Elemental: How the Periodic Table Can Now Explain (Nearly) Everything - Hardcover

James, Tim

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1468317024 ISBN 13: 9781468317022

Verlag: OVERLOOK PR, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

If you want to understand how our world works, the periodic table holds the answers. When the seventh row of the periodic table of elements was completed in June 2016 with the addition of four final elements—nihonium, moscovium, tennessine, and oganesson—we at last could identify all the ingredients necessary to construct our world.In Elemental, chemist and science educator Tim James provides an informative, entertaining, and quirkily illustrated guide to the table that shows clearly how this abstract and seemingly jumbled graphic is relevant to our day-to-day lives.James tells the story of the periodic table from its ancient Greek roots, when you could count the number of elements humans were aware of on one hand, to the modern alchemists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries who have used nuclear chemistry and physics to generate new elements and complete the periodic table. In addition to this, he answers questions such as: What is the chemical symbol for a human? What would happen if all of the elements were mixed together? Which liquid can teleport through walls? Why is the medieval dream of transmuting lead into gold now a reality?Whether you're studying the periodic table for the first time or are simply interested in the fundamental building blocks of the universe—from the core of the sun to the networks in your brain—Elemental is the perfect guide.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Tim James is an educator, blogger, inventor, and popular science lecturer for the Institute of Physics. Raised by missionaries in Nigeria, he graduated with a Master’s degree in chemistry specializing in computational quantum mechanics, and now teaches high school chemistry and physics.

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Elemental

How the Periodic Table Can Now Explain (Nearly) Everything

By Tim James

Abrams Books

Copyright © 2019 Tim James
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-4683-1702-2

Contents

INTRODUCTION A Recipe for Reality, 1, 
CHAPTER ONE Flame Chasers, 5, 
CHAPTER TWO Uncuttable, 15, 
CHAPTER THREE The Machine Gun and the Pudding, 25, 
CHAPTER FOUR Where Do Atoms Come From?, 37, 
CHAPTER FIVE Block by Block, 49, 
CHAPTER SIX Quantum Mechanics Saves the Day, 61, 
CHAPTER SEVEN Things that Go Boom, 73, 
CHAPTER EIGHT The Alchemist's Dream, 87, 
CHAPTER NINE Leftists, 101, 
CHAPTER TEN Acids, Crystals and Light, 115, 
CHAPTER ELEVEN It's Alive, It's Alive!, 127, 
CHAPTER TWELVE Nine Elements that Changed the World (and One that Didn't), 141, 
APPENDIX I Sulfur with an 'f ', 163, 
APPENDIX II Half a Proton?, 167, 
APPENDIX III Schrödinger's Equation, 171, 
APPENDIX IV Neutrons into Protons, 177, 
APPENDIX V The pH and pKa Scales, 181, 
APPENDIX VI Groups of the Periodic Table, 187, 
Acknowledgements, 191, 
Notes, 195, 
Index, 211, 

CHAPTER 1

Flame Chasers

THE MOST FLAMMABLE SUBSTANCE EVER MADE

Chemistry really began when we mastered our first reaction: setting fire to stuff. The ability to create and control fire helped us to hunt, cook, ward off predators, stay warm in winter and manufacture primitive tools. Originally, we burned things like wood and fat, but it turns out that most substances are combustible.

Things catch alight because they come into contact with oxygen, one of the most reactive elements out there. The only reason things aren't bursting into flame all the time is that while oxygen is reactive it needs energy to get going. That's why starting a fire also requires something like warmth or friction. Oxygen has to be heated in order to combust.

The most flammable chemical ever made, though, far worse than oxygen, was created in 1930 by two scientists named Otto Ruff and Herbert Krug. Meet chlorine trifluoride.

Made from the elements chlorine and fluorine in a one-to-three ratio, chlorine trifluoride is unique in being able to ignite literally anything it touches, including flame retardants.

A green liquid at room temperature and a colourless gas when warmed, ClF3 will set fire to glass and sand. It will set fire to asbestos and Kevlar (the material from which firefighters' suits are made). It will even set fire to water itself, spitting out fumes of hydrofluoric acid in the process.

