"The Disappearing Spoon"

[fiefoe]

Sam Kean does tell a great many interesting stories while cramming in a host of chemistry and physics knowledge, I just worry about my own retention rate.

• mercury: Using a toothpick like a hockey stick, she’d brush the supple spheres toward one another until they almost touched. Suddenly, with a final nudge, one sphere would gulp the other. A single, seamless ball would be left quivering where there had been two... she’d pour the quicksilver into the lid and let my siblings and me watch the futuristic metal whisk around, always splitting and healing itself flawlessly... Mercury acts this way, I later found out, because it is an element.
• * Lewis and Clark had trekked through South Dakota... they also carried with them six hundred mercury laxatives,... With a sort of sympathetic magic, they figured that beautiful, alluring mercury could cure patients by bringing them to an ugly crisis—poison fighting poison... As a handy side effect, Dr. Rush’s pills have enabled modern archaeologists to track down campsites used by the explorers.
• the symbol for mercury, Hg, consists of two letters that don’t even appear in its name. Unraveling that mystery—it’s from hydragyrum, Latin for “water silver”.. Hat manufacturers once used a bright orange mercury wash to separate fur from pelts, and the common hatters who dredged around in the steamy vats, like the mad one in Alice in Wonderland, gradually lost their hair and wits... They fray the “wires” in the central nervous system and burn holes in the brain, much as advanced Alzheimer’s disease does. <> But the more I learned about the dangers of mercury, the more—like William Blake’s “Tyger! Tyger! burning bright”—its destructive beauty attracted me... They just sat there, glistening, like beads of water so perfect you’d encounter them only in fantasies. All throughout my childhood, I associated spilled mercury with a fever. This time, knowing the fearful symmetry of those little spheres, I felt a chill.
• Two scientists observed the first evidence for helium (an unknown spectral line, in the yellow range) during an eclipse in 1868—hence the element’s name, from helios, Greek for “sun.”
• scientists realized that acids were in essence proton donors. Many acids contain hydrogen, a simple element that consists of one electron circling one proton (that’s all hydrogen has for a nucleus)... So Lewis shifted the paradigm. Instead of saying that H+ splits off, he emphasized that Cl− absconds with its electron. Instead of a proton donor, then, an acid is an electron thief. In contrast, bases such as bleach or lye, which are the opposites of acids, might be called electron donors. These definitions, in addition to being more general, emphasize the behavior of electrons, which fits better with the electron-dependent chemistry of the periodic table.
• * antimony, an element with probably the most colorful history on the periodic table.* Nebuchadnezzar, the king who built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon in the sixth century BC, used a noxious antimony-lead mix to paint his palace walls yellow. Perhaps not coincidentally, he soon went mad... Later, medieval monks—not to mention Isaac Newton—grew obsessed with the sexual properties of antimony and decided this half metal, half insulator, neither one thing nor the other, was a hermaphrodite. Antimony pills also won fame as laxatives. Unlike modern pills, these hard antimony pills didn’t dissolve in the intestines, and the pills were considered so valuable that people rooted through fecal matter to retrieve and reuse them.
• Much of our knowledge of alchemy and antimony comes from a 1604 book, The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony, written by Johann Thölde. To give his book a publicity boost, Thölde claimed he’d merely translated it from a 1450 text written by a monk, Basilius Valentinus... Although many did call antimony a hermaphrodite, others insisted it was the essence of femininity—so much so that a version of the alchemical symbol for antimony, became associated with the general symbol for “female.”
• Mixing antimony pentafluoride, SbF5, with hydrofluoric acid, HF, produces a substance with a pH of –31.
• Really, the strongest solo acid is still the boron-based carborane (HCB11Cl11). And this boron acid has the best punch line so far: It’s simultaneously the world’s strongest and gentlest acid... It can add an octane kick to gasoline, for one thing, and help make vitamins digestible. More important is its use in chemical “cradling.” Many chemical reactions involving protons aren’t clean, quick swaps. They require multiple steps, and protons get shuttled around in millionths of billionths of seconds—so quickly scientists have no idea what really happened. Carborane, though, because it’s so stable and unreactive, will flood a solution with protons, then freeze the molecules at crucial intermediate points. Carborane holds the intermediate species up on a soft, safe pillow.
• * The transition metals appear in columns three through twelve of the fourth through seventh rows, and they start to file electrons into what are called d-shells, which hold ten electrons. (D-shells look like nothing so much as misshapen balloon animals.) Based on what every other previous element has done with its shells, you’d expect the transition metals to put each extra d-shell electron on display in an outer layer and for that extra electron to be available for reactions, too. But no, transition metals squirrel their extra electrons away and prefer to hide them beneath other layers... Other atoms trying to react with the metals cannot get at those electrons, and the upshot is that many metals in a row leave the same number of electrons exposed. They therefore act the same way chemically. That’s why, scientifically, many metals look so indistinguishable and act so indistinguishably... F-shell elements are similarly messy. F-shells begin to appear in the first of the two free-floating rows of metals beneath the periodic table, a group called the lanthanides. (They’re also called the rare earths
• the nucleus obeys the dictates of probably the most unlikely Nobel laureate ever,.. Maria Goeppert was born in Germany in 1906.
• * The third most common element is oxygen, element eight. But why? Scientists might answer that oxygen has a very stable nucleus, so it doesn’t disintegrate, or “decay.” But that only pushed the question back—why do certain elements like oxygen have such stable nuclei? <> Unlike most of her contemporaries, Goeppert-Mayer saw a parallel here to the incredible stability of noble gases. She suggested that protons and neutrons in the nucleus sit in shells just like electrons and that filling nuclear shells leads to stability... Goeppert-Mayer pursued her hunch, and by piecing together a number of unlinked experiments, she proved that nuclei do have shells and do form what she called magic nuclei. For complex mathematical reasons, magic nuclei don’t reappear periodically like elemental properties. The magic happens at atomic numbers two, eight, twenty, twenty-eight, fifty, eighty-two, and so on.
