Mendeleyev's Dream

Title: Mendeleyev’s Dream – The Quest for the Elements

Author: Paul Strathern

Publisher: Penguin 2001 (First published: 2000)

ISBN: 9780140284140

Pages: 309

Every school boy and girl is familiar with the periodic table in chemistry lessons. Most high school classroom walls will be adorned by one. This book is for those who wonder how the elements were identified, discovered and arranged in the specific order with which we are so familiar today. Paul Strathern does an eminent job in telling the story of how chemistry became what it is at the present. The book’s central character is Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleyev, the scholar from Siberia who first identified the structure of the table. Even though the book is titled ‘Mendeleyev’s Dream’, the man appears only in a couple of chapters. All others narrate the progress of scientific thought in general and the development of chemistry in particular over the last two millennia. Strathern is a writer and an academic as well. He has traveled around the world and has authored five novels besides numerous books on science, philosophy, history, literature, medicine and economics.

Scientific speculation began in ancient Greece, mostly in Ionia, that is, in present day Turkey. In fact, what we perceive today as Greece’s golden era of Periclean Athens was a dead end as far as science was concerned. The excruciating style of Socrates’ debates further weakened science’s fledgling proponents. Amidst these obstacles, Thales of Miletus postulated that water is the basic element of the universe, which was extended by Anaximenes to include earth, fire and air as well. Aristotle confirmed this hypothesis. The Greek kingdoms were in turn replaced by the Roman Empire, in which science drew a blank. The only Roman said to have entered the history of science is the soldier who killed Archimedes! After the decline of the empire, Europe relapsed into a dark age. The onus of keeping the scientific flicker alive fell on the Islamic world. Baghdad, which was the seat of the Abbasid caliphate, was adorned with scholars of all professions. Strathern gives a lucid description of the contributions made by Jabir, ibn Sina (Avicenna) and al Razi. By the time of the Renaissance, Europe was blessed with classical knowledge collected during the plunder of the crusades and the migration of Greek scholars from Constantinople immediately before that city fell to the Ottoman Turks. The dark ages was permeated by alchemy, the quest to transmute base metals into gold. However mystical or superstitious the quest was, a lot of valuable information on chemical reactions, compounds and elements were collected in the process.

Early scientists were subjected to severe persecution for their scientific beliefs. Giordano Bruno was burnt alive at the stake; Galileo was bound for the same destination, but escaped with his life only because of his advanced age and poor health. He was kept under house arrest until death. The crime alleged on both was the same – teaching that the earth was not at the centre of the universe, but sun was. They also postulated that there are countless stars in the night sky, some of whom were not even visible to the naked eye. This went against the church’s stand that god created man in his image and the earth was entitled to a special place. As the entire universe was created for the benefit of mankind, what use is there in the scheme for invisible stars? But anyone who is somewhat familiar with the Bible knows that the holy writ does not contain any reference to earth’s position in the solar system. Then why did the church was so adamant to enforce its position which was not supported by the scriptures and even at the extreme cost of taking a human life? Strathern attempts to produce a convincing explanation, which removes all doubts in this regard. Christianity, when it was adopted as the state religion of the Roman Empire, stepped into the shoes of Hellenic philosophers like Aristotle. What distinguished Greek philosophy from others was its secularism. Thinkers contemplating on the root causes of the events didn’t find it necessary to ascribe divine mediation in order to explain them. Hence the church found it too easy to assimilate the Greek wisdom as it was already free from pagan beliefs. Once the established church stumbled on to something, it clung to it with its notorious aversion to change. It was Aristotle’s one fallacy among many that the earth was the centre of the universe. The church blindly followed suit and didn’t correct the course until it was too late. Another curious observation the readers can obtain from the book was that Aristotle faltered almost on all occasions he laid his hands on scientific concepts. Even though, or in spite of, being the greatest philosopher of his time, experimentation was not his forte. He believed that objects of different weights fell at different rates and celestial objects orbited each other in perfect circles. All these were proved false in the modern age.

