in 1998 by Wakefield and Lancet found an association between gastrointestinal disease and developmental regression in a group of children reported as previously normal. This may be associated with possible environmental triggers, including the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccination, as reported by the parents of the children. The test group was a group of 12 children, 11 of them boys, between the ages of 3 and 10 with an average of 6 years old. They all had a history of normal development and were then referred to a paediatric gastroenterology unit with a loss of acquired skills, including language, and diarrhea and abdominal pain. For 8 of the children, their parents or physician had identified a notable link between this vaccination and the onset of their behavioral problems. In some cases the children completely lost their language and communication skills and 10 of the children were diagnosed with autism, in some form. 5 of the children showed an early, adverse reaction to the vaccination, including convulsions, rash, delirium, and fever.  In this study the children were thoroughly assessed, ruling out a wide variety of neurological and gastrointestinal abnormalities. The intestinal abnormalities that were identified, ranging from lymphoid nodular hyperplasia to aphthoid ulceration, were fairly consistent across the test group. Wakefield and Lancet state that they prove no connection between the mumps, measles, and rubella vaccination and these problems, just that they found chronic intestinal issues (chronic enterocolitis) to be linked to neuropsychiatric dysfunction and, in most cases, this was onset after the vaccination.

D.S. Chapter 4 Summary

A terribly fascinating topic for science is, born out of simple curiosity, where do the elements come from? The theory that emerged from this question essentially leaves us with the idea, as put by Carl Sagan that "We are all star stuff." Scientists think that all known elements in the universe come from stars, or suns. Beginning as just fiery masses of hydrogen and helium the stars fuse these elements together again and again, sometimes all the way up to iron. But that is the heaviest element that star can fuse with the energy they have during their normal life cycle. So where do the rest of the elements come from? The stars, reaching the end of their life cycle, are no longer producing enough energy at their cores in the form of nuclear fusion to balance the threat of implosion. As a result the stars collapse in on themselves with enough force to fuse even protons and electrons into neutrons at their core. They then explode outward with unimaginable force and every known element is created from this "particle blizzard." Because everything else after this, including our planets, is made of elements, everything is aggregated from this cloud. In our own solar system we ended up with the gas giants, that are home to conditions that make elements behave in almost incomprehensible ways, compared to their behavior on earth. And, closer to our sun, our Earth.
In the 1950's Clair Patterson did EXTENSIVE research about the age of our earth. He did this through measuring the ratios of different isotopes in iron. The presence of such specific elements of the same age in our solar system also helped scientists come to the realization that our solar system is bobbing up and down in space-time, as proven by not only the regular extinctions that occured on earth but the presence of consistent layers of iridium throughout the entire planet, discovered by a father-son team with the last name Alvarez.

Disappearing Spoon Chp. 3 Summary

Many different, passionate scientists throughout history have shaped the way we know science today. Robert Bunson, best known for significantly improving the burner that everyone that has ever fiddled around with in a school science class, also left a lasting impact on the discovery of elements with his invention of a spectroscope. Bunson and a student took an old cigar box and attached two broken-off eyepieces from telescopes. Their results were incredible - they discovered that every element has a unique signature of colored bands and this knowledge later helped scientists immeasurably by allowing them to determine the presence of specific elements without having to boil them down or disintegrate them with acid. Another significant figure is Dmitri Mendeleev, who is generally credited with the development of the periodic table of elements. He grouped elements together by their properties and eventually was able to not only include all 62 elements known at the time but also to predict where elements that had yet to be discovered would fit and what their general properties would be. He surprised many people in his accuracy of this, including Lecoq de Boisbaudran, who was eventually (after much debate and bickering with Mendeleev) credited with discovering gallium. Among the elements that Mendeleev had predicted but not yet known, were the lanthanides, which are prevalent in Ytterby, a coastal village in Sweden. After interest in a local quarry grew because of the desire to make porcelain, Johan Gadolin made significant progress with isolating several lathanides, characterized by their ability to produce bright pigments when glazes were processed.

Disappearing Spoon Chapter 2 Summary

The chapter opens with discussing that, originally, molecules were named based on an old Germanic system that named every exact protein structure, but in the 1960's as "a number of quick amino acid sequencing tools become available" scientists realized this was not terribly viable, as one protein in particular, if spelled out this way, would be 189,819 letters long. Then, moving to genealogy, Kean discusses both the similarities and great differences of elements in the same columns, specifically carbon, silicon, and germanium. Carbon is so miraculous because of the way it forms bonds and it would seem, especially to science fiction fans, that silicon, which shares many characteristics would be a prime candidate for an alternative form of life. Yet the fact that silicon only becomes gaseous at an extremely high temperature makes that idea significantly less feasible. Of these three elements, though, germanium is the "black sheep." Despite the fact that it was the first element to be used to make a solid transistor that eliminated the need to old vacuum tubes, silicon came in and stole all of its glory because it is much more abundant and therefore cheaper and doesn't stall at high temperatures.

Disappearing Spoon: Chapter 1 Summary

Before examining the individual elements in the periodic table, first just look at the structure of it - it alone holds a great amount of information. Kean begins by asserting that before teachers introduce students to the jumble of abbreviations and numbers and decimals, they should show them a blank table, without any markings at all. Looking like a castle made of a great number of bricks all composed of completely different substances the place, or geography, of each block holds almost everything scientifically interesting about it. Beginning on the far right are the noble gases, which would have been Plato's favorite elements, had he known about them, with their "perfect" "aloofness," not requiring any more or wanting to give away any electrons to be content. All the way across the table, with alkalis and halogens and earth metals and all the others all have their own set of characteristics and particular affiliations for bonding with each other based on the number of electrons they contain. And one person who shed light on the behavior of electrons more than anyone else was Gilbert Lewis. He laid out a theory about acids and bases and how they react. And many acids, like antimony and carborane have their own rich histories as well. Perhaps most interesting about the elements is the way their electrons behave, with different shapes of shells and the transition metals with unpredictable hidden electrons. Lastly, it's hard to ignore what makes up the majority of the mass of atoms - their nuclei. Maria Goeppert discovered magic nuclei which are special organizations of protons and neutrons that appear at numbers specific numbers in the table. The reading the periodic table vertically, by columns, reveals much about its past.