• the same arithmetic shows that poor carbon, element six, has four electrons left over after filling its first shell and therefore needs four more to make eight. That’s harder to do, and the upshot is that carbon has really low standards for forming bonds. It latches onto virtually anything. <> That promiscuity is carbon’s virtue. Unlike oxygen, carbon must form bonds with other atoms in whatever direction it can. In fact, carbon shares its electrons with up to four other atoms at once. This allows carbon to build complex chains, or even three-dimensional webs of molecules. And because it shares and cannot steal electrons, the bonds it forms are steady and stable.
• * Why silicon biology is impossible: Silicon enthusiasts can even point to a few animals on earth that employ silicon in their bodies, such as sea urchins with their silicon spines and radiolarian protozoa (one-celled creatures) that forge silicon into exoskeletal armor... But unlike carbon dioxide, silicon dioxide (even as fine volcanic dust) is a solid,..  They don’t flow, and it’s hard to get at individual molecules, which cells need to do... Silicon might substitute adequately for carbon in the Martian equivalent of fats or proteins. But carbon also contorts itself into ringed molecules we call sugars. Rings are states of high tension—which means they store lots of energy—and silicon just isn’t supple enough to bend into the right position to form rings.
• Hurrying back from Paris, Shockley wedged himself back into the transistor picture, often literally. In Bell Labs publicity photos showing the three men supposedly at work, he’s always standing between Bardeen and Brattain, ... Those images became the new reality and the general scientific community gave credit to all three men.
• This P. T. Barnum—whose real name was Gordon Teal—then hooked up a germanium-run record player to external speakers and, rather medievally, lowered the player’s innards into a vat of boiling oil. As expected, it choked and died. After fishing the innards out, Teal popped out the germanium transistor and rewired the record player with his silicon one. Once again, he plopped it into the oil. The band played on... Kilby’s original germanium circuit is ensconced in the Smithsonian Institution, but in the bare-knuckle marketplace, germanium got pummeled.
• The first had one of those names from history books, like Dr. Guillotin, or Charles Ponzi, or Jules Léotard, or Étienne de Silhouette, that makes you smile to think someone actually answered to it. This pioneer of the periodic table deserves special praise, since his eponymous burner
• Bunsen settled back into chemistry at the University of Heidelberg in the 1850s and soon ensured himself scientific immortality by inventing the spectroscope, which uses light to study elements. Each element on the periodic table produces sharp, narrow bands of colored light when heated. 
• * Mendeleev didn’t conjure up the first periodic table on his own. Six people invented it independently, and all of them built on the “chemical affinities” noted by an earlier generation of chemists. Mendeleev started with a rough idea of how to group elements into small, synonymous sets, then transformed these gestures at a periodic system into scientific law, much like Homer transformed disconnected Greek myths into The Odyssey... Pinning her hopes on her sharp-minded son, she bundled him up on horseback and rode twelve hundred miles across the steppes and steep, snowy Ural Mountains to an elite university in Moscow—which rejected Dmitri because he wasn’t local stock. Undaunted, Mama Mendeleev bundled him back up and rode four hundred miles farther, to his dead father’s alma mater in St. Petersburg. Just after seeing him enrolled, she died.
• De Chancourtois, a geologist, drew his periodic system on a spiral cylinder, like the thread of a screw. The possibility of his getting credit for the table was dashed when a publisher couldn’t figure out how to reproduce the crucial screw diagram showing all the elements.
• Mendeleev’s outsized character. Like his Russian contemporary Dostoevsky—who wrote his entire novel The Gambler in three weeks to pay off desperate gambling debts—Mendeleev threw together his first table to meet a textbook publisher’s deadline. He’d already written volume one of the textbook, a five-hundred-page tome, but had got through just eight elements. That meant he had to fit all the rest into volume two. After six weeks of procrastinating, he decided in one inspired moment that the most concise way to present the information was in a table.
• Desperate to save his neck, Böttger begged the king to spare him. Although he’d failed with alchemy, he claimed he knew how to make porcelain... Tschirnhaus had just invented a special oven that reached 3,000°F. This allowed him to melt down porcelain to analyze it... The duo discovered that the secret ingredients in Chinese porcelain were a white clay called kaolin and a feldspar rock that fuses into glass at high temperatures. Just as crucially, they figured out that, unlike with most crockery, they had to cook the porcelain glaze and clay simultaneously, not in separate steps.
• He made element hunting a pastime, even an avocation, and when, in Mendeleev’s old age, chemists with better tools revisited Gadolin’s work on the Ytterby rocks, new elements started to fall out like loose change... Overall, of the seven elements discovered in Ytterby, six were Mendeleev’s missing lanthanides.
• It first suggests the universe was once a primordial slurry of hydrogen, with a smattering of helium and lithium. Eventually, hydrogen clumped together into stars, and the extreme gravitational pressure inside stars began fusing hydrogen into helium, a process that fires every star in the sky... 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... 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... 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...  Iron is the final peal of a star’s natural life.
• * The reason elements live such strange lives inside Jupiter is that Jupiter is a ’tweener: not a large planet so much as a failed star. Had Jupiter sucked up about ten times more detritus during its formation, it might have graduated to a brown dwarf, a star with just enough brute mass to fuse some atoms together and give off low-watt, brownish light... Inside Jupiter, they enter a limbo of possibility between chemical and nuclear reactions, where planet-sized diamonds and oily hydrogen metal seem plausible... The friction from skydiving above Jupiter would have excited falling droplets of those elements in the same way, energizing them like meteors. So if big enough droplets fell far enough fast enough, someone floating right near the metallic hydrogen layer inside Jupiter maybe, just maybe, could have looked up into its cream and orange sky and seen the most spectacular light show ever—fireworks lighting up the Jovian night with a trillion streaks of brilliant crimson, what scientists call neon rain.
