What do you think?
Rate this book
Big Ideas Simply Explained
The Chemistry Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained
Discover and understand the key ideas that underpin the core science of chemistry and learn about the great minds who uncovered themWritten in plain English, The Chemistry Book is packed with short, pithy explanations of some of the most historic moments in science, from the birthof atomic theory to the discovery of polyethylene and the development of new vaccine technologies to combat COVID-19. Simple graphics, such as flowcharts and mind maps, support the text and make the explanation of key concepts easy to follow.Arranged in chronological order, the book covers key themes in the physical and natural sciences, such as geochemistry and the elements. Within each chapter, a series of articles traces the history of scientific thought and introduces the work of the scientists who have shaped the subject such as John Dalton, Marie Curie, Dmitri Mendeleev, Kathleen Lonsdale, and Stephanie Kwolek. Along the way, the book addresses some of the most fundamental questions in science, such as what is the universe made of, how is matter created, and what are the chemical bonds that make life possible?Whether you are new to chemistry, a student of the sciences, or just want to keep up with and understand the latest news and scientific debates, The Chemistry Book is for you.
336 pages, Hardcover
Published August 9, 2022
237 people are currently reading
1162 people want to read
About the author
D.K. Publishing
9,071 books2,080 followersDorling Kindersley (DK) is a British multinational publishing company specializing in illustrated reference books for adults and children in 62 languages. It is part of Penguin Random House, a consumer publishing company jointly owned by Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA and Pearson PLC. Bertelsmann owns 53% of the company and Pearson owns 47%.
Established in 1974, DK publishes a range of titles in genres including travel (including Eyewitness Travel Guides), arts and crafts, business, history, cooking, gaming, gardening, health and fitness, natural history, parenting, science and reference. They also publish books for children, toddlers and babies, covering such topics as history, the human body, animals and activities, as well as licensed properties such as LEGO, Disney and DeLiSo, licensor of the toy Sophie la Girafe. DK has offices in New York, London, Munich, New Delhi, Toronto and Melbourne.
Source: Wikipedia.
Established in 1974, DK publishes a range of titles in genres including travel (including Eyewitness Travel Guides), arts and crafts, business, history, cooking, gaming, gardening, health and fitness, natural history, parenting, science and reference. They also publish books for children, toddlers and babies, covering such topics as history, the human body, animals and activities, as well as licensed properties such as LEGO, Disney and DeLiSo, licensor of the toy Sophie la Girafe. DK has offices in New York, London, Munich, New Delhi, Toronto and Melbourne.
Source: Wikipedia.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
May 11, 2025
I love my ummah but I will never forgive them for creating chemistry
August 29, 2022
3.5
I haven't had much to do with chemistry since school. So this was a great refresher on a lot of things and I learned about a lot of new things to me. So that was fun and I really enjoyed it. I reccomend this if you're interested in the subject matter.
I haven't had much to do with chemistry since school. So this was a great refresher on a lot of things and I learned about a lot of new things to me. So that was fun and I really enjoyed it. I reccomend this if you're interested in the subject matter.
November 28, 2022
Looking for a complete history of our chemistry endeavours both good and bad?
Here you go!
Loved this so much.
Here you go!
Loved this so much.
August 1, 2024
I especially enjoyed learning about lesser known women chemists- starting with the first perfume maker! Excellent organization, images, and content.
August 8, 2023
Another winner from DK Books, this one takes as its subject the store of human knowledge accumulated over centuries of experimenting with matter. It starts with very crude but significant processes, like fermentation to create beer and yield various forms of noble rot. This isn’t always pretty, as anyone involved in creating compounds for perfume can tell you (google “Skatole” to see what I mean.) Such concoctions can also yield as many poisons as medicines, but, to paraphrase Paracelsus, the difference between medicine and poison is in the dose.
From there the book moves on to alchemy, the attempt to isolate substances, to find the elemental constituents of compounds, and to transmute one substance into another. It failed in its ultimate aim of finding a “philosopher’s stone” to turn base metals into gold, but is still properly understood as a protoscience rather than pseudoscience. It took great ingenuity to make any discovery in a time where oxygen’s role in the world wasn’t understood, before the “phlogiston” theory was finally put to rest.