Most of the students of science are ignorant of its tumultuous history and would benefit much from reading this book. It may be nothing short of a revelation to many to learn that the principles which are now taken for granted have been around for hardly two centuries. Think of an era in which carbon dioxide was called ‘fixed air’, oxygen ‘dephlogisticated air’ and so on. The 17^th century was the crucial period in which the stage for transformation from alchemy and religion was set. The works of Robert Boyle was the backbone of modern chemistry’s measurement paradigm. Newton also dabbled with alchemy, which may come as a surprise to many. A still larger shock may be experienced when learning that most of the scientists, including Newton and Boyle were deeply religious figures. Boyle had intended the lecture series he instituted in science’s foremost debating platform – the Royal Society – to proving ‘Christian beliefs against pagans’! The array of glassware on which reactions are conducted, the wide range of measuring instruments and dedicated safety measures which constitute the essential components of any decent chemistry lab at present were not available to the pioneers. Karl Scheele, the Swedish discoverer of elements used his own tongue to classify the compounds using taste as an indicator. This was a dangerous practice and he had successfully tasted even hydrogen cyanide! This may be the inspiration for the apocryphal anecdote of a maverick scientist who was desirous of finding out the taste of a highly poisonous cyanide compound meeting his death while doing this on a miniscule portion of the poison. Similarly, Henry Cavendish measured the strength of electric current by the amount of pain he felt while touching it. Strathern thus reminds the young students about the legacy they are inheriting from masters of yore. Lavoisier in 1787 published ‘A Method of Chemical Nomenclature’ which heralded the era in which chemicals were expressed according to their modern names. Around this time, a lot more elements were also discovered. The stage was being prepared for a new classification scheme.

Mendeleyev’s biography and the insight which helped him find the hidden structure of the elements occupy only the two final chapters. We find him a gnomic figure from a photograph dating to that time. He was a typical scholar, in the sense that he made life miserable for family members who had to share the same roof. Mendeleyev’s wife found a novel way out of this dilemma. The family had two houses in the city of St. Petersburg and in the country. The scientist lived alone and his wife and children occupied the home other than where he was. And when he visited the place for a change of ambience, she no sooner packed the things and went with the children to the other house. In 1869, Mendeleyev developed the structure of the periodic table in a sudden surge of insight. This was so revolutionarily prescient that he was not even bothered at the two vacant spots in his table. Around 60 elements were discovered at that time and new elements were popping up everywhere. Mendeleyev predicted that an element will eventually be found between aluminium and uranium with an atomic weight of 68 and another one between silicon and tin with weight 70. In a fit of supreme confidence, he even named them eka-aluminium and eka-silicon! Just think about his thrill when barely five years later, gallium was discovered with weight 69 and after ten years, germanium with weight 72 and having the exact physical properties anticipated! Much reform has been made between that one table and what we see today, but the spirit observed by the Russian genius remains the same. But it took almost a century for an element to be named in honour of him. In 1955, mendeleviyum (Md) with atomic number 101 was discovered and suitably named.

The author’s experience as a novelist lends a subtle charm to the narrative. The book is easy to read, as the concepts are illustrated in a down-to-earth way.The author has suggested several books for further reading that will be ideal for serious readers. It sports an index too. However, the number of illustrations could have been more.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

The Opium War

Title: The Opium War – Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China

Author: Julia Lovell

Publisher: Picador 2012 (First published: 2011)

ISBN: 9780330457484

Pages: 456

China is one of the few great civilizations that keeps the continuity of its ancestral civilization to the present. Any narrative of an event in Chinese history is hence bound to be extrapolated to the current day. Julia Lovell, a professor of history in London, has authored many books on China besides translating several works into English. As a Chinese scholar herself, the book narrates the history of Opium Wars in its two installments and examines the legacy of the war that ended China’s isolationism, paving the way for the vast country’s modernization drive. Every conflict has two competing sides and hence two versions of the story. Earlier descriptions of the war relied solely on English works, thereby keeping one eye firmly shut. Lovell opens the other eye too, with her command of the Chinese language. The author compares the standard descriptions with Chinese ones and brings out the gulf that separates them in vivid detail. The Chinese were addicted to opium and the British to tea, which both of them couldn’t live without. The war that resulted opened up Chinese society. Readers are encouraged to draw their own conclusions on the striking similarity between the opium wars and the first war of Indian Independence (1857) which coincided with the second opium war. Both countries boasted of an ancient civilization and were forcibly opened up as a result of the trouncing experienced in the war at the hands of a common foe – the British. Being outside the scope of the book, Lovell does not undertake this survey, but other authors may find it worthwhile to work on it.

