Talk:The Disappearing Spoon (Book)

Snippets

That, too, proved unhappy, so he fled to the newly conquered Philippines to work for the U.S. government, taking with him only one book, Nernst’s Theoretical Chemistry, so he could spend years rooting out and obsessively publishing papers on every quibbling error. (recommended reading: cathedrals of science)

Tantalus, Niobe’s father, killed his own son and served him at a royal banquet. As punishment, Tantalus had to stand for all eternity up to his neck in a river, with a branch loaded with apples dangling above his nose. Whenever he tried to eat or drink, however, the fruit would be blown away beyond his grasp or the water would recede. (from whence the term tantalizing?)

Lots of other elements emit gamma rays, but there’s something special about cobalt. Regular A-bombs can be waited out in underground shelters, since their fallout will vomit up gamma rays immediately and be rendered harmless. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were more or less habitable within days of the 1945 explosions. (were habitable within days??)

The reactor’s initial source of power would be pellets of uranium-233, which readily fissions. (The 233 means the uranium has 141 neutrons plus 92 protons; notice the excess of neutrons.) But the uranium would be surrounded with a jacket of a slightly lighter element, thorium-232. After the fission events, the thorium would absorb a neutron and become thorium-233. Unstable thorium-233 undergoes beta decay by spitting out an electron, and because charges always balance in nature, when it loses a negative electron, thorium also converts a neutron to a positive proton. This addition of a proton shifts it to the next element on the table, protactinium-233. This is also unstable, so the protactinium spits out another electron and transforms into what you started with, uranium-233. (what? this is how a breeder reactor works)

For instance, long after Isaac Newton had derived the laws of calculus and his monumental theory of gravity, he became master of the Royal Mint of England in the last few years of the 1600s. Newton, in his early fifties, just wanted a well-paying government post, but to his credit he didn’t approach it as a sinecure. Counterfeiting—especially “clipping” coins by shaving the edges and melting the scraps together to make new coins—was endemic in the seedier parts of London. (is that why coins now have ridged edges?)

To test this idea, Rutherford had his physics department’s glassblowers blow two bulbs. One was soap-bubble thin, and he pumped radon into it. The other was thicker and wider, and it surrounded the first. The alpha particles had enough energy to tunnel through the first glass shell but not the second, so they became trapped in the vacuum cavity between them. (but lapha particles are basically helium. how do they travel through glass?)

Chemical Warfare in World War I: The American Experience, 1917–1918, (book recommendation)

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. And actually, you should probably just read the whole thing, since it’s the best account of twentieth-century science history yet written. (strong recommendation to read)

The repose of the noble gases is rare, however. One column to the west sits the most energetic and reactive gases on the periodic table, the halogens. And if you think of the table wrapping around like a Mercator map, so that east meets west and column eighteen meets column one, even more violent elements appear on the western edge, the alkali metals. The pacifist noble gases are a demilitarized zone surrounded by unstable neighbors.

Overall, Mendeleev’s work is comparable to that of Darwin in evolution and Einstein in relativity. None of those men did all the work, but they did the most work, and they did it more elegantly than others. They saw how far the consequences extended, and they backed up their findings with reams of evidence. And like Darwin, Mendeleev made lasting enemies for his work.

One popular trick, since gallium molds easily and looks like aluminium, is to fashion gallium spoons, serve them with tea, and watch as your guests recoil when their Earl Grey “eats” their utensils.

Soon, wherever people found feldspar, they mined it, including in frosty Scandinavia, where porcelain stoves were prized because they reached higher temperatures and held heat longer than iron-belly stoves.

More intriguingly for scientists, its rocks also produced exotic pigments and colored glazes when processed. Nowadays, we know that bright colors are dead giveaways of lanthanides

Only when the hydrogen burns up, B2FH suggests—and here is its real contribution—do things start shaking. Stars that sit bovinely for aeons, chewing hydrogen cud, are transformed more profoundly than any alchemist would have dared dream.

