by Sam Kean
Gilbert Lewis also used heavy water in a last-ditch effort to win the Nobel Prize in the early 1930s. Lewis knew that Harold Urey’s discovery of deuterium—heavy hydrogen with an extra neutron—would win the Nobel Prize, as did every other scientist in the world, including Urey. (After a mostly lackluster career that included ridicule from his in-laws, he came home right after discovering deuterium and told his wife, “Honey, our troubles are over.”)
Lewis decided to hitch himself to this no-miss prize by investigating the biological effects of water made with heavy hydrogen. Others had the same idea, but Berkeley’s physics department, headed by Ernest O. Lawrence, happened to have the world’s largest supply of heavy water, quite by accident. The team had a tank of water it had been using for years in radioactivity experiments, and the tank had a relatively high concentration of heavy water (a few ounces). Lewis begged Lawrence to let him purify the heavy water, and Lawrence agreed—on the condition that Lewis give it back after his experiments, since it might prove important in Lawrence’s research, too.
Lewis broke his promise. After isolating the heavy water, he decided to give it to a mouse and see what happened. One queer effect of heavy water is that, like ocean water, the more you drink, the more throat-scratchingly thirsty you feel, since the body cannot metabolize it. Hevesy ingested heavy water in trace amounts, so his body really didn’t notice, but Lewis’s mouse gulped all the heavy water in a few hours and ended up dead. Killing a mouse was hardly a Nobel Prize–worthy exercise, and Lawrence went apoplectic when he learned a lousy rodent had peed away all his precious heavy water.
“blocked him for personal reasons”: Kazimierz Fajans’s son Stefan Fajans, now a professor emeritus of internal medicine at the University of Michigan’s medical school, kindly supplied information to me in an e-mail:
In 1924 I was six years old, but either then and certainly in the years to follow I did hear from my father of some aspects of the Nobel Prize story. That a Stockholm newspaper published a headline “K. Fajans to Receive Nobel Prize” (I do not know whether it was in chemistry or physics) is not rumor but fact. I remember seeing a copy of that newspaper. I also remember seeing in that newspaper a photo of my father walking in front of a building in Stockholm (probably taken earlier) in somewhat formal dress but not [formal] for that time…. What I did hear was that an influential member of the committee blocked the award to my father for personal reasons. Whether that was rumor or fact is impossible to know unless someone could look at the minutes of these meetings. I believe they are secret. I do know as a fact that my father expected to receive the Nobel Prize as intimated to him by some people in the know. He expected to receive it in the years to follow…. but it never happened, as you know.
“ ‘protactinium’ stuck”: Meitner and Hahn actually named their element “protoactinium,” and only in 1949 did scientists shorten it by removing the extra o.
“ ‘disciplinary bias, political obtuseness, ignorance, and haste’ ”: There’s a wonderful dissection of Meitner, Hahn, and the awarding of the Nobel Prize in the September 1997 issue of Physics Today (“A Nobel Tale of Postwar Injustice” by Elisabeth Crawford, Ruth Lewin Sime, and Mark Walker). The article is the source of the quote about Meitner losing the prize because of “disciplinary bias, political obtuseness, ignorance and haste.”
“the peculiar rules for naming elements”: Once a name has been proposed for an element, the name gets only one shot at appearing on the periodic table. If the evidence for the element falls apart, or if the international governing body of chemistry (IUPAC) rules against an element’s name, it is blacklisted. This might feel satisfying in the case of Otto Hahn, but it also means that no one can ever name an element “joliotium” after Irène or Frédéric Joliot-Curie, since “joliotium” was once an official candidate name for element 105. It’s unclear whether “ghiorsium” has another shot. Perhaps “alghiorsium” would work, although IUPAC frowns on using first and last names, and in fact once rejected “nielsbohrium” in favor of plain “bohrium” for element 107—a decision that didn’t please the West German team that discovered 107, since “bohrium” sounds too much like boron and barium.
13. Elements as Money
“in Colorado in the 1860s”: The fact that gold-tellurium compounds were discovered in the mountains of Colorado is reflected in the name of a local mining town, Telluride, Colorado.
