The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table

“The periodic table has its own grammar, and reading between its lines reveals whole new stories.” 

The elements are arranged in rows and columns that indicate how each atom is likely to behave. From left to right, atoms’ chemical activity varies in a distinct pattern; from top to bottom, atoms become progressively heavier, which leads to decreasing stability. Many other implications can be derived by careful study of the table.

“Most elements are undeservedly anonymous.” 

As with most things in life, the elements vary in their importance to humans. Some atoms are largely ignored but turn out to have interesting and useful properties when properly studied. 

“You might say the history of the periodic table is the history of the many characters who shaped it.” 

The table is filled in, over the decades, in bits and pieces as scientists press ahead in their quest to discover all the elements. Economics, politics, and even the arts play roles in determining how and when a given atom is found and added to the periodic table. 

“In the end, it’s probably impossible to tease out whether the heads or tails of science, the theory or the experiment, has done more to push science ahead.” 

Without theory, there’s nothing to look for; without interesting discoveries, there’s no need for a theory. Sometimes a scientist will calculate on paper where a new atom is likely to be found and how it will behave; sometimes researchers in labs will discover new atoms while looking for something else. Scientists often combine theory and practice to earn powerful results. 

“It’s a sad truth that men like Haber pop up frequently throughout history—petty Fausts who twist scientific innovations into efficient killing devices.” 

Haber made breakthrough contributions to the chemistry of farming, possibly saving millions of lives from starvation; he preferred, though, to rework these inventions into weapons of wartime destruction. In general, scientists aren’t the types who revel in new ways to kill people, but Haber appears to have been an exception. 

“If an atom has too many neutrons, it splits itself, releasing energy and excess neutrons in the process. If nearby atoms absorb those neutrons, they become unstable and spit out more neutrons, a cascade known as a chain reaction.” 

Chain reactions are difficult to control: too fast, and you get a bomb; too slow, and nothing useful happens. In between is a region where the heat from nuclear fission can be channeled to generate electricity in nuclear power plants. 

“Today, just two generations on, the Monte Carlo method (in various forms) so dominates some fields that many young scientists don’t realize how thoroughly they’ve departed from traditional theoretical or experimental science.”

People, financial markets, and atoms can behave in unpredictable ways as individual entities; group them together, and patterns of predictable behavior begin to emerge. Statistical surveys of large collections of seemingly random events can reveal tendencies and trends invisible at the level of single events. 

“As historian George Dyson neatly summarized the technological history of that decade, ‘Computers led to bombs, and bombs led to computers.’” 

The need to calculate the behavior of large groups of atoms in chain reactions prompts the development of large-capacity computers. This, in turn, makes possible the construction of bombs, which leads to increases in computing capacity to deal with the new weaponry frontier, which leads to experiments with larger bombs, and so forth. 

“When a heavy atom fissions into two lighter atoms of roughly equal size, the lighter atoms require fewer neutron buffers, so they spit the excess neutrons out. Sometimes those neutrons are absorbed by nearby heavy atoms, which become unstable and spit out more neutrons in a chain reaction. In a bomb, you can just let that process happen. Reactors require more touch and control, since you want to string the fission out over a longer period.” 

It’s hard enough to build an atom bomb, but it is harder still to coordinate the precise density of nuclear materials so they heat up in a nuclear reactor without exploding. 

“Obscure elements do obscure things inside the body—often bad, but sometimes good. An element toxic in one circumstance can become a lifesaving drug in another […].” 

Examples of the phenomenon described here include the following: Gadolinium attacks cancer cells, but it also gums up kidneys. Copper pipes kill germs but are harmless to humans. Vanadium is an excellent spermicide, but it destabilizes blood-sugar levels. Zinc helps reduce cold symptoms, but too much can interfere with the immune system. 

“With virtually every element that’s not a toxic metal (and even occasionally with those), you can find some alternative medicine site selling it as a supplement. Probably not coincidentally, you’ll also find personal-injury firms on the Internet willing to sue somebody for exposure to nearly every element.” 

The body’s interaction with metals is complex, which gives quacks and charlatans a chance to push chemical remedies that might not work or might cause harm. 

“On an atomic level, elements behave predictably. Yet when they encounter all the chaos of biology, they continue to baffle us. Even blasé, everyday elements, if encountered in unnatural circumstances, can spring a few mean surprises.” 

It’s generally possible to predict how an element will behave in the presence of other elements, but it’s not always possible to predict the behavior of the resulting chemicals. As atoms collect into complex forms, surprises await. 

“The point is that, at least partially, we’re products of our environment, and however good our brains are at parsing chemical information in a lab or designing chemistry experiments, our senses will draw their own conclusions and find garlic in tellurium and powdered sugar in beryllium.” 

