Hard Science, Softened With Stories - "The Disappearing Spoon"

[groovedaddy]

On the one hand, as Sam Kean points out at the start of “The Disappearing Spoon,” the periodic table of the elements is a clear, accessible-looking chart that ought to make sense to anyone who ever set foot in a chemistry classroom. On the other, many a would-be chemist has found it as impenetrable as it is alluring.

“People remember the table with a mix of fascination, fondness, inadequacy and loathing,” Mr. Kean writes in the book, a work of chatty popular science that means to rekindle affection for the table and its many mysteries.

Though he is obviously quite knowledgeable about chemistry, Mr. Kean knows that “probably the biggest frustration for many students was that the people who got the periodic table, who could really unpack how it worked, could pull so many facts from it with such dweeby nonchalance.” Mr. Kean’s book means to override that frustration by making some of those facts available to anyone.

Here is what “The Disappearing Spoon” does not do: really unpack how the periodic table works. Nor does it provide clear and consistent illumination about, say, what electrons do in s-shells versus what they do in p-shells, let alone in the more daunting d-shell configuration. Inevitably some of what he discusses will be out of reach for the lay reader. And Mr. Kean does not have the teacherly patience of Brian Greene, a science writer who can make string theory sound like child’s play.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/05/books/05book.html?th&emc=th

[TheMadMonk]

1. Given hyperlinking, a periodic table today should let a user of any level...

...burrow in and out in all directions. Interested in nuclear properties, radioisotopes and decay modes there they are. Magnetic, paramagnetic in there too. Electron shell structures. Physical properties, links off into applications.

All those interesting things that you'd often wish were on the chart hanging on the wall in the lab to go with the atomic weights and numbers.