Periodic Tales: A Cultural History of the Elements, From Arsenic to Zinc
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.16 (632 Votes) |
| Asin | : | B00WL4QT94 |
| Format Type | : | |
| Number of Pages | : | 444 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-06-02 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Outstanding book The author gives a plethora of fascinating details and explains many little-understood facts. I highly recommend this book. The student as well as a learned scholar will benefit from reading this wonderful book.. Put on a tweed jacket and settle in for great read. Thoroughly enjoyable to scientist or lay person, this book tells the stories of the elements; not just their discovery but their cultural and historical significance. Some American readers may find Aldersey-William's British academic style a bit of a slog, and be sure to have a good dictionary at hand, but the author's voice soon becomes familiar and comfortable. If you have any interest in the building blocks of our world, I highly recommend this book.. You'll learn something Periodic Tales by Hugh Aldersey-Williams is a cultural history of some of the elements on the periodic table. They are in no particular order. Stories are included on how any given element affected societies, were named, were discovered, and so on. The tone is conversational and the stories are almost always interesting. The book is long and full of information so it is not a quick read, but you will no doubt learning something (or many things) from it!
Like the alphabet, the calendar, or the zodiac, the periodic table of the chemical elements has a permanent place in our imagination. We do not know what most of them look like, how they exist in nature, how they got their names, or of what use they are to us. Unlocking their astonishing secrets and colorful pasts, Periodic Tales is a passionate journey through mines and artists' studios, to factories and cathedrals, into the woods and to the sea to discover the true stories of these fascinating but mysterious building blocks of the universe.. But aside from the handful of common ones (iron, carbon, copper, gold), the elements themselves remain wrapped in mystery