Tag Archives: Chemistry

Chemistry (getting a big reaction) – Dan Green & Basher ***

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We’ve not been awfully kind about some of the predecessors of these strange little illustrated science books ‘created by Basher’ (whatever that means). The format is odd – very small in many cases (they do have some larger editions, but this isn’t one of them), half the space given up to illustrations that don’t add any information whatever, and a really irritating text that is written in the first person, apparently by the subject of the page. So in this case you will see entries by a molecule, an acid and so on. Cringeworthy.

But having said all that, for some reason, the chemistry entry didn’t seem anywhere near as bad as some of the others. I think the reason is that there is a lot more useful text than in some examples. It does really tell you quite a bit about, say, acids, even if it is with that irritating first person spin.

The book doesn’t limit itself to the chemicals and their components – there are sections on lab equipment, reactions and more.

Despite my relative enthusiasm, I can’t bring myself to be too positive, though. The text is too sophisticated for the age group the design seems aimed at – it’s a bit like the South Park of children’s popular science books (without the rude bits). So I’d say the text is probably 9 to 12 (apart from the first person aspect) while the design is more 6 to 9. Oh, well. It’s definitely an improvement on some of the others.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Crackling Chemistry – Steve Parker ***

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Like the other books in this ‘Science Crackers’ series, Crackling Chemistry consists of a series of well-illustrated double page spreads, combining factoids, more detailed information, photographs and diagrams in the typical, rather messy scrapbook style. Interlaced with the information pages are five double page spreads of ‘hands on’ activities. You have to be fairly easily pleased to describe them as ‘fantastic’ as the cover does – I’d be more inclined to call them safe and simple. The closest we get to exciting is a vinegar and baking powder volcano. It’s also the closest we get to chemistry.

This is because, remarkably, there is hardly any chemistry in the book. In part this is, I suspect, a side effect of the national curriculum in the UK for this age of children. That too has hardly any chemistry. Instead we get a good few pages on materials, whether things are hard and soft and mixtures. We then move onto freezing and boiling, states of matter, heat and conductivity. Unless I missed it there was no mention of elements, compounds, reactions and… well, pretty well all of chemistry.

It’s not a bad book – but it really should be Marvellous Materials, or even A Bit More Physics, rather than Crackling Chemistry.

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Review by Jo Reed

What Einstein Kept Under His Hat – Robert L. Wolke ****

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First things first – this book has nothing to do with Einstein, for which I ought to dock it several stars for gratuitous use of the great man’s name, but I can’t because it’s such a good book. And it’s about the chemistry of food.

The format is simple. Robert Wolke gives us a series of questions about food that have a chemistry-based answer and… he answers them. Interspersed there are a fair number of recipes, vaguely relevant to the question. And that’s about it. But it’s the way he tells them.

Firstly, Wolke is genuinely funny. I would advise any science writer not to use humour, because on the whole it just doesn’t work. The writer comes across as smug and/or silly. But for some reason, Wolke’s funnies (painful though some of them are) hit the spot for me. Take this from the opening:

What are the first two things a server says to you as soon as you’ve been seated in a restaurant? (1) “Hello, my name is Bruce/Aimee and I’ll be your server.” (2) “May I bring you something to drink?”

Thus far, I have been successful in repressing the replies: (1) “Glad to meet you. My name is Bob and I’ll be your customer.” Or (2) “Thanks, but I came here primarily to eat.”

That sets the tone nicely. (He goes on to point out it would be useful to know your server’s name if it were socially acceptable to yell it across the room when you wanted service… but it isn’t.) Wolke breaks down the food into various sections (drinks, dairy, vegetables) etc. and just piles on the wonderful (and sometimes silly) questions that enable him to explore the subject. I don’t know if he makes the questions up like most magazines (I don’t really care) – but the format works really well and I genuinely learned a lot about how food and cooking work from the viewpoint of a chemist.

A couple of minor moans. It is quite American in feel, with reference to various products Europeans will never have heard of, but it really doesn’t make much difference to the readability and sheer fun of this book. I admit I didn’t read the recipes, but I’m sure they’re nice too. I did notice one oddity. Sometimes (but not always) the recipe calls for ‘kosher salt’. This sounds as bizarre a concept as organic salt. I wish he had a) explained what it was and b) debunked the ‘expensive salts taste better’ myth – and c) pointed out the meaningless of the concept of kosher salt.