“It’s called fluorescence”: To clarify some easily (and often) confused terms, “luminescence” is the umbrella term for a substance absorbing and emitting light. “Fluorescence” is the instantaneous process described in this chapter. “Phosphorescence” is similar to fluorescence—it consists of molecules absorbing high-frequency light and emitting low-frequency light—but phosphorescing molecules absorb light like a battery and continue to glow long after the light shuts off. Obviously, both fluorescence and phosphorescence derive from elements on the periodic table, fluorine and phosphorus, the two most prominent elements in the molecules that first exhibited these traits to chemists.
“the silicon semiconductor revolution eighty years later”: Moore’s law says that the number of silicon transistors on a microchip will double every eighteen months—amazingly, it has held true since the 1960s. Had the law held for aluminium, Alcoa would have been producing 400,000 pounds of aluminium per day within two decades of starting up, not just 88,000. So aluminium did well, but not quite well enough to beat its neighbor on the periodic table.
“Alcoa shares worth $30 million”: There’s some discrepancy about the magnitude of Charles Hall’s wealth at his death. Thirty million dollars is the high end of the range. The confusion may be because Hall died in 1914 but his estate was not settled until fourteen years later. One-third of his estate went to Oberlin College.
“spelling disagreement”: Aside from differences between languages, other spelling discrepancies within a language occur with cesium, which the British tend to spell “caesium,” and sulfur, which many people still spell “sulphur.” You could make a case that element 110 should be spelled mendeleevium, not mendelevium, and that element 111 should be spelled röntgenium, not roentgenium.
14. Artistic Elements
“Sybille Bedford could write”: The Sybille Bedford quote comes from her novel A Legacy.
“a hobby”: Speaking of strange hobbies, I can’t not share this in a book full of quirky stories about elements. This anagram won the Special Category prize for May 1999 at the Web site Anagrammy.com, and as far as I’m concerned, this “doubly-true anagram” is the word puzzle of the millennium. The first half equates thirty elements on the periodic table with thirty other elements:
hydrogen + zirconium + tin + oxygen + rhenium + platinum + tellurium + terbium + nobelium + chromium + iron + cobalt + carbon + aluminum + ruthenium + silicon + ytterbium + hafnium + sodium + selenium + cerium + manganese + osmium + uranium + nickel + praseodymium + erbium + vanadium + thallium + plutonium
=
nitrogen + zinc + rhodium + helium + argon + neptunium + beryllium + bromine + lutetium + boron + calcium + thorium + niobium + lanthanum + mercury + fluorine + bismuth + actinium + silver + cesium + neodymium + magnesium + xenon + samarium + scandium + europium + berkelium + palladium + antimony + thulium
That’s pretty amazing, even if the number of ium endings mitigated the difficulty a little. The kicker is that if you replace each element with its atomic number, the anagram still balances.
1 + 40 + 50 + 8 + 75 + 78 + 52 + 65 + 102 + 24 + 26 + 27 + 6 + 13 + 44 + 14 + 70 + 72 + 11 + 34 + 58 + 25 + 76 + 92 + 28 + 59 + 68 + 23 + 81 + 94
=
7 + 30 + 45 + 2 + 18 + 93 + 4 + 35 + 71 + 5 + 20 + 90 + 41 + 57 + 80 + 9 + 83 + 89 + 47 + 55 + 60 + 12 + 54 + 62 + 21 + 63 + 97 + 46 + 51 + 69
=
1416
As the anagram’s author, Mike Keith, said, “This is the longest doubly-true anagram ever constructed (using the chemical elements—or any other set of this type, as far as I know).”
Along these
lines, there’s also Tom Lehrer’s incomparable song “The Elements.” He adapted the tune from Gilbert and Sullivan’s “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General,” and in it he names every element on the periodic table in a brisk eighty-six seconds. Check it out on YouTube: “There’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium…”
“ ‘Plutonists’ ”: Plutonists were sometimes called Vulcanists, too, after the fire god Vulcan. This moniker emphasized the role of volcanoes in the formation of rocks.