Desperate to maintain high temperatures, stars lacking hydrogen begin to burn and fuse helium in their cores. Sometimes helium atoms stick together completely and form even-numbered elements, and sometimes protons and neutrons spall off to make odd-numbered elements. Pretty soon appreciable amounts of lithium, boron, beryllium, and especially carbon accumulate inside stars (and only inside—the cool outer layer remains mostly hydrogen for a star’s lifetime). Unfortunately, burning helium releases less energy than burning hydrogen, so stars run through their helium in, at most, a few hundred million years. Some small stars even “die” at this point, creating molten masses of carbon known as white dwarfs. Heavier stars (eight times or so more massive than the sun) fight on, crushing carbon into six more elements, up to magnesium, which buys them a few hundred years. A few more stars perish then, but the biggest, hottest stars (whose interiors reach five billion degrees) burn those elements, too, over a few million years. B2FH traces these various fusion reactions and explains the recipe for producing everything up to iron: it’s nothing less than evolution for elements. As a result of B2FH, astronomers today can indiscriminately lump every element between lithium and iron together as stellar “metals,” and once they’ve found iron in a star, they don’t bother looking for anything smaller—once iron is spotted, it’s safe to assume the rest of the periodic table up to that point is represented.

Common sense suggests that iron atoms soon fuse in the biggest stars, and the resulting atoms fuse, forming every element down to the depths of the periodic table. But again, common sense fails. When you do the math and examine how much energy is produced per atomic union, you find that fusing anything to iron’s twenty-six protons costs energy. That means post-ferric fusion does an energy-hungry star no good. Iron is the final peal of a star’s natural life.

For instance, the common elements lead and uranium fixed the birth date of the planet through a series of almost insanely meticulous experiments done by a graduate student in Chicago in the 1950s.

Iridium is a siderophile, or iron-loving, element

This cloud would have blotted out the sun and choked off plant life, which all in all seemed a tidy explanation for why not just dinosaurs but 75 percent of all species and 99 percent of all living beings died out around that time. It took a lot of work to convince some scientists, but the Alvarezes soon determined that the iridium layer extended around the world, and they ruled out the competing possibility that the dust deposits had come from a nearby supernova.

When other geologists (working for an oil company) discovered a crater more than one hundred miles wide, twelve miles deep, and sixty-five million years old on the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, the asteroid-iridium-extinction theory seemed proved.

Many geologists today believe that massive volcanoes, in India, which were coincidentally erupting before and after the Yucatán impact, helped kill off the dinosaurs

And in 1984, some paleontologists began arguing that the dinosaur die-off was part of a larger pattern: every twenty-six million years or so, the earth seems to have undergone mass extinctions.

As philosopher-historian Eric Scerri writes, “All the elements other than hydrogen and helium make up just 0.04 percent of the universe. Seen from this perspective, the periodic system appears to be rather insignificant. But the fact remains that we live on the earth… where the relative abundance of elements is quite different.”

But even though nitrogen makes up 80 percent of air—four of every five molecules we breathe—it’s surprisingly bad at topping off soil because it rarely reacts with anything and never becomes “fixed” in the soil. That combination of plentitude, ineptitude, and importance proved a natural target for ambitious chemists.

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’s story is darker because he was so skilled.

Tungsten would go on to become the “it” metal of the Second World War, but in some ways molybdenum’s story is more interesting. Almost no one knows it, but the most remote battle of World War I took place not in Siberia or against Lawrence of Arabia on the Sahara sands, but at a molybdenum mine in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.

atoms in solids spontaneously and often disastrously rearrange themselves when temperatures change (more on this in chapter 16), which often results in brittle metals that crack and fail. Doping steel with molybdenum gums up the iron atoms, preventing them from sliding around. (The Germans were not the first ones to figure this out. A master sword maker in fourteenth-century Japan sprinkled molybdenum into his steel and produced the island’s most coveted samurai swords, whose blades never dulled or cracked.

Few noticed the bulletin except for a behemoth international mining company based in Frankfurt, Germany, with a U.S. branch in New York. According to one contemporary account, Metallgesellschaft had smelters, mines, refineries, and other “tentacles” all over the world. As soon as the company directors, who had close ties to Fritz Haber, read about King’s molybdenum, they mobilized and ordered their top man in Colorado, Max Schott, to seize Bartlett Mountain.

