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Come on a journey into the heart of matter -- and enjoy the
process! -- as a brilliant scientist and entertaining tour guide takes you on
a fascinating voyage through the Periodic Kingdom, the world of the elements.
The periodic table, your map for this trip, is the most important
concept in chemistry. It hangs in classrooms and labs throughout the world, providing
support for students, suggesting new avenues of research for professionals, succinctly
organizing the whole of chemistry. The one hundred or so elements listed in the
table make up everything in the universe, from microscopic organisms to distant
planets. Just how does the periodic table help us make
sense of the world around us? Using vivid imagery, ingenious analogies, and liberal
doses of humor, P. W. Atkins answers this question. He shows us that the Periodic
Kingdom is a systematic place. Detailing the geography, history, and governing
institutions of this imaginary landscape, he demonstrates how physical similarities
can point to deeper affinities, and how the location of an element can be used
to predict its properties. We visit both familiar and
exotic regions, examining their economic and social significance. The cultivation
of copper, a "state" on the eastern edge of the Western Desert, began
our long journey out of the Stone Age. Iron has implemented profitable alliances
with neighboring cobalt and manganese to form varieties of steel, literally serving
as the foundation of modern society. In recent years, the titanium "region"
has provided a light, yet noncorrosive metal that is vital to our technological
future. Atkins tells us about the cosmic origins of the
elements and introduces the intrepid explorers and cartographers who expanded
the frontiers of the kingdom: Humphry Davy, the nineteenth-century chemist who
identified and catalogued several of the common metallic elements; Dmitri Mendeleev,
the Russian scientist who (legend has it) saw in a dream the prototype of the
modern periodic table; and the Manhattan Project scientists who originated the
techniques still used today to map the dangerously radioactive regions.
Here's an opportunity to discover a rich kingdom of the imagination,
kingdom of which our own world is a manifestation. P.
W. Atkins is a university lecturer in physical chemistry at the University of
Oxford and a fellow and tutor at Lincoln College, Oxford. He is the author of
more than twenty books, including the highly popular Molecules and the
textbook Physical Chemistry, which is used around the world. |