By the middle of the 18^th century, England far outgrew its insular position imposed on it by nature and rose to be a world power in its own right. It controlled the major part of international maritime trade and London turned to be the emporium of the world. Britons developed a taste for Chinese tea around this time. Drinking tea became a national habit. This called for more and more import from China, along with its famous silk. Britain hoped that the numerous mechanical inventions made in its home ground by the era of inventions would find appeal among the Chinese who would then buy British products. Unfortunately, Imperial China which considered itself to be a celestial empire having all other nations in the world as its vassals. In a vein of arrogance and superiority, the emperor turned down offers of trade and consigned the sample pieces to the waste bin. Now the English had only one option to maintain the flow of tea and silk to Europe – buy the merchandise using hard cash in the form of silver. This huge drain on its treasury exasperated the empire. Luckily for them, opium began to be cultivated in the English East India Company’s newly acquired Bengal province in India. The excellent quality of the product immediately ensured consumption in China. Company officials vied with private traders in dealing with the drug. Large chunks of Chinese society succumbed to the addiction, sometimes even soldiers being impotent to fight under the stupefying effects of the narcotic. China banned opium, which helped create an underground distribution system and larger margins of profit. Smuggling went unabated for decades that helped Britain maintain the balance of payment in silver coins. Consumption of opium in China multiplied an astronomical ten times in the 40 years from 1800 to 1840. At last, Emperor Daoguang decided to end the trade once and for all and appointed an incorruptible commissioner Lin Zexu to see to the finer details to stop and imprison the deviant traders. Lin’s effective action put a halt to the trade and infuriated the British colonial establishment. A full fledged war ensued in which China suffered a humiliating defeat and had to open her ports other than Canton to foreign merchant vessels.

Globalization and international free trade are two ideas that are generally ascribed to the last two decades of the 20^th century. But if we peer deep into the murky pool of history, we can discern clear patterns of globalization taking shape in the 15^th century itself, when a brand ‘New World’ was thrown open to economic exploitation by the pioneering explorers. Tilts of the economic balance in one country thus began to affect the prospects of not only neighbouring countries, but distant nations in other continents as well. Lovell explains how the scarcity of silver imported from South America indirectly supplied one of the reasons for the outbreak of Opium War. During the 18^th century, most of the world’s silver used for coinage came from the New World. (It still is, as in 2013, almost half (49%) of the world’s silver production was extracted from American mines). By the second and third decades of the 19^th century, silver-producing countries in Latin America were in the grip of freedom movements that had a tellingly adverse impact on industrial output and silver shipments dwindled. This caused a world wide scarcity for the metal and payments were defaulted in many places. All countries tried to preserve their existing stock, by putting curbs on import of non-essential items. This aspect is also to be considered in the background compulsions that forced the Emperor of China to put his foot firmly down on the opium trade that was draining the country white of silver as well as leading to a physically and mentally debauched society.

