Mendeleyev's Dream: The Quest For the Elements

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I'm a scientist and I value the scientific method but I'd argue that even today the method only gives us simplistic glimpses of the truth and I know better than to mock the people who came before me. 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. The discovery of the periodic table lays out the basic material composition of the universe and this has done a tremendous impact to the development of modern science. Though it was not really a one man invention, Mendeleyev puzzled all the pieces of previously discovered elements and brought them together - to answer old question 'What is the most basic element of nature? For the kind of book this is trying to be, pick up Bill Bryson's _A Brief History of Nearly Everything_.

The cover may have some limited signs of wear but the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged. First there was the seeking of direct profitable results (gold, philosopher's stone, life elixers), and this seems to change in looking for rather more abstract results ('knowledge', fame, status).He is scheduled to meet with a group of cheesemakers in a small town some 600 kilometres away and must catch a train. Framing this history is the story of 19th-century Russian scientist Dmitri Mendeleyev, who dreamed the periodic table - the template upon which chemistry is founded. He imparts the news that Renaissance chemists held mystical beliefs as though this were horrifying or strange. The title of this book is misleading, if from it you assume the book is primarily about Mendeleyev - far from it.

The wondrous and illuminating story of humankind’s quest to discover the fundamentals of chemistry, culminating in Mendeleyev’s dream of the Periodic Table. This idea, once conceived, was quickly developed by Thales’ pupils in Miletus – the philosophers known as the Milesian school. Misguided from the start and frequently bizarre, alchemy did manage to work out a good many compounds, chemical processes and even some practical applications.It's clearly written with the benefit of hindsight and is selecting the stories in light of what would later prove to be important, even though that direction was unknown at the time. 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.