On human skin, tellurium gives off an unpleasant odor; on the tongue, beryllium tastes sweet. Neither metal has been important to human metabolism; thus, their effects on the body are essentially random, and each just happens to have an odd and surprising sensory outcome.

“A live body is so complicated, so butterfly-flaps-its-wings-in-Brazil chaotic, that if you inject a random element into your bloodstream or liver or pancreas, there’s almost no telling what will happen.” 

One difficulty in developing medicinal uses for metals is that the human body is extremely complex, and an element that’s good at doing one thing in the body may produce downstream effects that are decidedly bad for health. This is part of why drug researchers must spend years testing new medicines. 

“We’re the periodic table all the way down.” 

Various elements make up the brain, the seat of the mind; a lack of iodine can disrupt and impede thought; thus, brain chemistry is, in a way, the cause of awareness. 

“Curie was an early example of a species whose population exploded during the twentieth century—the refugee scientist.” 

Curie left Poland, controlled by Russia, to study in relatively free-and-open France. Lise Meitner, who discovered nuclear fission, had to escape to Sweden from Nazi Germany because she was from a Jewish family. Eminent scientist Emilio Segrè left fascist Italy and came to America to complete his work. Wars and totalitarian regimes make life difficult for scientists, especially in the early 20th century, and especially for Jews. Science benefits all people, however, and many countries exhibited the wisdom to offer asylum to such researchers. 

“Like any human activity, science has always been filled with politics—with backbiting, jealousy, and petty gambits. Any look at the politics of science wouldn’t be complete without examples of those.” 

Stultifying governmental regimes aren’t the only political danger that scientists face. Competition for grant money, imperious lab directors, annoying coworkers, office affairs, and the contest to be first to a discovery force scientists to engage in politics and public relations as well as research and theorizing. If science were easy, everyone would be good at it. 

“To be sure, it’s no coincidence that people from the upper classes were usually the ones doing things like discovering new elements: no one else had the leisure to sit around and argue about what some obscure rocks were made of.” 

Until the 20th century, most science was undertaken by the wealthy, while the rest of humanity labored on farms or in shops for a living. As education became more affordable to all, and scientific research labs proliferated, lower- and middle-class people begin to participate in the quest for knowledge. 

“There’s always something novel to discover about the elements, even today.” 

The pursuit not only of undiscovered elements but also of the many hidden facts of the known elements will likely continue for a long time. Each of nature’s secrets opens a vista on yet more secrets to unravel. 

“Everyday liquids, solids, and gases still yield secrets now and then, if fortune and the scientific muses collude in the right way.” 

Atomic science yet has fine details to work out; meanwhile, organic chemistry and materials science are just beginning to unravel the mysteries of complex molecular structures and their traits. 

“Progress in any number of fields, from post-Einsteinian cosmology to the astrobiological hunt for life on other planets, depends on our ability to make ever finer measurements based on ever smaller scraps of information.”

The search for exoplanets requires the most advanced and finely tuned equipment to detect tiny signals that arrive at Earth from unimaginably vast distances, so that researchers can announce that they’ve found a new planet of a certain size at a specific distance from a particular star. This feat also requires that the measuring sticks of science—among them the meter, the second, the speed of light, and the candela of luminosity—become ever more precise. 

“All we know for sure is that if some astronomer turned a telescope to a far-off star cluster tonight and found incontrovertible evidence of life, even microbial scavengers, it would be the most important discovery ever—proof that human beings are not so special after all. Except that we exist, too, and can understand and make such discoveries.”

While every revelation of science has the potential to benefit humankind, the finding of life on other planets will alter fundamentally how people see themselves—no longer the lonely inhabitants of a single planet but a part of a chain of life immeasurably larger. 

“Einstein came to distrust quantum mechanics. Its statistical and deeply probabilistic nature sounded too much like gambling to him, and it prompted him to object that ‘God does not play dice with the universe.’ He was wrong, and it’s too bad that most people have never heard the rejoinder by Niels Bohr: ‘Einstein! Stop telling God what to do.’” 

Einstein’s quote about God playing dice is one of the most famous in all of science. Ironically, his work on the photoelectric effect, that won him the Nobel Prize, lays the groundwork for the quantum theory he came to despise. Einstein is a classical scientist who reached beyond convention and brought back the post-classical theory of relativity. His achievement was monumental, but his mind still reeled at the weird absurdities on the quantum side of post-classical science. Einstein had one foot on the dock of classical mechanics and one on the boat of quantum mechanics, and, as the boat pulled away from the dock, Einstein tumbled into the philosophical waters between. Like Moses, Einstein can point the way to a Promised Land, this one of modern science, but ultimately he cannot live there.