Mendeleyev's Dream Quotes

“What Mendeleyev discovered on 17 February 1869 was the culmination of a two-and-a-half-thousand-year epic: a wayward parable of human aspiration. In 1955 element 101 was discovered and duly took its place in the Periodic Table. It was named mendelevium, in recognition of Mendeleyev’s supreme achievement. Appropriately, it is an unstable element, liable to spontaneous nuclear fission.”
― Paul Strathern, Mendeleyev's Dream: The Quest for the Elements

“Empedocles was to die when he leapt into the crater of Mount Etna, in an attempt to prove to his followers that he was immortal. Opinion remained divided at the time, but over the years his lack of reappearance went against him.”
― Paul Strathern, Mendeleyev's Dream: The Quest for the Elements

“In 1981 the American physicist Murray Gell-Mann, inspired by Mendeleyev’s example, came up with a classification table for subatomic particles, which he named the eightfold way.”
― Paul Strathern, Mendeleyev's Dream: The Quest for the Elements

“Mendeleyev had realized that when the elements were listed in order of their atomic weights, their properties repeated in a series of periodic intervals. For this reason, he named his discovery the Periodic Table of the Elements.”
― Paul Strathern, Mendeleyev's Dream: The Quest for the Elements

“What Mendeleyev was looking for amongst the elements appeared to be something very similar: a pattern listing the elements”
― Paul Strathern, Mendeleyev's Dream: The Quest for the Elements

“And the nitrogen group of elements, nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), arsenic (As) and antinomy (Sb), were just as disparate when it came to their atomic weights: ”
― Paul Strathern, Mendeleyev's Dream: The Quest for the Elements

“earlier, the French positivist philosopher Auguste Comte had pronounced that certain kinds of knowledge would remain forever beyond the reach of science. For instance, it would never be possible to discover precisely what the stars were made of. Comte”
― Paul Strathern, Mendeleyev's Dream: The Quest for the Elements

“When Kirchhoff had studied sunlight with his spectroscope, he had detected a number of unaccountable dark bands in its spectrum. The light from the sun had to pass through its atmosphere, and he realized that these dark bands were the ‘fingerprints’ of the”
― Paul Strathern, Mendeleyev's Dream: The Quest for the Elements

“Here he briefly attended lectures by Gustav Kirchhoff, said to have been the most boring lecturer in all Germany at the time. (Some feat, considering”
― Paul Strathern, Mendeleyev's Dream: The Quest for the Elements

“Between them, Kirchhoff and Bunsen developed the spectroscope, which uses a prism to refract light. As Newton had”
― Paul Strathern, Mendeleyev's Dream: The Quest for the Elements

“Thales of Miletus, the first philosopher-scientist. His theory that the world had developed from one element (water) was just the beginning. This idea, once conceived, was quickly developed by Thales’ pupils in Miletus – the philosophers known as the Milesian school. One of these was Anaximenes,”
― Paul Strathern, Mendeleyev's Dream: The Quest for the Elements

“In its early days philosophy included science – which became known as ‘natural philosophy’. Thales’ thinking was scientific because it could provide evidence for its conclusions. And it was philosophy because it used reason to reach these conclusions: there was no appeal to the gods or mysterious metaphysical forces. The argument was conducted entirely within the realms of this world, from which evidence could be gathered to prove or disprove its conclusions.”
― Paul Strathern, Mendeleyev's Dream: The Quest for the Elements