Until then, Salazar (if we lay aside morality for a moment) had played the Axis and Allies brilliantly with vague promises, secret pacts, and stalling tactics that kept the tungsten trains chugging. He had increased the price of his country’s one commodity from $1,100 per ton in 1940 to $20,000 in 1941, and he’d banked $170 million in three frenzied years of speculation.

Beyond being amusing, Alvarez’s dash symbolizes the state of nuclear science at the time. Scientists had been making steady if slow progress in understanding how the cores of atoms work, little snippets of knowledge here and there—and then, with one discovery, they found themselves on a mad tear.

The giant collective forehead slap—the “Of course!” moment—took place in 1932, when James Chadwick, yet another of Rutherford’s students, discovered the neutral neutron, which adds weight without charge. Coupled with Moseley’s insights about the atomic number, atoms (at least lone, isolated atoms) suddenly made sense. The neutron meant that lead-204 and lead-206 could still both be lead—could still have the same positive nuclear charge and sit in the same box on the periodic table—even if they had different atomic weights.

Other writers have compared chemists who discovered new elements in the 1800s to big-game hunters, thrilling the chemistry-loving masses with every exotic species they bagged. If that flattering description is true, then the stoutest hunters with the biggest elephant guns, the Ernest Hemingway and Theodore Roosevelt of the periodic table, were Ghiorso and Seaborg—who discovered more elements than anyone in history and extended the periodic table by almost one-sixth.

In 1942, Flyorov noticed that despite the great progress German and American scientists had made in uranium fission research in recent years, scientific journals had stopped publishing on the topic. Flyorov deduced that the fission work had become state secrets—which could mean only one thing. In a letter that mirrored Einstein’s famous letter to Franklin Roosevelt about starting the Manhattan Project, Flyorov alerted Stalin about his suspicions.

Like most others, Pauling was not interested in DNA until 1952, even though Swiss biologist Friedrich Miescher had discovered DNA in 1869. Miescher did so by pouring alcohol and the stomach juice of pigs onto pus-soaked bandages (which local hospitals gladly gave to him) until only a sticky, goopy, grayish substance remained. Upon testing it, Miescher immediately and self-servingly declared that deoxyribonucleic acid would prove important in biology.

Unfortunately, chemical analysis showed high levels of phosphorus in it. Back then, proteins were considered the only interesting part of biochemistry, and since proteins contain zero phosphorus, DNA was judged a vestige, a molecular appendix.

Sadly, that conclusion was a reflex because of what happened a century ago near the Kamioka mines. As early as 1912, doctors there noticed local rice farmers being felled by awful new diseases. The farmers came in doubled over with joint and deep bone pain, especially the women, who accounted for forty-nine of every fifty cases. Their kidneys often failed, too, and their bones softened and snapped from the pressure of everyday tasks. One doctor broke a girl’s wrist while taking her pulse.

Zinc is an essential mineral, and just as cadmium mixes with zinc in the ground, it interferes with zinc in the body by replacing it. Cadmium also sometimes evicts sulfur and calcium, which explains why it affected people’s bones. Unfortunately, cadmium is a clumsy element and can’t perform the same biological roles as the others. Even more unfortunately, once cadmium slips into the body, it cannot be flushed out.

Still, itai-itai disease was not an isolated incident in Japan last century. Three other times in the 1900s (twice with mercury, once with sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide), Japanese villagers found themselves victims of mass industrial poisonings. These cases are known as the Big Four Pollution Diseases of Japan.

Scarily, cadmium is not even the worst poison among the elements. It sits above mercury, a neurotoxin.

That’s why thallium, element eighty-one, is considered the deadliest element on the table. Animal cells have special ion channels to vacuum up potassium, and thallium rides into the body via those channels, often by skin osmosis. Once inside the body, thallium drops the pretense of being potassium and starts unstitching key amino acid bonds inside proteins and unraveling their elaborate folds, rendering them useless. And unlike cadmium, thallium doesn’t stick in the bones or kidneys, but roams like a molecular Mongol horde. Each atom can do an outsized amount of damage.

