Mendeleyev's Dream: The Quest For the Elements

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Chemistry is the science of matter, but this book doesn’t let you feel the materiality, physicality, and dangers of chemical experimentation.

Saint Petersburg University — his father’s alma mater and, incidentally, both of my parents’ — admitted him and the family relocated there despite their poverty.When Kirchhoff had studied sunlight with his spectroscope, he had detected a number of unaccountable dark bands in its spectrum. He struggled to find an underlying principle that would organize them according to sets of similar properties and eventually reaped the benefits of the pattern-recognition that fuels creativity. Strathern is an entertaining guide, capable of marshalling a colourful cast of thinkers and experimentalists. Strathern is an entertaining guide, capable of marshaling a colorful cast of thinkers and experimentalists. Even though Strathern prose is pleasant and the content interesting, I prefer the former more direct approach.

And it was philosophy because it used reason to reach these conclusions: there was no appeal to the gods or mysterious metaphysical forces.Paul Strathern is a Somerset Maugham Award-winning novelist, and his nonfiction works include The Venetians, Death in Florence, The Medici, Mendeleyev's Dream, The Florentines, Empire, and The Borgias, all available from Pegasus Books. Most amusing (and tedious) of all was the chapter on Paracelsus, because Strathern couldn't decide what attitude to have toward him, and he literally alternates back and forth from one paragraph to the next. From ancient philosophy, through medieval alchemy to the splitting of the atom, this is the true story of the birth of chemistry and the role of one man's dream. Strathern is an entertaining guide, too, capably marshaling a colorful cast of thinkers and experimentalists.

The argument was conducted entirely within the realms of this world, from which evidence could be gathered to prove or disprove its conclusions.

For more than 1/3 of the book, there is almost no chemistry at all, but pages and pages of biographical details of random folks who contributed little or nothing to chemistry (Nicholas of Cusa, I’m looking at you). Strathern is the author of several novels, including A Season in Abyssinia, which won a Somerset Maugham prize, and Mendeleyev's Dream: The Quest for the Elements.

The author's fascinating accounts of the peculiar early-modern "scientists" really closer to the medieval alchemists Paracelsus and Giordano Bruno (the latter Galileo's unlucky predecessor before the Inquisition) show how quackery can combine with real insight to make notable advances in science. Rather, it is a lay reader’s history of chemistry or, more broadly, scientific thought, from the ancient Greeks through the 19th century. Misguided from the start and frequently bizarre, alchemy did manage to work out a good many compounds, chemical processes and even some practical applications. His father was a professor of fine arts, philosophy, and politics, but grew blind and lost his teaching position. August Kekulé, the principal founder of the theory of chemical structure, dreamt of “atoms gambolling before my eyes!Indeed, in 1875 Paul Lecoq identified gallium, which had all the properties needed to fill the gap between aluminium and uranium. Complement Mendeleyev’s Dream with Margaret Mead’s existentially revelatory dream about the meaning of life and John Steinbeck’s prophetic dream about how the commercial media are killing creative culture, then revisit the science of what the brain actually does while we sleep. Otto Loewi, the German-born physiologist who won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1936 for his work on the chemical transmission of nerve impulses, dreamed the design of an experiment to a hypothesis of chemical transmission that he had worked on 17 years earlier. Finding the truth is never easy, and finding even the smallest part of it is always something to celebrate.