Overall, though, a real find. Great summer reading – it’s very light to read – but some genuinely interesting scientific concepts put across well.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Listening to Chemistry

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We don’t often see chemistry appearing in popular science, so it’s great that the Royal Society of Chemistry has built a a collection of 5 minute podcasts on each of the chemical elements, forming an audio periodic table. You can look over the whole table and click on element to hear a podcast (or read a transcript).

There is also a second, more open-ended series on compounds. Both element and compound series feature a range of podcasts by our editor, Brian Clegg. Here, for example, is his podcast on DNA.

You can see the whole list of elements here at the podcast site, and the new set of compounds here.

Reactions – Peter Atkins ***

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Like any other medium, from newspapers to blockbuster movies, popular science books tend to follow trends. I’m delighted to say that this is a book that breaks most of the current trends – it is probably the most different popular science book I’ve seen in a number of years.

Firstly, it concentrates on chemistry, the Cinderella of the sciences (at least from the point of view of popular science writing). If you aren’t dealing with the elements, chemistry generally gets a very rough ride. But Peter Atkins gives us a book that is as purely focused on chemistry as it’s possible to be.

Secondly, it bucks the trend that you either do a nicely illustrated book at a simplistic, for-anyone level, or a largely non-illustrated book if it’s for the more sophisticated audience. The illustrations (and beautiful they are too) are key to this book, yet it’s not a lightweight read in any sense of the world.

What Atkins aims to do is to present us with the fundamentals of chemistry in a new way. We start of gently with the nature of water, precipitation, redox reactions, combustion, acids and bases and the like. Over time, though, things build up until by the end we’re dealing with sophisticated organic reactions (admittedly in a rather more summary fashion) and reactions that involve light.

That reference to ‘redox reactions’ is the clue that this is not a book that is going to appeal to everyone. The nature of oxidation and reduction, which Atkins gradually shifts from its traditional meaning to the movement of electrons, is something a popular science book is likely to cover at a fairly summary level, but here we get quite meaty. I originally intended to do a degree in chemistry before switching to physics (though it’s a long time since I did any), yet I still found the book as a whole quite hard work. Its ideal audience would be chemistry students towards the end of their school career before moving on to university. It covers the groundwork beautifully, and I learned things I’m sure I never knew. But I can’t see many people sitting down and enjoying this as a purely recreational popular science book. As such it’s the chemistry equivalent of Cox and Forshaw’s The Quantum Universe.

Atkins has a great turn of phrase. I loved remarks like ‘Dissolution is seduction by electrical deception.’ It’s almost worth reading the book for these alone. Funnily enough, the real let down for me was those gorgeous illustrations. They show the structure of the molecules undertaking the reactions. But the trouble is there is no labelling – they rely on size, position and colour alone – and it is very difficult to work out what’s going on in them. This isn’t helped when the same colouring is used to mean different things in different diagrams. The idea of basing the book around these illustrations is great, but they would need significantly more development (or even better to be turned into animations in an iPad version of the book) to really do the job.

Overall then, a beautifully presented book, a great and largely overlooked subject and some excellent writing, but one for the chemistry student rather than the general reader.

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Review by Brian Clegg

How to Make a Universe with 92 Ingredients – Adrian Dingle ****

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This is a good example of Scholastic, best known for the excellent Horrible Science series, which is perhaps getting a little long in the tooth now, stretching their wings and coming up with something excellent. It’s a look at chemistry, the most neglected of the sciences in popular science writing (particularly for children). The name suggests it is going to be a trip through the periodic table, but instead it is more a set of applications and contexts for chemistry which pack in the fun facts.

The presentation style is classic large format, two pages per topic, with subjects ranging from the atmosphere and poisons, to fizzy drinks and petrol. Although occasionally they stretch chemistry well into physics (so, for example, there’s a spread on nuclear reactions), the subjects are largely chemistry-based and thus under-represented in other books. I personally find the kind of very brightly coloured pages used in these books a little eye-bending – sometimes the contrast with the text was a little lacking, making it not easy to read if you have even the slightest visual impairment – but there is no doubt the information is good and there’s plenty of fun trivia to keep you going.

Perhaps the only slight moan is that for an illustrated book it isn’t very illustrated. It takes the format of an illustrated book with the busy scattered-text pages, but the illustrations are often fairly basic graphics, not always up to the level you would expect in a book like this. They aren’t bad, but they aren’t stunning either.

