Reading about a man who toiled with arsenic is, to say the least, a bit disturbing. Arsenic has an explosive love-hate relationship with just about anything, it seems, even Robert Bunsen. As anyone well knows, arsenic is deadly stuff. Robert Bunsen loved messing with elements and, like most chemists would be, enjoyed finding new ones. He invented the first spectroscope a tool that identifies unknown substances by color. It resembles a cowbell, almost. A page or two into the chapter, Kean switches gears and starts talking about the periodic table again, this time disputing who made it. Great minds think alike, and when Mendeleev first began piecing together the structure that we know today, many others were doing the same. Mendeleev is given credit for the periodic table even though he did not discover all the elements needed to complete it, like the lanthanides.
In chapter 4, a reader learns just how silly humanity can be. That might seem cynical, but the reality that humans like to make [expletive] up is quite comical. When sticking their heads together to try and find out where elements hailed from, or if they could be forged, some pretty ridiculous theories arose. A giant comet landing on Earth and wiping out the dinosaurs was proposed as an explanation, most likely for the amount of heat and energy that resulted upon impact. Since those phenomena happen patterns an ungodly amount of years apart, it's possible that new elements could result from whatever comes to destroy the human race. Perhaps UFOs could give us our next set of tinker toys! Most know that elements like gold can only be forged in celestial explosions, a.k.a. supernovas, and don't appear on earth by human means. Supernovas are logically the producers of other elements, just like we're starchildren made of cosmic dust.
Does anybody know what page chapter 3 starts on
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