Indeed, radioactivity dominates the bottom of the periodic table. It plays the same role the octet rule does for elements near the top: almost everything useful about heavy elements derives from how, and how quickly, they go radioactive.

But ordinary uranium is mostly uranium-238, which is a weak source of radioactivity. (Figuring out how to enrich ore by separating uranium-235 and uranium-238, which are chemically identical, was in fact a major achievement of the Manhattan Project.)

With David’s record, this was a significant offense, since smoke detectors run on a radioactive element, americium. Americium is a reliable source of alpha particles, which can be channeled into an electric current inside detectors. Smoke absorbs the alpha particles, which disrupts the current and sets off the shrill alarm.

If certain bacteria, fungi, or algae inch across something made of copper, they absorb copper atoms, which disrupt their metabolism (human cells are unaffected). The microbes choke and die after a few hours. This effect—the oligodynamic, or “self-sterilizing,” effect—makes metals more sterile than wood or plastic and explains why we have brass doorknobs and metal railings in public places.

Copper tubing in air-conditioning ducts cleans out the nasty bugs that fester inside there, too.

Gadolinium, which sits in the middle of the rare earth row, has the maximum number of electrons sitting by themselves. Having so many unpaired, noncanceling electrons allows gadolinium to be magnetized more strongly than any other element—a nice feature for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

MRI machines work by slightly magnetizing body tissue with powerful magnets and then flipping the magnets off. When the field releases, the tissue relaxes, reorients itself randomly, and becomes invisible to a magnetic field. Highly magnetic bits like gadolinium take longer to relax, and the MRI machine picks up on that difference. So by affixing gadolinium to tumor-targeting agents—chemicals that seek out and bind only to tumors—doctors can pick tumors out on an MRI scan more easily. Gadolinium basically cranks up the contrast between tumors and normal flesh, and depending on the machine, the tumor will either stand out like a white island in a sea of grayish tissue or appear as an inky cloud in a bright white sky.

Even better, gadolinium might do more than just diagnose tumors. It might also provide doctors with a way to kill those tumors with intense radiation. Gadolinium’s array of unpaired electrons allows it to absorb scads of neutrons, which normal body tissue cannot absorb well. Absorbing neutrons turns gadolinium radioactive, and when it goes nuclear, it shreds the tissue around it. Normally, triggering a nano-nuke inside the body is bad, but if doctors can induce tumors to absorb gadolinium, it’s sort of an enemy of an enemy thing.

The other possible approach was to ignore Pasteur’s distinction and manufacture both right-handed and left-handed versions of biochemicals. This was actually fairly easy to do because, statistically, reactions that produce handed molecules are equally likely to form righties and lefties. The problem with this approach is that mirror-image molecules have different properties inside the body. The zesty odor of lemons and oranges derives from the same basic molecules, one right-handed and one left-handed. Wrong-handed molecules can even destroy left-handed biology

That limited maneuverability during coitus, coupled with rhodium’s catalytic ability to fast-forward reactions, meant that Knowles could get away with doing only a bit of the hard work—making a chiral rhodium catalyst—and still reap bushels of correctly handed molecules.

The year was 1968, and modern drug synthesis began at that moment—a moment later honored with a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for Knowles in 2001.

The scariest part is that no one struggles before dying. Panic never kicks in, despite the lack of oxygen. That might seem incredible if you’ve ever been trapped underwater. The instinct not to suffocate will buck you to the surface. But our hearts, lungs, and brains actually have no gauge for detecting oxygen. Those organs judge only two things: whether we’re inhaling some gas, any gas, and whether we’re exhaling carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide dissolves in blood to form carbonic acid, so as long as we purge CO2 with each breath and tamp down the acid, our brains will relax.

The taste buds for bitter scour food, especially plants, for poisonous nitrogen chemicals, like the cyanide in apple seeds.

The taste buds for savory, or umami, lock onto glutamate, the G in MSG. As an amino acid, glutamate helps build proteins, so these taste buds alert you to protein-rich foods.