There are very few instances of ClF3 being used, though, because it has the inconvenient property of setting fire to almost anything with which it comes into contact. It takes a special kind of maniac to think, 'Hmm, I'll give that a go.'

The most spectacular ClF3 incident happened on an undisclosed date at a chemical plant in Shreveport, Louisiana. A ton of it was being moved across the factory floor in a sealed cylinder, refrigerated to prevent it reacting with the metal. Unfortunately, the cold temperature made the cylinder brittle and it cracked, spilling the contents everywhere. The ClF3 instantly set fire to the concrete floor and burned its way through over a metre in depth before extinguishing. The man moving the cylinder was reportedly found blasted through the air 150 metres away, dead from a heart attack. That was refrigerated chlorine trifluoride.

During the 1940s, a few cautious attempts were made to use it as a rocket fuel, but inevitably it kept setting fire to the rockets themselves so the projects were abandoned.

The only people who made a serious attempt to harness its power were the Nazi weapons researchers of Falkenhagen Bunker. The idea was to use it as a flame-thrower fuel, but it set fire to the flame-thrower and anyone carrying it so, again, it was deemed unusable.

Just think about that. Not only will it set fire to water, chlorine tri-fluoride is so evil even the Nazis didn't mess with it. What makes it so potent?

The answer is that fluorine behaves in a very similar way to oxygen but needs less energy to get started. It's the most reactive element on the periodic table and effectively out-oxygens oxygen at breaking other chemicals down. So, when you combine it with chlorine, the second most reactive element, you get an unholy alliance that starts fires without encouragement.

FIRE FROM WATER

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus was so enamoured with fire he declared it to be the purest substance – the basic matter from which reality was made. According to him, everything was somehow made from fire in one form or another. Fire was, in other words, elemental.

It's an understandable assumption to make since fire does appear to possess magical properties. Then again, Heraclitus lived on a diet of nothing but grass and tried to cure himself of dropsy by lying in a cow shed for three days covered in manure ... after which he was eaten by dogs. So perhaps we don't need to take Heraclitus's views too seriously.

The reason it was so difficult to identify elements in the ancient world was because, unknown to the early philosophers, very few elements occur in their pure state. Most of them are unstable and combine to form element fusions called compounds.

It works a bit like a singles' bar. Each person is unhappy on their own so they link up with others to form stable pairings. At the end of the evening, most individuals have formed compounds leading to greater stability all round. Only a handful of elements like gold, which doesn't mind being single, remain in their native state.

Almost everything we come across in nature is a compound, so while something like table salt may look pure, the game is being rigged. Table salt is actually a compound of sodium and chlorine – the true elements.

You'll never find a lump of sodium in the ground or a cloud of chlorine drifting on the breeze because both are violently reactive. This makes them virtually undetectable, especially if you're working with the crude lab equipment of the first millennium.

There's also the fact that many elements are shockingly rare. Take the element protactinium used in nuclear physics research; the entire global supply comes from a single flake, weighing 125 g owned by the UK Atomic Energy Authority. With the odds stacked against them, Greek philosophers had no chance of getting things right.

It wasn't until the late seventeenth century that a German experimenter named Hennig Brandt proved everyday substances had elements locked inside them and most of the stuff we thought to be pure, wasn't at all.

On an unknown night in 1669, Brandt was boiling vast quantities of urine in his lab (you've got to have a hobby), probably because urine is gold-coloured and he was hoping to make a fortune by solidifying it into the precious metal.

After many hours of what must have been unpleasant work, Brandt was finally left with a thick red syrup and a black residue similar to the gunk you get after burning toast. He mixed these two things together and heated the mixture once more. What happened next made no sense.

His mixture of urine syrup and cookery schmutz suddenly formed a waxy solid, which smelled powerfully of garlic and glowed blue-green. Not only that, it was extremely flammable and gave off blinding white light as it burned. He had somehow extracted fire from water.

Brandt named his chemical phosphorus from the Greek for light-bringer, and spent the next six years experimenting with it in...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: OVERLOOK PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1468317024
• ISBN 13: 9781468317022
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar