Mendeleyev's Dream: The Quest For the Elements

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In the Prologue, Strathern sets the scene in Mendeleyev’s country house on a cold winter’s day of February 1869. Read more about the condition Very Good: A book that has been read and does not look new, but is in excellent condition.

In between were many interesting chapters giving a roller coaster ride through the history of the understanding of chemistry from the Greeks, through multiple alchemists and some 'characters' like Paracelsus and Cavendish. The argument was conducted entirely within the realms of this world, from which evidence could be gathered to prove or disprove its conclusions. Mendeleyev had already written the definitive textbook on organic chemistry while working as a lecturer at the Technical Institute in St.Rather, it is a lay reader’s history of chemistry or, more broadly, scientific thought, from the ancient Greeks through the 19th century. A very accessible, non-fiction telling of the epic journey and transmutation of the collective human intellect through the ages. Surely some of them were, but most of them were people of their time, striving to understand their world to the best of their ability, their ability being blunted by whatever prejudices they grew up with, which is no different than scientists are today.

It was only when he reentered his own head under the spell of sleep’s uninhibited state that the disjointed bits fell into a pattern and the larger idea expressed itself. I expected this book to be primarily about Mendeleyev but 2/3 of the book is a thorough history of the development of the scientific method in Europe. Saint Petersburg University — his father’s alma mater and, incidentally, both of my parents’ — admitted him and the family relocated there despite their poverty.what drove an already very busy man like Lavoisier to spend his Sundays in the laboratory doing rather tedious measurents? Here he briefly attended lectures by Gustav Kirchhoff, said to have been the most boring lecturer in all Germany at the time. He is scheduled to meet with a group of cheesemakers in a small town some 600 kilometres away and must catch a train.

The book is written in a charming tone of voice, and feels more like a friendly seminar than a von-oben lecture. com affiliate programs, designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to books. It's clearly written with the benefit of hindsight and is selecting the stories in light of what would later prove to be important, even though that direction was unknown at the time.I’ve always been interested in the history of sciences, arts and literature so I quickly got a copy of it. Chemistry has been a neglected area of science writing, and Mendeleyev, the king of chemistry, is a largely forgotten genius. The discovery of the periodic table lays out the basic material composition of the universe and this has done a tremendous impact to the development of modern science. I'm a scientist and I value the scientific method but I'd argue that even today the method only gives us simplistic glimpses of the truth and I know better than to mock the people who came before me.