The taste buds for salty also are affected by the flow of charges, but only the charges on certain elements. Sodium triggers the salty reflex on our tongues most strongly, but potassium, sodium’s chemical cousin, free rides on top and tastes salty, too. Both elements exist as charged ions in nature, and it’s mostly that charge, not the sodium or potassium per se, that the tongue detects. We evolved this taste because potassium and sodium ions help nerve cells send signals and muscles contract, so we’d literally be brain-dead and our hearts would stop without the charge they supply. Our tongues taste other physiologically important ions such as magnesium and calcium as vaguely salty, too.

The primary component of taste, smell, is the only sense that bypasses our logical neural processing and connects directly to the brain’s emotional centers.

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

Moreover, polonium has been linked to lung cancer from cigarettes, since tobacco plants absorb polonium excessively well and concentrate it in their leaves. Once incinerated and inhaled, the smoke ravishes lung tissue with radioactivity

Yet, as with most legends, what’s important isn’t the truth but the consequences—how people react to a story

And whereas electrons absorb and emit light of the same color (yellow in, yellow out), fluorescent molecules absorb high-energy light (ultraviolet light) but emit that energy as lower-energy, visible light. Depending on the molecule it’s attached to, europium can emit red, green, or blue light.

Pure samples were considered miracles. The French once displayed Fort Knox–like aluminium bars next to their crown jewels, and the minor emperor Napoleon III reserved a prized set of aluminium cutlery for special guests at banquets. (Less favored guests used gold knives and forks.)

Aluminium’s sixty-year reign as the world’s most precious substance was glorious, but soon an American chemist ruined everything.

The process was cheap and easy, and it would work just as well in huge vats as on the lab bench. This had been the most sought-after chemical prize since the philosopher’s stone, and Hall had found it. The “aluminium boy wonder” was just twenty-three.

Hall’s fortune, however, was not made instantly. Chemist Paul Héroult in France stumbled on more or less the same process at the same time. (Today Hall and Héroult share credit for the discovery that crashed the aluminium market.) An Austrian invented another separation method in 1887, and with the competition bearing down on Hall, he quickly founded what became the Aluminum Company of America, or Alcoa, in Pittsburgh. It turned into one of the most successful business ventures in history.

This spelling disagreement traces its roots back to the rapid rise of this metal. When chemists in the early 1800s speculated about the existence of element thirteen, they used both spellings but eventually settled on the extra i. That spelling paralleled the recently discovered barium, magnesium, sodium, and strontium. When Charles Hall applied for patents on his electric current process, he used the extra i, too. However, when advertising his shiny metal, Hall was looser with his language. There’s debate about whether cutting the i was intentional or a fortuitous mistake on advertising fliers, but when Hall saw “aluminum,” he thought it a brilliant coinage. He dropped the vowel permanently, and with it a syllable, which aligned his product with classy platinum.

He had read Goethe in the original German and found him mediocre. I was still young enough to be impressed by any strong convictions, and the denunciation made me suspicious of Goethe as a great thinker.

Luckily, the first real mood stabilizer, lithium, came to the United States in 1967.

Lithium tweaks many mood-altering chemicals in the brain, and its effects are complicated. Most interesting, lithium seems to reset the body’s circadian rhythm, its inner clock. In normal people, ambient conditions, especially the sun, dictate their humors and determine when they are tuckered out for the day. They’re on a twenty-four-hour cycle. Bipolar people run on cycles independent of the sun. And run and run. When they’re feeling good, their brains flood them with sunshiny neurostimulants, and a lack of sunshine does not turn the spigot off. Some call it “pathological enthusiasm”: such people barely need sleep, and their self-confidence swells to the point that a Bostonian male in the twentieth century can believe that the Holy Spirit has chosen him as the vessel of Jesus Christ. Eventually, those surges deplete the brain, and people crash. Severe manic-depressives, when the “black dogs” have them, sometimes take to bed for weeks.