“Döbereiner’s pillars”: Döbereiner called his groupings of elements not triads but affinities, part of his larger theory of chemical affinities—a term that gave Goethe (who frequently attended Döbereiner’s lectures at Jena) the inspiration for the title Elective Affinities.
“inches close to majesty”: Another majestic design inspired by elements is the wooden Periodic Table Table, a coffee table built by Theodore Gray. The table has more than one hundred slots on top, in which Gray has stored samples of every extant element, including many exclusively man-made ones. Of course, he has only minute quantities of some. His samples of francium and astatine, the two rarest natural elements, are actually hunks of uranium. Gray’s argument is that somewhere buried deep inside those hunks are at least a few atoms of each one, which is true and honestly about as good as anyone has ever done. Besides, since most of the elements on the table are gray metals, it’s hard to tell them apart anyway.
“ruthenium began capping every Parker 51 in 1944”: For the details about the metallurgy of the Parker 51, see “Who Was That Man?” by Daniel A. Zazove and L. Michael Fultz, which appeared in the fall 2000 issue of Pennant, the house publication of the Pen Collectors of America. The article is a wonderful instance of dedicated amateur history—of keeping alive an obscure but charming bit of Americana. Other resources for Parker pen information include Parker51.com and Vintagepens.com.
The famed tip on the Parker 51 was actually 96 percent ruthenium and 4 percent iridium. The company advertised the nibs as being made of super-durable “plathenium,” presumably to mislead competitors into thinking that expensive platinum was the key.
“which Remington turned around and printed anyway”: The text of the letter Twain sent to Remington (which the company printed verbatim) is as follows:
GENTLEMEN: Please do not use my name in any way. Please do not even divulge the fact that I own a machine. I have entirely stopped using the Type-Writer, for the reason that I never could write a letter with it to anybody without receiving a request by return mail that I would not only describe the machine, but state what progress I had made in the use of it, etc., etc. I don’t like to write letters, and so I don’t want people to know I own this curiosity-breeding little joker. Yours truly, Saml. L. Clemens
15. An Element of Madness
“pathological science”: Credit for the phrase “pathological science” goes to chemist Irving Langmuir, who gave a speech about it in the 1950s. Two interesting notes on Langmuir: He was the younger, brighter colleague whose Nobel Prize and impudence at lunch might have driven Gilbert Lewis to kill himself (see chapter 1). Later in life, Langmuir grew obsessed with controlling the weather by seeding clouds—a muddled process that skirted awfully close to becoming a pathological science itself. Not even the great ones are immune.
In writing this chapter, I departed somewhat from Langmuir’s description of pathological science, which was rather narrow and legalistic. Another take on the meaning of pathological science comes from Denis Rousseau, who wrote a top-rate article called “Case Studies in Pathological Science” for American Scientist in 1992. However, I’m also departing from Rousseau, mostly to include sciences such as paleontology that aren’t as data driven as other, more famous cases of pathological science.
“Philip died at sea”: Philip Crookes, William’s brother, died on a vessel laying some of the first transatlantic cables for telegraph lines.
“supernatural forces”: William Crookes had a mystical, pantheistic, Spinozistic view of nature, in which everything partakes of “one sole kind of matter.” This perhaps explains why he thought he could commune with ghosts and spirits, since he was part of the same material. If you think about it, though, this view is quite odd, since Crookes made a name for himself discovering new elements—which by definition are different forms of matter!
“manganese and the megalodon”: For more details on the link between the megalodon and manganese, see Ben S. Roesch, who published an article evaluating how unfeasible it is to think that the megalodon survived in The Cryptozoology Review (what a word—“cryptozoology”!) in the autumn of 1998 and revisited the topic in 2002.
“The pathology started with the manganese”: In another strange link between the elements and psychology, Oliver Sacks notes in Awakenings that an overdose of manganese can damage the human brain and cause the same sort of Parkinson’s disease that he treated in his hospital. It’s a rare cause of Parkinson’s, to be sure, and doctors don’t quite understand why this element targets the brain instead of, like most toxic elements, going after other vital organs.