The book overemphasizes the psychological impact of an alien rule on the majority population of China, the descendants of Han. The Manchu regime, which was considered to be semi-barbarian by the Chinese, faced a string of rebellions while facing the British militarily. The idea being conveyed by the juxtaposition of civil wars and British aggression is that the common people were equally offended by one outsider as the other. Numerous cases are cited in which the locals readily changed sides at the transfer of a triflingly little amount of money and worked for the British with as much relish as they had previously served their Manchu masters. What is drowned in these copious examples of defections is the unmitigated enmity felt by the common people, in Canton in particular, against the white conquerors. The incidents at Sanyuanli is played down as the natural response of the natives when the British went on a spree of pillage and rape around the countryside and dug up ancestral graves, in search of booty. Though Lovell describes the events with her usual condemning tone against aggression, readers feel that the author had failed to illuminate the sheer gravity of the crime which went against all international ethics and law. The reaction to this wanton act may be compared to the consternation that would result if some enemy soldiers were to dig up the graves in Westminster Abbey during a conflict. By the same token, the author fails to convince the reader about the sheer ferocity of violence the occupying British met at the hands of the local population. The resistance of the civilians was heroic while that of their Manchu masters had been cowardly. What the Cantonese felt about the British is clearly evident in their conception of the English as “born and grew up in wicked and noxious villages beyond the pale of civilization, have wolfish hearts and brutish faces, the looks of the tiger and the suspicion of the fox” (p.249). A part of the xenophobia should be attributed to the feeling of superiority, while a larger part must be accounted to the equally strong sense of primacy the British harboured in their minds in all dealings with non-white societies.

The book presents a blow by blow account of the first Opium War, but gives only a half-hearted narration of the second, which in fact produced even more lasting effects on China’s economic, political and social spheres. Brutally forced to step down from their ivory towers, Chinese emperors opened up the country to foreign business. Five new ports in addition to Canton were allowed to carry on foreign trade, equal status was accorded to the British in its dealings with the emperor and consular access granted to foreign merchants. This deeply depressed national self esteem, but indirectly paved the way for the enlightenment and modernization of China. A good part of the book is dedicated to tell the story of a giant waking up from slumber that lasted a couple of thousands of years. Growth of national sentiment, news papers, modern communication methods, revamping of military and political institutions ensued. The aging Qing empire tried in vain to stem the tide with earthen dams of weak repressive measures. Hardly a century after the first war, China turned to a stage in which nationalistically motivated revolutions acted out in full swing. The Communists gained ascendancy in the 1920s and began a systematic campaign to rewrite the history books with adaptations and re-interpretations of flawed Marxian ideals. Lovell has been successful in exposing the Communist bluff and doublespeak. She cites instances in which the Chinese Communist Party itself dabbled in opium trade to generate much wanted income during its initial phase, at the same time excoriating the West for forcing the habit on China. Another strong point for the book is its exposition of the role of the missionary in opium deals. Many openly colluded with the pedlars and served as spies of the attacking imperialists.

What differentiates the book from generic ones are the few chapters in the end in which the legacy of the war in present Chinese society is analyzed in detail, with personal observations of the author underlining the relevance of the argument. A common feature of autocratic regimes in general and Chinese Communist power in particular is the unease the rulers feel when a mass unrest occurs. This is correctly understood and explained. The Communist party went into an overdrive to whip up nationalist frenzy after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. To divert public attention from the heinous crime they had committed on their own citizens, the Communists trumpeted patriotic fervor by re-interpreting the opium wars as national humiliation of the Chinese nation at the hands western imperialists. A series of anti-foreign protests were staged across Chinese cities after 1989 which were craftily choreographed by the regime. But the moment it identified the uneasy conclusion that the protests have been ingrained into the masses and a true public outrage is beginning to get expressed in the streets, it quickly stepped in to dampen the spirit and herded the angry public safely back to their corrals.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

A Study of History, Vol 12

Title: A Study of History, Vol 12 – Reconsiderations

Author: Arnold Joseph Toynbee

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1985 (First published 1954)

ISBN: 9780192152251

Pages: 740

This volume completes a mission that began almost an year ago, when the first volume of ‘A Study of History’ was reviewed. The experience may be compared to one of the adventures of Sindbad, the Sailor. Even though on each occasion the protagonist had to face life threatening situations, every time he successfully tames them and comes out immensely rich. ‘A Study of History’ is like an ocean. Spread into twelve volumes – each one nearly twice the size of a regular paperback – the sheer volume was simply frightening at first. Typeset in small font and replete with Greek and French quotes, the book was no easy matter to sail through. There were occasions when tempests blocked the way in the form of long essays on one of Toynbee’s philosophical escapades. In moments like these, the reader must borrow some strength of will from the author himself as it took him a quarter of a century to research and complete the full series. There were times when the urge prompted me to stop midway as I had actually did in 2002, when the same project was abandoned midway, after completing volume 7A!  But thirteen years is almost half a generation which steels the will. Also, it was a foregone conclusion that if I couldn’t complete the unabridged series now, it is going to be never! It turned out to be a most fulfilling moment to turn the last page and close the book for the last time.

