09-14-2023, 11:10 PM
By Paul Strathern...
I finished a book! Yay me!
The subtitle pretty much covers it...from the ancients, to alchemy, many asides explaining where modern words come from, and who decided it should be this way or that...
Mendeleyev doesn't actually come into the story until the final two chapters where there was a shift in the acceptance of sciences and a lot of discoveries were being made in rapid succession. The problem being competing theories/schools of thought, and incomplete knowledge...the "dream" in the title was the organization of the periodic table and how Mendeleyev knew there were gaps, but was able to predict undiscovered elements and their properties with great accuracy.
I found it interesting enough to finish which says quite a lot actually...
I did have this nagging urge to find a Time Machine and have a conversation about the basics of high school chemistry with these folks, but we (students) just accept the dogma as correct and in their time, their contemporaries thought their dogma was correct, so it probably wouldn't have helped...reading about them struggling to piece things together was sometimes excruciating...
--tg
I finished a book! Yay me!
The subtitle pretty much covers it...from the ancients, to alchemy, many asides explaining where modern words come from, and who decided it should be this way or that...
Mendeleyev doesn't actually come into the story until the final two chapters where there was a shift in the acceptance of sciences and a lot of discoveries were being made in rapid succession. The problem being competing theories/schools of thought, and incomplete knowledge...the "dream" in the title was the organization of the periodic table and how Mendeleyev knew there were gaps, but was able to predict undiscovered elements and their properties with great accuracy.
I found it interesting enough to finish which says quite a lot actually...
I did have this nagging urge to find a Time Machine and have a conversation about the basics of high school chemistry with these folks, but we (students) just accept the dogma as correct and in their time, their contemporaries thought their dogma was correct, so it probably wouldn't have helped...reading about them struggling to piece things together was sometimes excruciating...
--tg