“a dozen African bull elephants”: The bull elephant calculation works as follows. According to the San Diego Zoo, the hugest elephant ever recorded weighed approximately 24,000 pounds. Humans and elephants are made of the same basic thing, water, so their densities are the same. To figure out the relative volume if humans had the appetite of palladium, we can therefore just multiply the weight of a 250-pound man by 900 and divide that number (225,000) by the weight of an elephant. That gives 9.4 elephants swallowed. But remember, that was the biggest elephant ever, standing thirteen feet at the shoulders. The weight of a normal bull elephant is closer to 18,000 pounds, which gives about a dozen swallowed.
“a better, more concise description of pathological science”: David Goodstein’s article on cold fusion was titled “Whatever Happened to Cold Fusion?” It appeared in the fall 1994 issue of the American Scholar.
16. Chemistry Way, Way Below Zero
“proved an easier thing to blame”: The theory that tin leprosy doomed Robert Falcon Scott seems to have originated in a New York Times article, although the article floated the theory that what failed was the tins themselves (i.e., the containers) in which Scott’s team stored food and other supplies. Only later did people start to blame the disintegration of tin solder. There’s an incredibly wide variation, too, in what historians claim that he used for solder, including leather seals, pure tin, a tin-lead mixture, and so on.
“and go roaming”: Plasma is actually the most common form of matter in the universe, since it’s the major constituent of stars. You can find plasmas (albeit very cold ones) in the upper reaches of the earth’s atmosphere, where cosmic rays from the sun ionize isolated gas molecules. These rays help produce the eerie natural light shows known as the aurora borealis in the far north. Such high-speed collisions also produce antimatter.
“blends of two states”: Other colloids include jelly, fog, whipped cream, and some types of colored glass. The solid foams mentioned in chapter 17, in which a gas phase is interspersed throughout a solid, are also colloids.
“with xenon in 1962”: Bartlett performed the crucial experiment on xenon on a Friday, and the preparation took him the entire day. By the time he broke the glass seal and saw the reaction take place, it was after 7:00 p.m. He was so keyed up that he burst into the hallway in his lab building and began yelling for colleagues. All of them had already gone home for the weekend, and he had to celebrate alone.
“Schrieffer”: In a macabre late-life crisis, one of the BCS trio, Schrieffer, killed two people, paralyzed another, and injured five more in a horrific car accident on a California highway. After nine speeding tickets, the seventy-four-year-old Schrieffer had had his license suspended, but he decided to drive his new Mercedes sports car from San Francisco to Santa Barbara anyway, and had revved his speed well into the triple digits. Despite his speed, he somehow managed to fall asleep at the wheel and slammed into a van at 111 mph.
He was going to be sentenced to eight months in a county jail until the victims’ families testified, at which point the judge said that Schrieffer “need[ed] a taste of state prison.” The Associated Press quoted his erstwhile colleague Leon Cooper muttering in disbelief: “This is not the Bob I worked with…. This is not the Bob that I knew.”
“almost”: Now, to back off my rigid stance a little, there are a few good reasons why many people conflate the uncertainty principle with the idea that measuring something changes what you’re trying to measure—the so-called observer effect. Light photons are about the tiniest tools scientists have to probe things, but photons aren’t that much smaller than electrons, protons, or other particles. So bouncing photons off them to measure the size or speed of particles is like trying to measure the speed of a dump truck by crashing a Datsun into it. You’ll get information, sure, but at the cost of knocking the dump truck off course. And in many seminal quantum physics experiments, observing a particle’s spin or speed or position does alter the reality of the experiment in a spooky way. However, while it’s fair to say you have to understand the uncertainty principle to understand any change taking place, the cause of the change itself is the observer effect, a distinct phenomenon.
Of course, it seems likely that the real reason people conflate the two is that we as a society need a metaphor for changing something by the act of observing it, and the uncertainty principle fills that need.
“than the ‘correct’ theory”: Bose’s mistake was statistical. If you wanted to figure the odds of getting one tail and one head on two coin flips, you could determine the correct answer (one-half) by looking at all four possibilities: HH, TT, TH, and HT. Bose basically treated HT and TH as the same outcome and therefore got an answer of one-third.