The key concepts and arguments demonstrated in the earlier volumes are subjected to an intense and open instrospection and reconsideration in this volume, in view of the criticism offered to them. The work was gargantuan in nature, in its attempt to envelope all the world’s civilizations – present as well as past – in its folds. The tone of critics vary through the entire spectrum of mild censure to outspoken indictment. Critics quickly homed in on the author’s reluctance to define the terms he used throughout the previous volumes. His urge to base discussions on the shaky foundation of religion is also flayed threadbare. But the most voluminous accusation is definitely his sole reliance on the Hellenic Civilization as a reference model to compare others of the same species. Here, the author pleads himself guilty as charged and confesses it all on his classical education received during the earlier part of the last century at Oxford, at a time when the knowledge of Greek and Latin far outweighed all other subjects. The work itself was praised wholeheartedly by public intellectuals, but criticized by professionals as a ‘weakness of achievement’. But this line of argument is a punch below the belt. Toynbee himself dons the mantle of precaution when he asserts that the generalizations he made about the past may not be applicable in the future! He justifies this shortcoming citing the special nature of historical study, but which is unfortunate for its scientific credentials. Sharp delineations of epochs like the disintegration of the Hellenic society with the Atheno–Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE), and the beginning of the modern era with the development of three-masted, square-rigged sailing ship (1475) are taken to task by critics, which is accepted by the author in good humour.

Toynbee finds a point to retract in his philosophical reconsiderations. As we remember from previous volumes, when a civilization breaks down and starts its downward movement to dissolution, the creative minority that solved all the puzzles in its growth phase loses creativity. It can no longer impel the proletariat to flock to their cultural ideas. It then transforms into a dominant minority where its will is implemented forcefully. The internal proletariat secedes from its masters and accepts inspiration from the religious precepts of the external proletariat in another civilization. Thus a new higher religion is born in the disintegrating civilization. The religion then acts as a chrysalis when the older civilization metamorphoses into a civilization that is apparented and affiliated to the first. This concept was hammered home with numerous examples in previous volumes. Curiously, Toynbee is having second thoughts on this and retracts the idea as false. But the reasoning is far from convincing. Now, the author assumes that a higher religion can’t be expected to serve a secular function as to act as the cradle of a mundane civilization. Religion has a higher role to serve, as asserted by Toynbee, though he doesn’t consider himself to be a believer. Critics accuse him to be a rationalist, but he begs to differ. He still believes that “answers to questions that matter most to us can be found only beyond the reason’s limits”! As regarding the visual apparatus used to learn about nature, he assigns reason to be “mind’s cracked lens”. As the saying goes, something is better than nothing, so a cracked lens is the next best thing to having none at all. The author asserts himself to be an out and out fan of religions as the only way in which human beings can establish communion with the creator. But his mind’s vista is never narrow – he assigns prominence to all higher religions alike, that is, to Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism and Buddhism.