• The heaviest elements are radioactive, and almost all—most notably uranium—break down into steady lead... Patterson’s lead fixation did lead to two important results. First, when he’d cleaned up his lab enough, he came up with what’s still the best estimate of the earth’s age, 4.55 billion years. Second, his horror over lead contamination turned him into an activist, and he’s the largest reason future children will never eat lead paint chips and gas stations no longer bother to advertise “unleaded” on their pumps.
• Muller, in what he described as an adrenaline-fueled moment of improvised genius, reached down and blurted out that maybe the sun had a roaming companion star, around which the earth circled too slowly for us to notice—and, and, and whose gravity yanked asteroids toward the earth as it approached us... Nemesis could explain why the dinosaurs died out so slowly. The Mexican crater might have been only the biggest blow in a pummeling that lasted many thousands of years, as long as Nemesis was in the neighborhood... This theory is far from proved, but if it ever is, we’re on one long, deadly carousel ride through the universe. At least we can thank iridium and rhenium for letting us know that, perhaps soon, we’d better duck.
• Fritz Haber: became one of the most famous scientists in the world around 1900 when he figured out how to convert the commonest of chemicals—the nitrogen in air—into an industrial product... (When pitcher plants and Venus flytraps trap insects, it’s the bugs’ nitrogen they’re after.)
• that pesky Hague pact, which political leaders didn’t want to break (again) publicly. The solution was to interpret the pact in an ultraconscientious yet ultimately bogus way. In signing it, Germany had agreed to “abstain from the use of projectiles, the sole object of which is the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases.” So to the Germans’ sophisticated, legalistic reading, the pact had no jurisdiction over shells that delivered shrapnel and gas. It took some cunning engineering—the sloshing liquid bromine, which evaporated into gas on impact, wreaked havoc with the shells’ trajectory
• because chlorine is smaller—each atom weighs less than half of a bromine atom—chlorine can attack the body’s cells much more nimbly. Chlorine turns victims’ skin yellow, green, and black, and glasses over their eyes with cataracts. They actually die of drowning, from the fluid buildup in their lungs. If bromine gas is a phalanx of foot soldiers clashing with the mucous membranes, chlorine is a blitzkrieg tank rushing by the body’s defenses to tear apart the sinuses and lungs.
• Humiliated at the huge reparations Germany had to pay to the Allies, Haber spent six futile years trying to extract dissolved gold from the oceans, so that he could pay the reparations himself... work on the insecticide continued. And within years the Nazis were gassing millions of Jews, including relatives of Haber, with that second-generation gas—Zyklon B.
• the German military had begun to exploit a different pocket of the periodic table during World War I, and it eventually decided that bludgeoning enemy combatants with two metals, molybdenum and tungsten... 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 at a molybdenum mine in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.
• Molybdenum (pronounced “mo-lib-di-num”) could withstand the excessive heat ... 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... But Germany soon faced another huge Bertha setback—it had no supply of molybdenum and risked running out. In fact, the only known supplier was a bankrupt, nearly abandoned mine on Bartlett Mountain in Colorado.
• * Those nearly three tons exceeded the yearly world demand for molybdenum by 50 percent, which meant King hadn’t just flooded the market, he’d drowned it... the German agents got to King anyway, mugging him with knives and pickaxes on a mountain pass and hurling him off a sheer cliff. Only a well-placed snowbank saved his neck. As the self-described “tomboy bride” of one miner put it in her memoirs, the Germans did “everything short of downright slaughter to hinder the work of his company.”.. Not until the British captured German arms in 1916 and reverse-engineered them by melting them down did the Allies discover the wundermetall, but the shenanigans in the Rockies continued. The United States didn’t enter World War I until 1917, so it had no special reason to monitor Metallgesellschaft’s subsidiary in New York, especially considering its patriotic name, American Metal... Sadly, those efforts came too late to disable Germany’s Big Berthas. As late as 1918, Germany used moly steel guns to shell Paris from the astonishing distance of seventy-five miles.
• refugees longed to escape to Lisbon, from which they could safely fly to Britain or the United States. However, the dictator of Portugal, Antonio Salazar, tolerated Nazi sympathizers in his government and provided a haven for Axis spies. He also rather two-facedly shipped thousands of tons of tungsten to both sides during the war. Proving his worth as a former professor of economics, Salazar leveraged his country’s near monopoly on the metal (90 percent of Europe’s supply) into profits 1,000 percent greater than peacetime levels... Distressingly, far from there being a black market for this grayish metal, the whole process was entirely transparent, as one historian noted. Tungsten was shipped from Portugal through fascist Spain, another “neutral,” and much of the gold the Nazis had seized from Jews—including the gold wrenched out of the teeth of gassed Jews—was laundered by banks in Lisbon and Switzerland, still another country that took no sides.
