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

After World War II, scientists developed cloud chambers, “in which a ‘gun’ shot ultra-fast atomic torpedoes at cold gas atoms” (296). These atoms give off subatomic particles that scientists study. Donald Glaser and his partner, Luis Alvarez—“of dinosaur-killing-asteroid fame” (298)—developed a better system that used liquid atoms. At the right temperature, liquid hydrogen will emit particles that create distinctive bubble patterns that can be analyzed. At the young age of 33, Glaser won a Nobel Prize.

Ernest Rutherford discovered that certain materials give off bubbles of gas that turn out to be new atoms derived from the radioactive decay of the older material. Rutherford’s team figured out that the gas is a newly discovered element, radon. Rutherford also learned that atoms “could suddenly move laterally as they decayed and skip across spaces” (302) on the periodic table. This flies in the face of the convention that the old alchemists, who sought to change lead into gold, were on the wrong track.

Scientists tried to estimate the age of the Earth by its heat loss. Lord Kelvin, in the 1800s, estimated the planet’s age at 20 million years. Rutherford realized that radioactive decay within the Earth will add heat, delaying the drop in temperature, which means the Earth is much older than Kelvin believed. One way to calculate this more precisely involves the decay of uranium into lighter atoms. Each decay releases helium, which forms bubbles in the rocks. The more helium, the older the rock. Rutherford “got some primordial uranium rock, eluted the helium from microscopic bubbles inside, and determined that the earth was at least 500 million years old” (306). Scientists further refined the helium rock-bubble technique and dated the Earth at two billion years old. This figure is much closer to the present-date theory of the earth’s age: more than four billion years.

Kelvin’s experiments with glycerin bubbles and how they cluster formed the beginning of bubble science. This also led to the science of cell biology: “the first crude cells were certainly bubble-like structures that surrounded proteins or RNA or DNA and protected them” (309). Lord Rayleigh figured out that the propellers on World War I submarines degrade because “bubbles produced by the churning propellers turned around and attacked the metal blades like sugar attacks teeth” (309).

Bubbles in water, exposed to the waveforms of certain loud sounds, alternately squish and expand, emitting light at every squish; this process is called sonoluminescence, “with the process repeating thousands of times every second” (311). The brightest bubbles contain minute amounts of xenon or krypton. Some researchers even hoped, for a time, that sonoluminescence could become a catalyst for nuclear fusion. 

The French bureau of weights and measures maintains the official Prototype Kilogram. Kean describes it as “a two-inch-wide, 90 percent platinum cylinder that, by definition, has a mass of exactly 1.000000… kilogram (to as many decimal places as you like)” (314). The cylinder is temperature controlled and kept inside three bell jars to prevent any mishap that might alter its weight. Platinum is smooth, to avoid accretions, and it conducts electricity “that might zap stray atoms” (315). Many countries have copies of the prototype, which must be recalibrated from time to time, a months-long process that includes a tedious flight to Paris past suspicious customs officers who must not be allowed to touch the cylinders. The French use exact copies of the Prototype Kilogram, which, in turn, must be recalibrated now and then with the original. In the 1990s, scientists discovered that “the Kilogram had lost an additional mass equal to that of a fingerprint” (317) per year over the past several decades.

Now scientists seek a replacement for the imperfect kilogram cylinder. All the rest of the seven basic units of measure have been redefined, no longer in terms of a human artifact but in accordance with some property of nature. For example, the meter is now “the distance any light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second” (318). And the second is defined as 9,192,631,770 transition jumps of the outer electron of a cesium atom while irradiated by a particular frequency of microwave.

Scientists also seek to understand how we met the very small odds of the cosmos having exactly the right fine structure to support life—and to explain why the fine structure constant has the value it has. The fine structure constant, which “controls how tightly negative electrons are bound to the positive nucleus” and “determines the strength of some nuclear processes” (321), has a value of 1/137. Were it any larger or smaller, nuclear fusion in stars would not take place, and no life would exist in the universe.