The structure of the book itself is also subjected to reconsideration in a laudable spirit of intellectual rectitude, seen rarely in literary circles. The author proposes better models for a possible further study. Toynbee attempts the analysis of civilizations with the stages seen in the Hellenic model, as that is the civilization in which his society is affiliated and apparented. It consists of the by now well known sequence – parochial states, time of troubles, universal states, disintegration, higher religions, dissolution and emergence of an affiliated civilization. The previous volumes had been constructed on this structural edifice. Now he is prepared to re-evaluate the plan by incorporating structural particulars seen in other societies. The Chinese culture presents the concept of Yin and Yang, which offers a rhythm of alternating bouts of activity and quiescent states. There is feverish activity during the Yang stage and then a temporary state of calm known as Yin. Toynbee applies this new concept as well to the study of civilizations and christens it, the ‘Hellenico – Sinic’ model. However, this plan suffers severe reverses in the case of the Egyptiac. In earlier versions, Osirism, the worship of Osiris developed during the Middle Kingdom, was taken as a popular religion borrowed by the internal proletariat to match with the tyranny of barbarian Hyksos. This idea was taken from the works of Breasted, which has since been revised in the light of recent discoveries in the archeological field. Now it seems that Osirism also was a handmaiden of the ruling elite, just like the worship of the solar god, Re. A third mode, with inspiration from Judaism is also proposed to account for the various diaspora originating in the modern world. The Jews were forcibly evicted from their homeland many times and taken as prisoners to the land of their captors. These minorities had no land to till and so they resorted to trading and financial sectors, in which they flourished. In fact, too flourished to engender envy and hatred in their adopted homelands in which people of other faiths constituted the majority. Toynbee suggests this Judaic model to compensate where the earlier two models fail to impress.

Attempts to reconsider the definitions of some of the crucial terms are seen in this volume. Surprisingly, even the term ‘civilization’ is also subjected to scrutiny and if I remember right, this term was not defined in any of the earlier volumes. Almost three decades separate the chronological shorelines of the first and the last volumes in the series, which is abundant time for new discoveries and intuitions to take hold. A startling revelation is the downgrading of the Egyptian Civilization to a secondary category, which owes its birth to cultural diffusion from the Sumeric world. There was a resurgent bout of archeological study in what is now Iraq and Syria, immediately after the Second World War. Toynbee even reconsiders his earlier argument that similar geographical environments need not evoke the birth of civilization containing a similar spirit. At that time, he had pointed to the emergence of civilizations along the Tigris – Euphrates rivers and Nile, whereas no such culture took its root along the Jordan river valley in Palestine. The Jordanian terrain was imposing at first sight and many historians could not deduce that culture originated there too, but later archeologists found unmistakeable evidence in the form of artefacts from the area. In this case, Toynbee’s argument still holds, but one of his examples had been proved wrong.

West Asia had been a fertile ground for the origin of higher religions. All continents other than Asia are today under the sole tutelage of religions originated here, notably Christianity and Islam. An in-depth analysis of this extraordinary fertility is attempted. Christianity and Islam are said to be born out of the compost of several previous civilizations that contributed to the sociocultural richness of the area, the most noteworthy being the Hellenic and the Syriac. These also include the Egyptiac, Sumero-Akkadian and the Minoan too. As a sequel to this, Toynbee refutes the argument that Islam constituted a discontinuity in the cultural progress and ideas suggesting a lesser place for the religion is rubbished. This chapter finds added relevance today when the stability of the entire Fertile Crescent is threatened by an orgy of religious violence fuelled by radical Islam that respects no liberal human value. If the author is to be believed, Islam is no different from Christianity. He even goes on to note that proselytism was not in the agenda of early Muslim conquerors, who were content with annexation of territory and accepting a poll tax from followers of other religions. But, as the Muslim power established itself in the form of the Caliphate, infidels joined the religion en masse and channeled its philosophy to new outlets in which the missionary zeal predominated.

A startling revelation of the interaction between the Old and New Worlds in the pre-Columbian era is immensely interesting. The existence of South American sweet potato in Polynesia rises profound questions on the nature of the interchange. The author’s summary of the spiritual virtues like imagination, wisdom, self-control and good intent as the keys to mankind’s destiny is a guide to individual as well as societal actions. But the saddening aspect of this otherwise illuminating series of books is the excessive reliance on religion as the master activity of the human race. This is subjected to intense comment by reviewers, but Toynbee keeps his habit in this volume too, as we see that “Their (religions’) visions may be partly delusions; their counsels may be partly misguided; their very concern with the soul’s ultimate problem and task may be almost smothered under a heap of irrelevant accretions: ritual observances, social regulations, astronomical theories, and what not. Yet in spite of all their manifest weaknesses the higher religions are the only ways of life, known to Man so far, that do recognize what is the soul’s true problem and true quest, and do offer Man some guidance for reaching his spiritual goal” (p. 534).

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star