• The fires burned hottest in Congo between 1998 and 2001, at which point cell phone makers realized they were funding anarchy. To their credit, they began to buy tantalum and niobium from Australia, even though it cost more, and Congo cooled down a bit... things never really calmed down in the eastern half of the country, near Rwanda. And lately another element, tin, has begun to fund the fighting. In 2006, the European Union outlawed lead solder in consumer goods, and most manufacturers have replaced it with tin—a metal Congo also happens to have in huge supply... Overall, more than five million people have died in Congo since the mid-1990s,
• Most of the elements line up on the table in a cattle call of increasing weight... Yet to make the elements fit properly—so cobalt sat above cobalt-like elements and nickel above nickel-like elements—chemists had to switch their spots. No one knew why this was necessary,... Moseley, just twenty-five, solved the riddle by translating the question from chemistry to physics. The crucial thing to realize is that few scientists believed in the atomic nucleus at the time. Rutherford had put forward the idea of a compact, highly positive nucleus just two years earlier, and it remained unproven in 1913, too tentative for scientists to accept. Moseley’s work provided the first confirmation... Moseley linked an element’s place on the table to a physical characteristic, equating the positive nuclear charge with the atomic number. And he did so with an experiment that anyone could repeat.
• * Yet Manhattan Project scientists had orders to figure out exactly how much plutonium and uranium they needed to create a bomb: too little and the bomb would fizzle out. Too much and the bomb would blow up just fine, but at the cost of prolonging the war by months, since both elements were monstrously complicated to purify... So, just to get by, some pragmatic scientists decided to abandon both traditional approaches, theory and experiment, and pioneer a third path.
• To start, they picked a random speed for a neutron bouncing around in a pile of plutonium (or uranium). They also picked a random direction for it and more random numbers for other parameters, such as the amount of plutonium available, the chance the neutron would escape the plutonium before being absorbed, even the geometry and shape of the plutonium pile. Note that selecting specific numbers meant that scientists were conceding the universality of each calculation, since the results applied to only a few neutrons in one of many designs. Theoretical scientists hate giving up universally applicable results, but they had no other choice.
• At this point, rooms full of young women with pencils (many of them scientists’ wives, who’d been hired to help out because they were crushingly bored in Los Alamos) would get a sheet with the random numbers and begin to calculate... Each of the hundreds of women did one narrow calculation in an assembly line, and scientists aggregated the results. Historian George Dyson described this process as building bombs “numerically, neutron by neutron, nanosecond by nanosecond… [a method] of statistical approximation whereby a random sampling of events… is followed through a series of representative slices in time, answering the otherwise incalculable question of whether a configuration would go thermonuclear.”... Particles on the quantum level are governed by statistical laws, and quantum mechanics, for all its bizarre, counterintuitive features, is the single most accurate scientific theory ever devised.
• Ulam recognized that he was using the same basic approach as scientists had used in the bomb-building “experiments” in Los Alamos. (The connections are abstract, but the order and layout of the cards were like the random inputs, and the “calculation” was playing the hand.) Discussions soon followed with his calculation-loving friend John von Neumann, another European refugee and Manhattan Project veteran. Ulam and von Neumann realized just how powerful the method might be if they could universalize it and apply it to other situations with multitudes of random variables... they would simply define the problem, pick random inputs, and “plug and chug.” ... But with enough calculations, they could be pretty darn sure of the probabilities... Ulam liked to brag that he named it in memory of an uncle who often borrowed money to gamble on the “well-known generator of random integers (between zero and thirty-six) in the Mediterranean principality.”... Symbiotically, the advent of cheap computing meant that Monte Carlo–style experiments, simulations, and models began to take over branches of chemistry, astronomy, and physics, not to mention engineering and stock market analysis.
• 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... Cobalt bombs fall devilishly between those extremes, a rare case in which the golden mean is the worst. Cobalt-60 atoms would settle into the ground like tiny land mines. Enough would go off right away to make it necessary to flee, but after five years fully half of the cobalt would still be armed... In fact, Szilard conjured up the idea to show the insanity of nuclear war, and people did seize on it.
• 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.
• Before the mayor’s snub, he had been advocating for calling element ninety-seven berkelium and making its chemical symbol Bm, because the element had been such a “stinker” to discover.
• But with element 101, there weren’t enough atoms for that. Therefore, the team had to identify it “posthumously,” by looking at what was left over after each atom disintegrated—like piecing a car together from scraps after a bombing.
• For various reasons—despotic tsars, an agrarian economy, poor schools, harsh weather—Russia just never fostered the scientific genius it might have. It couldn’t even get basic technologies right, such as its calendar. Until well past 1900, Russia used a misaligned calendar that Julius Caesar’s astrologers had invented, leaving it weeks behind Europe and its modern Gregorian calendar. That lag explains why the “October Revolution” that brought Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks to power in 1917 actually occurred in November.
• 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.
• Speaking of mistakes, no element has been discovered for the “first time” more times than element forty-three. It’s the Loch Ness monster of the elemental world... In 1846, another German discovered “ilmenium,” which was actually niobium. The next year someone else discovered “pelopium,” which was niobium, too.
• There’s no evidence Lawrence held a grudge against Segrè for his molybdenum gambit, but it was Lawrence who lowballed Segrè later that year. In fact, Lawrence blurted out, oblivious to the Italian’s feelings, how happy he was to save $184 per month to spend on equipment, like his precious cyclotron... Glenn Seaborg, once said that Lawrence’s world-renowned and much-envied Rad Lab—and not the Europeans who did—should have discovered artificial radioactivity and nuclear fission, ... To miss both, Seaborg rued, was “scandalous failure.”
• Fermi: he missed a far more consequential discovery than transuranics: he had actually induced uranium fission years before anyone else and hadn’t realized it. When two German scientists contradicted Fermi’s results in 1939, Fermi’s whole lab was stunned—he had already won a Nobel Prize for this. Segrè felt especially chagrined. His team had been in charge of analyzing and identifying the new elements... Under Fermi, Segrè had misidentified nuclear fission products as transuranics. “Apparently not learning from that experience,” Glenn Seaborg recalled, “once again Segrè saw no need to follow up with careful chemistry.” In the exact opposite blunder, Segrè sloppily misidentified transuranic neptunium as a fission product.
• One of his projects, for instance, determined why sickle-cell anemia kills people: the misshaped hemoglobin in their red blood cells cannot hold on to oxygen. This work on hemoglobin stands out as the first time anyone had traced a disease to a malfunctioning molecule,... Pauling (with colleagues Harvey Itano, S. Jonathan Singer, and Ibert Wells) determined that defective hemoglobin causes sickle-cell anemia by running defective cells through a gel in an electric field. Cells with healthy hemoglobin traveled one way in the electric field, while sickle cells moved in the opposite direction. This meant that the two types of molecules had opposite electric charges, a difference that could arise only on a molecular, atom-by-atom level.
• 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... no one knew whether DNA or proteins carried that information. So two geneticists used radioactive tracers to tag both the phosphorus in viruses’ phosphorus-rich DNA and the sulfur in their sulfur-rich proteins. When the scientists examined a few hijacked cells, they found that radioactive phosphorus had been injected and passed on but the sulfurous proteins had not.
• two gawky graduate students at Cambridge University pored over advance copies of Pauling’s paper. Linus Pauling’s son, Peter, worked in the same lab as James Watson and Francis Crick* and had provided the paper as a courtesy. The unknown students desperately wanted to solve DNA to make their careers. And what they read in Pauling’s paper flabbergasted them: they had built the same model a year before—and had dismissed it, embarrassed, when a colleague had shown what a shoddy piece of work their triple helix was. <> During that dressing-down, however, the colleague, Rosalind Franklin, had betrayed a secret.
• Pauling: Eventually, his imprimatur as a Nobel Prize winner gave momentum to the nutritional supplement craze still going strong today, including the scientifically dubious notion (sorry!) that vitamin C can cure a cold.
• * 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. The malnutrition Hagino suspected at first also played a role. The local diet depended heavily on rice, which lacks essential nutrients, so the farmers’ bodies were starved of certain minerals. Cadmium mimicked those minerals well enough that the farmers’ cells, in dietary desperation, began to weave it into their organs at even higher rates than they otherwise would have... Thirteen years later, the horror of element forty-eight still retained such a hold on Japan that when filmmakers needed to kill off Godzilla in the then-latest sequel, The Return of Godzilla, the Japanese military in the film deployed cadmium-tipped missiles.
• to the right of mercury sit the most horrific mug shots on the periodic table—thallium, lead, and polonium—the nucleus of poisoner’s corridor. <> This clustering is partly coincidence, but there are legitimate chemical and physical reasons for the high concentration of poisons in the southeast corner. One, paradoxically, is that none of these heavy metals is volatile... The poisoner’s corridor elements are subtler and can migrate deep inside the body before going off. What’s more, these elements (like many heavy metals) can give up different numbers of electrons depending on the circumstances.
• During its Cuba-obsessed years, the Central Intelligence Agency hatched a plan to powder Fidel Castro’s socks with a sort of talcum powder tainted with thallium. The spies were especially tickled that the poison would cause all his hair, including his famous beard, to fall out, which they hoped would emasculate Castro
• A theoretical lake of bismuth would behave the same way—but almost uniquely so on the periodic table, since solids virtually always pack themselves more tightly than liquids. What’s more, that bismuth ice would probably be gorgeous. Bismuth has become a favorite desktop ornament and decorative knickknack for mineralogists and element nuts because it can form rocks known as hopper crystals, which twist themselves into elaborate rainbow staircases.
• Nuclear theory predicted bismuth should have a half-life of twenty billion billion years, much longer than the age of the universe. The French experiment was more or less a real-life Waiting for Godot. But amazingly, it worked. The French scientists collected enough bismuth and summoned enough patience to witness a number of decays. This result proved that instead of being the heaviest stable atom, bismuth will live only long enough to be the final element to go extinct.
• Yet bismuth is actually benign. It’s even medicinal: doctors prescribe it to soothe ulcers, and it’s the “bis” in hot-pink Pepto-Bismol...pacific bismuth marks the transition of poisoner’s corridor from the conventional retching-and-deep-pain poisons discussed above to the scorching radioactive poisons described below.
• the radioactive Boy Scout: In the meantime, David’s mother, fearing her house would be condemned, slipped into the laboratory shed one night and hauled almost everything in there to the trash. Months later, officials finally stormed across the neighbors’ backyards in hazmat gear to ransack the shed. Even then, the leftover cans and tools showed a thousand times more radioactivity than background levels.
• most pioneer families in early America invested in at least one good silver coin, which spent its Conestoga wagon ride across the wilderness hidden in a milk jug—not for safekeeping, but to keep the milk from spoiling.
• The hotel had rented out its convention center that week to a veterans group, the American Legion, and though not every victim belonged, the bug became known as Legionnaires’ disease.
• 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.
• 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.
• * Louis Pasteur and a peculiar discovery he made about a property of biomolecules called handedness: In fact, virtually every protein in every life form that has ever existed is exclusively left-handed. If astrobiologists ever find a microbe on a meteor or moon of Jupiter, almost the first thing they’ll test is the handedness of its proteins. If the proteins are left-handed, the microbe is possibly earthly contamination. If they’re right-handed, it’s certainly alien life... Yeast-born tartaric acid also has a curious property. Dissolve it in water and shine a vertical slit of light through the solution, and the beam will twist clockwise away from the vertical. It’s like rotating a dial. Industrial, human-made tartaric acid does nothing like that...  Only when he examined the crystals with a magnifying glass did he notice any difference. The tartaric acid crystals from yeast all twisted in one direction, like tiny, severed left-handed fists... The acid separates into left- and right-handed crystals only below 79°F, and had it been warmer that season, he never would have discovered handedness.
• Not until the drug saved the life of Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr., who was struck by a severe strep throat in 1936, and earned a headline in the New York Times did prontosil and its lone sulfur atom win any respect. Suddenly, Domagk might as well have been an alchemist... First, it wasn’t prontosil that fought off bacteria, but a derivative of it, sulfonamide, which mammal cells produce by splitting prontosil in two. This explained instantly why bacteria in test tubes had not been affected: no mammal cells had biologically “activated” the prontosil by cleaving it. Second, sulfonamide, with its central sulfur atom and hexapus of side chains, disrupts the production of folic acid, a nutrient all cells use to replicate DNA and reproduce. Mammals get folic acid from their diets, which means sulfonamide doesn’t hobble their cells. But bacteria have to manufacture their own folic acid or they can’t undergo mitosis and spread. In effect, then, the Frenchmen proved that Domagk had discovered not a bacteria killer but bacteria birth control!
• * 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. A German drug company in the 1950s began marketing a remedy for morning sickness in pregnant women, but the benign, curative form of the active ingredient was mixed in with the wrong-handed form because the scientists couldn’t separate them. The freakish birth defects that followed... made thalidomide the most notorious pharmaceutical of the twentieth century.
• But inanimate chemicals in a reaction don’t know to make one hand or the other.* They make both, unless they’re tricked. <> Knowles’s trick was a rhodium catalyst... Knowles found that one rhodium atom could inflate innumerably many of his 2D molecules. So he affixed the rhodium to the center of an already chiral compound, creating a chiral catalyst. <> The clever part was that both the chiral catalyst with the rhodium atom and the target 2D molecule were sprawling and bulky. So when they approached each other to react, they did so like two obese animals trying to have sex. That is, the chiral compound could poke its rhodium atom into the 2D molecule only from one position.
• metal prostheses: posses of blood cells surround foreign matter and wrap it in a straitjacket of slick, fibrous collagen. This mechanism—sealing the hunk off and preventing it from leaking—works great with, say, buckshot from a hunting accident. But cells aren’t smart enough to distinguish between invasive foreign matter and useful foreign matter,... Yet Brånemark found that for some reason, titanium hypnotizes blood cells: it triggers zero immune response and even cons the body’s osteoblasts, its bone-forming cells, into attaching themselves to it as if there was no difference between element twenty-two and actual bone.
• beryllium, element four, tastes like sugar. More than any other nutrient, humans need quick energy from sugar to live, and after millennia of hunting for sustenance in the wild, you’d think we’d have pretty sophisticated equipment to detect sugar. Yet beryllium—a pale, hard-to-melt, insoluble metal with small atoms that look nothing like ringed sugar molecules—lights up taste buds just the same.
• Gilbert Lewis proved, acids are intimately bound up with electrons and other charges. On a molecular level, then, “sour” is simply what we taste when our taste buds open up and hydrogen ions rush in. Our tongues conflate electricity, the flow of charged particles, with sour acids... 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.
• India’s iodine problem: But even decades after Gandhi’s march to Dandi, salt production was an industry by the people, for the people, and iodized salt, which the West pushed on India, retained a whiff of colonialism.
• Rather than just finding radioactive elements, Irène figured out a method for converting tame elements into artificially radioactive atoms by bombarding them with subatomic particles. This work led to her own Nobel Prize in 1935. Unfortunately, Joliot-Curie relied on polonium as her atomic bombardier. And one day in 1946, not long after Poland had been wrested from Nazi Germany, only to be taken over as a puppet of the Soviet Union, a capsule of polonium exploded in her laboratory, and she inhaled Marie’s beloved element.
• elemental tracers: Hevesy decided to test his idea on the tissue of a nonliving being, a test with an ulterior motive. He took too much meat at dinner one night and, when the landlady’s back was turned, sprinkled “hot” lead over it. She gathered his leftovers as normal, and the next day Hevesy brought home a newfangled radiation detector from his lab buddy, Hans Geiger... as Hevesy later recalled, “while the invading forces marched in the streets of Copenhagen, I was busy dissolving [Max von] Laue’s and also James Franck’s medals.”
• * Lise Meitner wasn’t baffled. Out of all the great minds who worked on transuranic elements, only hard-eyed Meitner grasped that they weren’t transuranic at all. She alone (after discussions with her nephew and new partner, physicist Otto Frisch) realized that Fermi hadn’t discovered new elements; he’d discovered nuclear fission. He’d cracked uranium into smaller elements and misinterpreted his results. The eka-lanthanum Joliot-Curie had found was plain lanthanum, the fallout of the first tiny nuclear explosions!..  Joliot-Curie, Hevesy said, “didn’t trust herself enough” to believe the correct interpretation. Meitner trusted herself... Shamefully, when Hahn got word of his win (the Allies now had him in military custody for suspicion of working on Germany’s atomic bomb; he was later cleared), he didn’t speak up for Meitner. As a result, the woman he’d once esteemed enough to defy his bosses and work with in a carpentry shop got nothing
• * What’s interesting is that zinc mixed with copper doesn’t form bronze; it forms brass. And the earliest known brass foundries existed in, of all places, the part of Asia Minor where Midas once reigned... Midas’s touch, then, was possibly nothing more than an accidental touch of zinc in the soil of his corner of Asia Minor.
• “fool’s fool’s gold.”: Gold is an aloof metal. You won’t find it mixed inside minerals and ores, because it doesn’t bond with other elements. Its flakes and nuggets are usually pure, besides a few odd alloys. The exception, the single element that will bond to gold, is tellurium, a vampirish element first isolated in Transylvania in 1782. with some equally atrocious chemical formulas. Instead of nice proportions such as H2O and CO2, krennerite is (Au0.8, Ag0.2)Te2.
• Later, the realization that electrons jump to whole-number levels and never orbit at fractional levels was a fundamental insight of quantum mechanics. Everything wacky you’ve ever heard about quantum mechanics derives directly or indirectly from these discontinuous leaps.
• lanthanides can emit light in a way other than simple absorption. It’s called fluorescence,* which is familiar to most people from black lights and psychedelic posters. In general, normal emissions of light involve just electrons, but fluorescence involves whole molecules. 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.
• Cerium sparks when struck, making it an ideal flint for cigarette lighters, and he traded the sticks to civilian workers in exchange for bread and soup. Levi came into the concentration camps fairly late, nearly starved there, and began bartering with cerium only in November 1944. He estimated that it bought him two months’ worth of rations, of life, enough to last until the Soviet army liberated his camp in January 1945. His knowledge of cerium is why we have his post-Holocaust masterpiece The Periodic Table today.
• despite being the most common metal in the earth’s crust—around 8 percent of it by weight, hundreds of millions of times more common than gold—aluminium never appears in pure, mother lode-al form. It’s always bonded to something, usually oxygen. Pure samples were considered miracles. The French once displayed Fort Knox–like aluminium bars next to their crown jewels.. US to show off their country’s industrial prowess, capped the Washington Monument with a six-pound pyramid of aluminium in 1884.
• Hall cleaned up. At his death in 1914, he owned Alcoa shares worth $30 million* (around $650 million today). And thanks to Hall, aluminium became the utterly blasé metal we all know,
• * Strontium was somehow a blend of two elements, one lighter and one heavier. <> Intrigued, Döbereiner began to precisely weigh more elements, scouting around for other “triads.” Up popped chlorine, bromine, and iodine; sulfur, selenium, and tellurium; and more. In each case, the weight of the middle element fell halfway between its chemical cousins. Convinced this was not a coincidence, Döbereiner began to group these elements into what today we’d recognize as columns of the periodic table... Instead of using strontium and its neighbors to search for a universal way to organize matter, chemists (influenced by Christianity, alchemy, and the Pythagorean belief that numbers somehow embody true metaphysical reality) began seeing trinities everywhere and delving into triadic numerology... in 1823, (Döbereiner) invented the first portable lighter. This lighter relied on the curious ability of platinum to absorb and store massive amounts of burnable hydrogen gas.
• Parker 51: It was elegance herself. The pen’s caps were gold- or chrome-plated, with a gold-feathered arrow for the pen’s clasp. The body was as plump and tempting to pick up as a cigarillo and came in dandy colors such as Blue Cedar, Nassau Green, Cocoa, Plum, and Rage Red. The pen’s head, colored India Black, looked like a shy turtle’s head, which tapered to a handsome, calligraphic-style mouth.
• Robert Lowell couldn’t rein in his madness outside the margins of his poems, and his lunacy bled all over his real life.
• 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. Lithium helps cleave the proteins from DNA so people can wind down. Notice that sunlight still trumps lithium during the day and resets the proteins; it’s only when the sunlight goes away at night that lithium helps DNA shake free.
• 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. Some imaginative historians even pin Custer’s loss at the Battle of the Little Bighorn on his horses’ taking hits of loco before the battle. Overall, it’s fitting that “selenium” comes from selene, Greek for “moon,”
• * Shark teeth litter the ocean floor because they’re about the hardest biological substance known, the only part of shark carcasses that survive the crush of the deep ocean (most sharks have cartilaginous skeletons). It’s not clear why manganese, of all the dissolved metals in the ocean, galvanizes shark teeth, but scientists know roughly how quickly it accumulates: between one-half and one and a half millimeters per millennium. From that rate they have determined that the vast majority of recovered teeth date from at least 1.5 million years ago, meaning the megalodons probably died out around then.
• Tin, which Scott used as solder, has been a prized metal since biblical times because it’s so easy to shape. Ironically, the better metallurgists got at refining tin and purifying it, the worse it became for everyday use. Whenever pure tin tools or tin coins or tin toys got cold, a whitish rust began to creep over them like hoarfrost on a window in winter. The white rust would break out into pustules, then weaken and corrode the tin, until it crumbled and eroded away. <> Unlike iron rust, this was not a chemical reaction... tin atoms can arrange themselves inside a solid in two different ways, and when they get cold, they shift from their strong “beta” form to the crumbly, powdery “alpha” form... The alpha–beta shift can even release enough energy to cause audible groaning
• The point is that the universe can accommodate far more states of matter—different micro-arrangements of particles—than are dreamed of in our provincial categories of solid, liquid, and gas. And these new states aren’t hybrids like Jell-O. In some cases, the very distinction between mass and energy breaks down. Albert Einstein uncovered one such state while fiddling around with a few quantum mechanics equations in 1924—then dismissed his calculations and disavowed his theoretical discovery as too bizarre to ever exist. It remained impossible, in fact, until someone made it in 1995.
• Nevertheless, below that temperature argon fluorohydride was a durable crystal. The Finnish scientists announced the feat in a paper with a refreshingly accessible title for a scientific work, “A Stable Argon Compound.” Simply announcing what they’d done was bragging enough.
• For decades, most scientists assumed that superconducting electrons simply had more space to maneuver: atoms in superconductors have much less energy to vibrate back and forth, giving electrons a wider shoulder to slip by and avoid crashes... But really, as three scientists figured out in 1957, it’s electrons themselves that metamorphose at low temperatures... this explanation is known as the BCS theory of superconductivity
• In fact, before they can hurry down, the strobe light flashes again. This sends more of the neodymium’s electrons flying up to the tenth floor and crashing back down. When this happens repeatedly, the second floor gets crowded; when there are more electrons on the second floor than the first, the laser has achieved “population inversion.” At this point, if any dawdling electrons do jump to the ground floor, they disturb their already skittish and crowded neighbors and knock them over the balcony, which in turn knocks others down. And notice the simple beauty of this: when the neodymium electrons drop this time, they’re all dropping from two to one at the same time, so they all produce the same color of light. This coherence is the key to a laser.
• By doing this slowly and whisking away only the few hottest atoms each time, the scientists plunged the temperature to a billionth of a degree (0.000000001) above absolute zero. At this point, finally, the sample of two thousand rubidium atoms collapsed into the Bose-Einstein condensate, the coldest, gooeyest, and most fragile mass the universe has ever known.
  But to say “two thousand rubidium atoms” obscures what’s so special about the BEC. There weren’t two thousand rubidium atoms as much as one giant marshmallow of a rubidium atom. It was a singularity, and the explanation for why relates back to the uncertainty principle. Again, temperature just measures the average speed of atoms. If the molecules’ temperature dips below a billionth of a degree, that’s not much speed at all—meaning the uncertainty about that speed is absurdly low. It’s basically zero. And because of the wavelike nature of atoms on that level, the uncertainty about their position must be quite large.
  So large that, as the two scientists relentlessly cooled the rubidium atoms and squeezed them together, the atoms began to swell, distend, overlap, and finally disappear into each other.
• Those rare kaons, muons, and pions appear only when an atom’s nucleus, its dense core, is splintered. In 1952, a device called a cloud chamber existed, in which a “gun” shot ultra-fast atomic torpedoes at cold gas atoms. Muons and kaons and so on sometimes appeared in the chamber after direct strikes, and the gas condensed into liquid drops along the particles’ track. But substituting a liquid for the gas made more sense, Glaser thought... Plus, if liquid hydrogen was held a shade below its boiling point, even a little kick of energy from a ghostly particle would lather up the hydrogen like Glaser’s beer.
• One element that readily forms bubbles—as well as foam, a state where bubbles overlap and lose their spherical shape—is calcium. Cells are to tissues what bubbles are to foams, and the best example of a foam structure in the body (besides saliva) is spongy bone.
• calcium bubbles have shaped world economics and empires... smugglers, using the calcium coves to conceal the French brandy, fiddles, tobacco, and silk they ran over from Normandy in fast cutters... His Majesty’s expensive coast guard to crack down on smuggling convinced Parliament to liberalize trade laws in the 1840s
• Rutherford’s mystery particles began glowing helium’s characteristic green and yellow. Rutherford basically proved that alpha particles were escaped helium atoms with an early “neon” light. It was a perfect example of his elegance, and also his belief in dramatic science.
• Rutherford realized that those alpha particles, after being ejected, form small bubbles of helium inside rocks. The key insight was that helium never reacts with or is attracted to other elements. So unlike carbon dioxide in limestone, helium shouldn’t normally be inside rocks. Any helium that is inside rocks was therefore fathered by radioactive decay. Lots of helium inside a rock means that it’s old
• sonoluminescence: studying sonar—sound waves moving in water—was as trendy in the 1930s as radioactivity had been before. At least two research teams discovered that if they rocked a tank with jet engine–level noise, the bubbles that appeared would sometimes collapse and wink at them with a flash of blue or green light.
• In 1993, two physicists at Trinity University in Dublin, Robert Phelan and Denis Weaire, figured out a new solution to the “Kelvin problem”: how to create a bubbly foam structure with the least surface area possible... For the 2008 Olympics, an architectural firm drew on Phelan and Weaire’s work to create the famous “box of bubbles” swimming venue (known as the Water Cube) in Beijing,
• The best-known dimensionless constant is the fine structure constant, which is related to the fine splitting of electrons. In short, it controls how tightly negative electrons are bound to the positive nucleus. It also determines the strength of some nuclear processes. In fact, if the fine structure constant—which I’ll refer to as alpha, because that’s what scientists call it—if alpha had been slightly smaller right after the big bang, nuclear fusion in stars would never have gotten hot enough to fuse carbon. Conversely, if alpha had grown slightly larger, carbon atoms would all have disintegrated aeons ago, long before finding their way into us. That alpha avoided this atomic Scylla and Charybdis makes scientists thankful, naturally, but also very antsy, because they cannot explain how it succeeded.
• * Eddington began concocting “proofs” that alpha equaled exactly 1/136, partly because he found a mathematical link between 136 and 666. (One colleague derisively suggested rewriting the book of Revelation to take this “finding” into account.) Later measurements showed that alpha was closer to 1/137, but Eddington just tossed a 1 into his formula somewhere and continued on as if his sand castle hadn’t crumbled (earning him the immortal nickname Sir Arthur Adding-One). A friend who later ran across Eddington in a cloakroom in Stockholm was chagrined to see that he insisted on hanging his hat on peg 137.
• Sometimes when the two theories touch, they complement each other brilliantly: relativistic corrections of the speed of electrons help explain why mercury (the element I’m always looking out for) is a liquid and not the expected solid at room temperature. And no one could have created his namesake element, number ninety-nine, einsteinium, without knowledge of both theories.
• inner electrons orbit much more quickly around a nucleus than electrons in outer shells. The exact speed depends on the ratio between the number of protons present and alpha, the fine structure constant discussed last chapter. As that ratio gets closer and closer to one, electrons fly closer and closer to the speed of light. But remember that alpha is (we think) fixed at 1/137 or so. Beyond 137 protons, the inner electrons would seem to be going faster than the speed of light—which, according to Einstein’s relativity theory, can never happen. <> This hypothetically last element, 137, is often called “feynmanium,” after Richard Feynman, the physicist who first noticed this pickle.