Mendeleyev's Dream: The Quest for the ElementsIn this elegant, erudite, but entertaining book, Paul Strathern, the award-winning novelist and expositor of complex ideas, unravels the dramatic history of chemistry through the quest for the elements. Framing this history is the life story of the nineteenth-century Russian scientist Dmitri Mendeleyev, who fell asleep at his desk and awoke after conceiving the periodic table in a dream--the template upon which modern chemistry is founded and the formulation of which marked chemistry's coming of age as a science. From ancient philosophy through medieval alchemy to the splitting of the atom, Mendeleyev's Dream is the true story of the birth of chemistry and the role of one man's dream. |
Contents
In the Beginning 2 The Practice of Alchemy | |
Trial and Error | |
The Elements of Science | |
The Search for a Hidden Structure 13 Mendeleyev | |
Further Reading Index | |
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