Much great groundwork was lain for future research in this supposed dark age. Phosphorus was isolated and discovered to be a luminous mineral collected from urine an alchemist kept in the bottom of a barrel; crude “pile” batteries were constructed that eventually led to lithium batteries, which anyone who owns electronics will tell you still need some improvement; and electricity’s power and properties were studied, if not quite properly harnessed in Leyden jars. This is to say nothing of galvanic experiments that were used to gainsay or support arguments ranging from vitalism to Cartesian clockwork mechanics of man, and also gave us Mary Shelly’s immortal monster patchworked together from the parts of corpses.
At last we come to chemistry as most people properly understand it, the game of acids and basis, those substances which are alkaline or acidic according to the pH scale.
From there humanity continued to make strange and sometimes even dangerous discoveries about the latent energy hiding in the mass of various elements. This led to the discovery of nuclear and hydrogen power, which can be harnessed to yield incredible amounts of energy, for good and also not-so-good ends.
We’re still not done tampering, exploring, making life better but also more hazardous via our experiments with the very stuff of life. And the border between the magical and scientific remains as liminal and shifting as it was when Arthur C. Clarke made his famous comments all those decades ago.
The Chemistry Book is an everyman’s history accessible to the layman but probably also handy to the expert as a bit of a refresher on some of the names of science’s forgotten geniuses. For science not only contains byways and blind alleys, but characters who did most of the work while getting little or none of the credit. Nothing can quite correct those injustices, but they can at least be documented, which The Chemistry Book does when given the chance.
Illustrations and photographs are amply offered throughout, and the sturdy binding make this one an ideal coffee table book, or a good gift for a smart-but-absent-minded kid who might drop the book once or twice or leave it out in the elements all afternoon after exploring nature. Highest recommendation.
From there the book moves on to alchemy, the attempt to isolate substances, to find the elemental constituents of compounds, and to transmute one substance into another. It failed in its ultimate aim of finding a “philosopher’s stone” to turn base metals into gold, but is still properly understood as a protoscience rather than pseudoscience. It took great ingenuity to make any discovery in a time where oxygen’s role in the world wasn’t understood, before the “phlogiston” theory was finally put to rest.
Much great groundwork was lain for future research in this supposed dark age. Phosphorus was isolated and discovered to be a luminous mineral collected from urine an alchemist kept in the bottom of a barrel; crude “pile” batteries were constructed that eventually led to lithium batteries, which anyone who owns electronics will tell you still need some improvement; and electricity’s power and properties were studied, if not quite properly harnessed in Leyden jars. This is to say nothing of galvanic experiments that were used to gainsay or support arguments ranging from vitalism to Cartesian clockwork mechanics of man, and also gave us Mary Shelly’s immortal monster patchworked together from the parts of corpses.
At last we come to chemistry as most people properly understand it, the game of acids and basis, those substances which are alkaline or acidic according to the pH scale.
From there humanity continued to make strange and sometimes even dangerous discoveries about the latent energy hiding in the mass of various elements. This led to the discovery of nuclear and hydrogen power, which can be harnessed to yield incredible amounts of energy, for good and also not-so-good ends.
We’re still not done tampering, exploring, making life better but also more hazardous via our experiments with the very stuff of life. And the border between the magical and scientific remains as liminal and shifting as it was when Arthur C. Clarke made his famous comments all those decades ago.
The Chemistry Book is an everyman’s history accessible to the layman but probably also handy to the expert as a bit of a refresher on some of the names of science’s forgotten geniuses. For science not only contains byways and blind alleys, but characters who did most of the work while getting little or none of the credit. Nothing can quite correct those injustices, but they can at least be documented, which The Chemistry Book does when given the chance.
Illustrations and photographs are amply offered throughout, and the sturdy binding make this one an ideal coffee table book, or a good gift for a smart-but-absent-minded kid who might drop the book once or twice or leave it out in the elements all afternoon after exploring nature. Highest recommendation.
