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by
Oliver Sacks
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November 18 - November 26, 2017
make the mental leap, to move out of the assumptions of his time into a new realm,
H. G. Wells’s early story “The Lord of the Dynamos,”
her son Aubrey, even as a boy, was a learned and eloquent Zionist (and later, as Abba Eban, the first Israeli ambassador to the United Nations).
sheitls—
When I was five, I am told, and asked what my favorite things in the world were, I answered, “smoked salmon and Bach.” (Now, sixty years later, my answer would be the same.)
this is happening to his body,” she continued, “what is happening to his mind?”
“The Periodic Classification of the Elements—after Mendeleeff.”
found myself looking at the table in almost geographic terms, as a realm, a kingdom, with different territories and boundaries.
Suddenly Mendeleev was no longer seen as a mere speculator or dreamer, but as a man who had discovered a basic law of nature, and now the periodic table was transformed from a pretty but unproven scheme to an invaluable guide which could allow a vast amount of previously unconnected chemical information to be coordinated.
Elements 95 and 96, however, were created in 1944. Their discovery was not made public in the usual way—in a letter to Nature, or at a meeting of the Chemical Society—but during a children’s radio quiz show in November 1945, during which a twelve-year-old boy asked, “Mr. Seaborg, have you made any more elements lately?”
incandesced
allotrope,
“phossy-jaw,”
even ordinary cane sugar—and crush them, with a mortar and pestle, or between two test tubes (or even one’s teeth), cracking the crystals against one another—this would cause them to glow.
You may, when in the dark frighten simple people only by chewing lumps of sugar, and, in the meantime, keeping your mouth open, which will appear to them as if full of fire; to this add, that the light from sugar is the more copious in proportion as the sugar is purer.
horologist
“a feeling for the organism”—
insects saw ultraviolet,
Its discovery would have been premature, in the sense that there would have been no nexus of knowledge, no context, to give it meaning.
Madame Curie,
Monsieur Valdemar in the Edgar Allan Poe story.
but I knew them, nonetheless, all fifty-odd of them, by heart,
We took the funicular train up its cogwheel track to the summit of Mount Rigi—
Jonathan Miller
Eric Korn,
Cannery Row
Sweet Thursday,
Cannery Row in Monterey (by this time I knew that “Doc” was a real person, Ed Ricketts).
Uncle Abe had in his house a “spinthariscope,” just like the ones advertised on the cover of Marie Curie’s thesis. It was a beautifully simple instrument, consisting of a fluorescent screen and a magnifying eyepiece, and inside, an infinitesimal speck of radium. Looking through the eyepiece, one could see dozens of scintillations a second—when Uncle Abe handed me this, and I held it up to my eye, I found the spectacle enchanting, magical, like looking at an endless display of meteors or shooting
stars.
for the tiny sparks or scintillations one saw came from the disintegration of individual atoms of radium, from the individual alpha particles each shot off as it exploded.
as early as 1903, he had spoken of the earth as “a storehouse stuffed with explosives, inconceivably more powerful than any we know of.”
The World Set Free
John Hersey’s “Hiroshima”
It was reading The World Set Free in the 1930s that set Leo Szilard to thinking of chain reactions and getting a secret patent on these in 1936; in 1940 he persuaded Einstein to send his famous letter to Roosevelt about the possibilities of an atomic bomb.
How many elements would God need to build a universe?
William Prout, a chemically minded physician in London, observing that atomic weights were close to whole numbers and therefore multiples of the atomic weight of hydrogen, speculated that hydrogen was in fact the primordial element, and that all other elements had been built from it. Thus God needed to create only one sort of atom, and all the others, by a natural “condensation,” could be generated from this.
Prout’s hypothesis never really died—it was so beautiful, so simple, many chemists and physicists felt, that it must contain an essential truth.
In 1913, a century after Prout, Harry Moseley, a brilliant young physicist working with Rutherford, set about exploring atoms with the just-developed technique of X-ray spectroscopy. His experimental setup was charming and boyish: using a little train, each car carrying a different element, moving inside a yard-long vacuum tube, Moseley bombarded each element with cathode rays, causing them to emit characteristic X-rays. When he came to plot the square roots of the frequencies against the atomic number of the elements, he got a straight line; and plotting it another way, he could show that the
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One now knew for certain the order of the elements, and that there were ninety-two elements and ninety-two only, from hydrogen to uranium. And it was now clear that there were seven missing elements, and seven only, still to be found.
It was atomic number, not atomic weight, that was crucial.
atomic number
the number of protons in the nucleus of an atom, which determines the chemical properties of an element and its place in the periodic table.
Learning of this was the third ecstasy of my life, at least of my “chemical” life—the first having been learning of Dalton and atomic theory, and the second of Mendeleev and his periodic table. But the third, I think, was in some ways the most stunning of all, because it contravened (or seemed to) all the classical science I knew, and all I knew of rationality and causality.
Bohr’s electronic periodic table,
The inside of the sun reaches enormous temperatures, something on the order of twenty million degrees. I found it difficult to imagine a temperature like this—a stove at this temperature (George Gamow wrote in The Birth and Death of the Sun) would destroy everything around it for hundreds of miles.
Hydrogen, element 1, was not only the fuel of the universe, it was the ultimate building block of the universe, the primordial atom, as Prout had thought back in 1815. This seemed very elegant, very satisfying, that all one needed to start with was the first, the simplest of atoms.4
“God thinks in numbers,” Auntie Len used to say. “Numbers are the way the world is put together.”
Moseley had observed that element 72 was missing, but could not say whether it would be a rare-earth element or not (elements 57–71 were rare earths, and 73, tantalum, was a transition element, but no one was sure how many rare earths there would be). Bohr, with his clear idea of the numbers of electrons in each shell, was able to predict that element 72 would not be a rare-earth element, but a heavier analog of zirconium. He suggested that his colleagues in Denmark seek this new element in zirconium ores, and it was swiftly found (and named hafnium, after the old name for Copenhagen). This
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What was found, using mercury, was the complete opposite: the mercury became a perfect conductor, a superconductor, suddenly losing all its resistance at 4.2 degrees above absolute zero. Thus one could have a ring of mercury, cooled by liquid helium, with an electrical current flowing around it with no diminution, for days, forever.
it was only the lightest elements—hydrogen and helium and perhaps a little lithium—that originated in the Big Bang.
