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.