July 29, 2025
Chemistry and the increasing laundry list of chemical names chemists produce, is increasingly leeching into our lives, even if we live in isolate Antarctica or a tropical jungle, as the products and pollutants in densely human populated places have diffused to every corner of the planet. No rock under the sea is safe from this modern global chemistry experiment!
As such, we need to familiarize ourselves with the processes of synthesizing chemicals, and understand how (functional) groups behave, like how they affect our bodies - just look at any random grocery product in the supermarket and you'll see names that your grandma cannot pronounce (unless she's a scientist herself).
I feel satisfied with how this book presented the major milestones in chemistry! With informative diagrams, and descriptions to get the mind's imagination sizzling with compound shapes. I really had a fun time learning how our perception of chemistry changed from the practical of producing goods like alcoholic beverages to perfumes, to the occult with alchemy, then how the strange ground laid down by them, paved the way for more modern practices of mixing and isolating chemicals.
What this book did an especially well with, is bringing awareness to the environmental and health affects, both positive and negative, the evolving field of chemistry has produced over these past few centuries, and increasingly now, decades; while scientists' reactions to the negative side sparked innovative solutions, burgeoning new fields of research in its path. Chemists created many modern problems, its now chemistry's responsibility to clean up this problem - to reduce or neutralize the runaway chain reactions in the environment and public health, before the problem goes nuclear.
I've really had to take my time with this one to tell some of the important core concepts simmer into a boil in my brain. There's juice to be squeezed from reading this.
I think the last sentence of this book highlights a core message from the stories told here:
"This shows how even research whose importance is unclear can change the world" (p. 315).
(I hope you like my chemistry puns I dispersed across this graphical medium! hehe)
As such, we need to familiarize ourselves with the processes of synthesizing chemicals, and understand how (functional) groups behave, like how they affect our bodies - just look at any random grocery product in the supermarket and you'll see names that your grandma cannot pronounce (unless she's a scientist herself).
I feel satisfied with how this book presented the major milestones in chemistry! With informative diagrams, and descriptions to get the mind's imagination sizzling with compound shapes. I really had a fun time learning how our perception of chemistry changed from the practical of producing goods like alcoholic beverages to perfumes, to the occult with alchemy, then how the strange ground laid down by them, paved the way for more modern practices of mixing and isolating chemicals.
What this book did an especially well with, is bringing awareness to the environmental and health affects, both positive and negative, the evolving field of chemistry has produced over these past few centuries, and increasingly now, decades; while scientists' reactions to the negative side sparked innovative solutions, burgeoning new fields of research in its path. Chemists created many modern problems, its now chemistry's responsibility to clean up this problem - to reduce or neutralize the runaway chain reactions in the environment and public health, before the problem goes nuclear.
I've really had to take my time with this one to tell some of the important core concepts simmer into a boil in my brain. There's juice to be squeezed from reading this.
I think the last sentence of this book highlights a core message from the stories told here:
"This shows how even research whose importance is unclear can change the world" (p. 315).
(I hope you like my chemistry puns I dispersed across this graphical medium! hehe)
October 19, 2023
As a first year medical student, this book helped me understand that chemistry and medicine are much more related than I first thought. It showed me that many discoveries in medicine could not have been made without chemistry and vice versa. Also, it helped build a solid foundation for my understanding of all natural science subjects that are a part of med school and therefore led to me understanding lecutres faster. Definitely recommend for (first year) med students
January 8, 2025
Amazingly well done history of the chemistry field in an easy to digest manner. I learned so many interesting tidbits from this book, and it really helps to contextualize the field as a whole. Would recommend for any aspiring chemist or curious scientist.
February 21, 2024
Not so simply explained as the cover says. Too many names, too many dates and they are repeated over and over. Good luck with this one.
June 14, 2025
It's a pretty alright history of chemistry book
September 22, 2025
very informative
Read
June 17, 2023""
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 5, 2025
This was an excellent book to read aloud to my middle son. It was packed full of information about all things chemistry - past and present.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews