Disappearing Spoon, Ch. 5-7

Chapter five taught me that The Disappearing Spoon is an excellent choice of reading material for long car rides between states. Kean talked at length about Fritz Haber and his ground-breaking chemical contributions to German warfare. I found myself a bit resentful toward Haber when I read how he treated his wife and his friends. I suppose that it really is possible to devote every speck of your soul to science. Fritz's specialty when tinkering with his chemicals was creating deadly gas weapons that could wipe out entire armies of enemy men. His formulas were potent, containing elements of chlorine, bromine, and nitrogen. Ironically, this man of scientific genius got what was coming to him in throwing away his personal relationships. He ended up being captured for being Jewish by Nazis, and a watered-down version of one of his gases was used in concentration camps to eradicate other Jews. Right in the feel-bads, huh? I have to say, one of my favorite elements of this book so far is the heavy amount of German history in it.

In chapter six, the material focused on how the last few spots in Mendeleev's periodic table were filled. It's tragic to look at dear promethium, with its dark and mysterious name, and know that it wasn't good for much but taking a seat among other relatively useless elements. As I (and Kean) mentioned before, Mendeleev's table underwent tons of changes after the time of its creation. Everything from rearranging the order of Mendeleev's elements, to changing the degree at which the table sits, happened. A man named Henry Moseley helped sort out some crucial kinks in the table, like switching elements that didn't make sense. He was the one to propose that elements should be placed in order of increasing atomic number, along with mass. After Moseley joined the army and was killed in action, a sequence of finding new elements for the table began, and after that, the neutron was discovered and used to explain isotopes. Scientists and the public now understood that two elements could have different weights, but still keep their identity, which kept some people from throwing elements out of the table. The rest of the chapter sort of went on about the Manhattan Project and the team's unorthodox experimentation. Kean's tone seemed interested (as it always has, up to this point) in the method of throwing random numbers into a sequence, calculating, and hoping a good product would emerge. This kind of testing, I realized, is sort of like the scientific method that we're taught today: observe, hypothesize, conduct the experiment. If something doesn't turn out right, change a variable and do it all again.

In chapter seven, Kean frantically went on about Berkeley and its feverish endeavor to find as many elements for the table as possible. Of course, they couldn't have all the elements out there to themselves, so other countries outside the U.S., like Russia, were quick to try their hand at the synthesizing process. When someone other than Berkeley came up with a new element, the lab checked their work. They didn't take kindly to seeing correct data different than theirs. (Like a kid who thinks they always have to be right!) Naming elements proved, challenging, too, because some names were either dry or offensive to the public. Believe it or not, communism in Russia affected the scientists that were trying to fill the table. Joseph Stalin and his followers were among perhaps the most stubborn of men and didn't believe that what the scientists were trying was legitimate. He thought it traitorous to his socialist government and tried to have the process shut down, executing physicists and chemists alike or forcing them to work in unimaginable conditions. So many people tried to get in on naming/synthesizing new elements that the endeavor became more of a game than a race to fill the table, and when people started fighting over who could earn a square on the periodic table, a high-and-mighty, official team of people had to sift through all the B.S. and decide.