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