Mendeleyev's Dream: The Quest For the Elements

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The author unravels the history of chemistry, from the ancient Greek philosophers to the Age of Englightenment and beyond, introducing the colorful cast of characters who fashioned the study of elements into a science. Paul Strathern is a Somerset Maugham Award-winning novelist, and his nonfiction works include The Venetians, Death in Florence, The Medici, Mendeleyev's Dream, The Florentines, Empire, and The Borgias, all available from Pegasus Books.

Most amusing (and tedious) of all was the chapter on Paracelsus, because Strathern couldn't decide what attitude to have toward him, and he literally alternates back and forth from one paragraph to the next. Strathern illuminates all of the major characters, their lives, and their intellectual entanglements in myth, religious dogma, superstition, and the specially persistent influences of alchemy that took chemistry millennia to shed like an emergent butterfly from its chrysalis. Here he briefly attended lectures by Gustav Kirchhoff, said to have been the most boring lecturer in all Germany at the time. And it was frustrating that the whirlwind history was so short of the details of exaclty what these minds worked out and exactly how they did it - to me the chemistry should have been the nub of the book.For example, Mendeleyev’s Periodic Table was so successful because it was predictive as well as descriptive. This idea, once conceived, was quickly developed by Thales’ pupils in Miletus – the philosophers known as the Milesian school.

It goes all the way back to the Ancient Greeks and how Aristotle proposed a theory in which matter was composed of four elements—fire, earth, wind, and water. A few of the intervals began with a certain regularity, but then the pattern just seemed to peter out.It is also extremely well matched to the fascinating story adduced in this absorbing and enlightening book. Beginning in the early 17th century, men like Robert Boyle began to put chemistry on a footing we would today recognize as scientific. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). 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.

He was born in London, and studied at Trinity College, Dublin, after which he served in the Merchant Navy over a period of two years. Rather, it is a lay reader's history of chemistry or, more broadly, scientific thought, from the ancient Greeks through the 19th century. Most purchases from business sellers are protected by the Consumer Contract Regulations 2013 which give you the right to cancel the purchase within 14 days after the day you receive the item. In the Prologue, Strathern sets the scene in Mendeleyev’s country house on a cold winter’s day of February 1869.Saint Petersburg University — his father’s alma mater and, incidentally, both of my parents’ — admitted him and the family relocated there despite their poverty. Plus there was a lot of detail on the more primitive scientists and I admittedly was more interested in John Dalton and after. Indian mathematical genius and dreamer Srinivasa Ramanujan often dreamt of a Hindu goddess, named Namakkal, who would appear and present mathematical formulae which he would verify after waking. This is a used book - there is no escaping the fact it has been read by someone else and it will show signs of wear and previous use. Dmitri Mendeleyev was not the only scientist to find the answer to a puzzle in the murky world of the subconscious.