Lithium regulates the proteins that control the body’s inner clock. This clock runs, oddly, on DNA, inside special neurons deep in the brain. Special proteins attach to people’s DNA each morning, and after a fixed time they degrade and fall off. Sunlight resets the proteins over and over, so they hold on much longer. In fact, the proteins fall off only after darkness falls—at which point the brain should “notice” the bare DNA and stop producing stimulants. This process goes awry in manic-depressives because the proteins, despite the lack of sunlight, remain bound fast to their DNA. Their brains don’t realize they should stop revving.

selenium is toxic in large doses. Ranchers know this well. If not watched carefully, their cattle will root out a prairie plant of the pea family known as locoweed, some varieties of which sponge up selenium from the soil. Cattle that munch on locoweed begin to stagger and stumble and develop fevers, sores, and anorexia—a suite of symptoms known as the blind staggers. Yet they enjoy the high. In the surest sign that selenium actually makes them go mad, cattle grow addicted to locoweed despite its awful side effects and eat it to the exclusion of anything else. It’s animal meth.

What made the experiment special was the combination of heavy hydrogen with palladium, a whitish metal with one flabbergasting property: it can swallow nine hundred times its own volume of hydrogen gas.

The point is that many scientists who’d predicted the impossibility of such superconductors felt like asses. It was the physics equivalent of finding the coelacanth. And like megalodon romantics, cold-fusion lovers in 1989 could point to the recent superconductor craziness and force normally dismissive scientists to suspend judgment. Indeed, cold-fusion fanatics seemed giddy at the chance to overthrow old dogma, a delirium typical of pathological science.

“Because the Cold-Fusioners see themselves as a community under siege, there is little internal criticism. Experiments and theories tend to be accepted at face value, for fear of providing even more fuel for external critics, if anyone outside the group was bothering to listen. In these circumstances, crackpots flourish, making matters worse for those who believe that there is serious science going on here.” It’s hard to imagine a better, more concise description of pathological science.

One alien ice, Ice X, doesn’t melt until it reaches 3,700°F.

Despite its austere beauty in a vacuum, light gets corrupted when it interacts with some elements. Sodium and praseodymium can slow light down to 6 miles per second, slower than sound. Those elements can even catch light, hold on to it for a few seconds like a baseball, then toss it in a different direction.

The most powerful, most impressive lasers today—capable of producing beams that, for a fraction of a second, produce more power than the whole United States—use crystals of yttrium spiked with neodymium.

When water leaks into calcium’s pores, the two react like a mini grade-school volcano to release small amounts of carbon dioxide, which softens up the rock. On a large and geological scale, reactions between rainwater and calcium form the huge cavities we know as caves.

Shortly after moving from New Zealand to Cambridge University in 1895, Rutherford devoted himself to radioactivity, the genetics or nanotechnology of the day.

Inside certain rocks, uranium atoms spit out alpha particles (which have two protons) and transmutate into element ninety, thorium. Thorium then begets radium by spitting out another alpha particle. Radium begets radon with yet another, and radon begets polonium, and polonium begets stable lead.

Anytime you hear scientists announcing a record for the “world’s oldest rock”—probably in Australia or Greenland, where zircons have survived the longest—rest assured they used zircon-uranium bubbles to date it.

For historical reasons (the French Enlightenment folk were fanatic measurers), the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM) just outside Paris acts as the standards bureau’s standards bureau, making sure all the “franchises” stay in line.

So, like phobic mothers, they constantly monitor the Kilogram’s temperature and the pressure around it to prevent microscopic bloating and contracting, stress that could slough off atoms.

You can’t e-mail the Kilogram, and no one has ever come up with a definition more reliable than that squat, shiny, pampered cylinder in Paris. (Or if they have, it’s either too impossibly involved to be practical—such as counting trillions of trillions of atoms—or requires measurements too precise for even the best instruments today.)

If anything runs deeper than a mathematician’s love of variables, it’s a scientist’s love of constants.

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.”

First are superatoms. These clusters—between eight and one hundred atoms of one element—have the eerie ability to mimic single atoms of different elements. For instance, thirteen aluminium atoms grouped together in the right way do a killer bromine: the two entities are indistinguishable in chemical reactions. This happens despite the cluster being thirteen times larger than a single bromine atom and despite aluminium being nothing like the lacrimatory poison-gas staple.

the most detailed account of Hahn’s story, see Ken Silverstein’s article in Harper’s magazine, “The Radioactive Boy Scout” (November 1998). Silverstein later expanded the article into a book of the same name.