Another very unlikely phenomenon is the fact that the world’s only natural nuclear fission reactor, in Oklo, Africa, is still in operation after 1.7 billion years. Pond scum in a river oxygenates the water, which acidifies, percolates down, and leaches out uranium. The scum concentrates the uranium, which starts a chain reaction, which boils off the water, stopping the reaction. The cycle repeats every 150 minutes. However, some of the reactor’s decay products, elements such as samarium, are in the wrong proportions; one scientist proposed controversially that this is because, in the distant past, the fine structure constant was different. Kean edges into the question of whether the laws of nature can change over time. One group, studying light emitted by quasars in faraway galaxies, believed the fine structure constant “changed by up to 0.001 percent over ten billion years” (326). This tiny change might be enough to cause the variations in the Oklo reactor. It’s also possible that physical constants in the universe have, elsewhere and/or in the past, been different enough to prevent the formation of life there. Kean asks how we can measure the possibility of life on other planets. One way is by searching for magnesium, found in DNA and in plant photosynthesis. Magnesium is a good sign of water, vital for life as we know it, and “helps keep oceans fluid” (329), especially in cold conditions.

Signs point to constants staying constant, however, and new techniques permit astronomers to discover planets around nearby stars. Kean concludes the chapter by explaining that “[h]unting for alien life will take every bit of measuring genius we have, possibly with some overlooked box on the periodic table” (330). 

In general, the bigger the atom, the harder it is to pack together protons and neutrons into a stable arrangement that balances the various competing forces within. These include the electromagnetic force, which pushes positively charged protons apart, and the strong nuclear force, which binds them together at close range. The neutrons keep the protons far enough apart to dull the electrostatic repulsion between them, allowing the strong force to take over. However, the bigger the nucleus, the harder it is for the strong force to hold on to all the protons. Hence, heavy elements tend to suffer radioactive decay.

The rarest element on Earth is element 85, astatine. In the entire planet, the total amount of astatine “is one stupid ounce” (332). Heavier elements sometimes decay into astatine, but half the astatine is gone in four hundred minutes. Very heavy atoms also decay into element 87, francium, and half of those decay in a mere 20 minutes. In fact, if scientists could collect a visible sample of francium, “it would be so intensely radioactive it would murder them immediately” (332). Yet there are 20 to 30 ounces of francium in the earth at any time, much more than the slower-decaying astatine. This poses a conundrum for scientists.

It turns out that many heavier elements decay into francium, but few break down from there into astatine, instead leaping over it to become radium. Thus, there are more francium atoms at any given time than atoms of astatine, despite francium’s faster decay rate.

Among the heaviest atoms, a few here and there exhibit enhanced stability due to the well-organized geometry of their nuclei. Creating atoms beyond element 111 has proven difficult, but scientists believe there may be an “island of stability” somewhere up there that might permit the creation of even heavier manufactured elements (334). “If that’s so,” Kean hypothesizes, “maybe elements in the 140s, 160s, and 180s are possible. The island of stability would become a chain of islands” (336).

There may, however, be a wall at element 137, beyond which the inner electrons of such atoms would orbit their nuclei at speeds faster than light, which violates relativity theory.

At this point Kean turns to the periodic table’s future. Many theorists have devised alternatives to the periodic table that try to account for some of the older tables’ inconsistencies. These include one shaped like a pyramid, a “version where a hydrogen ‘sun’ sits at the center of the table, and all the other elements orbit it like planets with moons” (341), and one that looks like a spiraling honeycomb.

“Superatoms,” such as groups of aluminum or sodium atoms that, gathered into certain shapes, can behave like a single bromine atom, mimic calcium, or imitate “elements from pretty much any other region of the periodic table” (343), require a rethinking of the table. Under certain conditions, many atoms of indium can trap electrons that behave as if they’re orbiting a single atom; these “quantum dots” can be used in quantum computers to do super-fast calculations. They also challenge the periodic table’s current shape.

Still, Kean concludes that the standard periodic table, as finalized by Seaborg in the 1960s, is “a good combination of easy to make and easy to learn” and likely “will dominate chemistry classes for generations to come” (345).