However, that’s a minor point. There’s a lot to enjoy in this book which ought to give chemistry a nice little boost.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Periodic Tales – Hugh Aldersey-Williams ****

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Nothing gives an author a sinking feeling more than noticing that someone else has brought out a book on the same subject at more or less the same time – yet it happens all too frequently. It’s not some evil conspiracy (usually), but it is more a matter of the author searching for an idea that hasn’t been covered too much already and that seems to be timely, and producing a book that has immediate competitor. From the reviewer’s point of view, it’s quite different, of course. It’s rather handy to have something to use for direct comparison.

This rather lengthy introduction is to point out that we’ve only just reviewed a book on the chemical elements when along comes another, just like those famed London buses. Sam Kean’s The Disappearing Spoon was a big hit here, so it’s fascinating to be able to put Hugh Aldersey-Williams’ Periodic Tales alongside it. Periodic Tales is a chunky book that has a classy look and feel. Like Kean, Aldersey-Williams doesn’t go for the obvious and potentially tedious route of organizing the elements by the structure of the periodic table. Instead, each chapter dives around the table using various linking strategies. So we go from gold to platinum, palladium to iron and so on, in a first section loosely connected on the theme of ‘power’.

Straight away Aldersey-Williams demonstrates what he does best, taking us off on a little side story with gold, describing the solid gold lifesize statue of Kate Moss, Siren. The author muses that the statue must be hollow, as the artist wanted it to weigh the same as the model, around 50 kilograms, which is nowhere enough for a solid figure this size. Then he whips us off the the early days of gold, the conquistadores, the American gold rush and more. It can be a little exhausting – but you certainly get your money’s worth in this delightful trip.

I think Aldersley-Williams really triumphs when he has a go himself. His description of his attempt to get hold of homeopathic plutonium (sic) is hilarious, and his recreation of a medieval method of obtaining phosphorus from his own urine has a distinct and powerful alchemical quality. This is excellent stuff.

The only real problem with this book is it goes on too long. Of course he wants to get everything in (some admittedly in a rather cursory fashion), but in the end the reader starts to get element fatigue. I felt this with Kean’s book as well, but not as much. In the end, I found Kean’s writing style more approachable (though there is nothing wrong with Aldersley-Williams’ style) and The Disappearing Spoon, by giving us less, managed to give more in the form of a more readable book. It’s interesting that the BBC Radio 4 condensation of the book used a fusty, pernickety and slightly wry voice to read Periodic Tales. I think this tells you something about the way it reads.

Occasionally the author also a tendency to imbue situations (and elements) with a false significance. For example, we are told that when he worked with plutonium at Harwell as a summer job, ‘The aura of power surrounding the element was made apparent when, as a condition of employment, I had to sign the Official Secrets Act.’ I really don’t think this had anything to do with an ‘aura of power’ surrounding plutonium. I had to sign the Official Secret Act when I did some work at the Met Office – it just reflects the connection with the Ministry of Defence.

This is a very good book, and many people will get a lot of enjoyment from it. It goes into more of the art and cultural implications of the elements than does The Disappearing Spoon, which will appeal to readers who are less comfortable with science. Reflecting the authors’ nationalities, this is a much more English book than Kean’s, and that will make it appeal to many readers above the competition. But I’m afraid, for me, it does come a very honourable second.

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Review by Brian Clegg

The Disappearing Spoon – Sam Kean *****

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Winning the honour of being the first five star book of 2011, Sam Kean’s The Disappearing Spoon is an entertaining romp through the chemical elements. Rather than take the kind of rigid, structured walk through the periodic table that might seem the natural approach, Kean lumps together rather random collections of elements, linked only by the wonderful rambling tales of their discovery, use and general oddity.

In case you were wondering, the ‘disappearing spoon’ refers to gallium, which has a melting point of around 30 degrees Celsius. Despite being a metal with a fair resemblance to aluminium, it will melt in your hands (unlike certain sweets). So make a spoon out of gallium, give it to someone to stir their tea, then sit back and chortle as they wonder where the spoon went. Ah, how we laughed.

This book is entirely entertaining – it’s a real page turner, and there’s very little not to like about the combination of a string of QI like fascinating facts with a whole slew of engaging stories. Of course we get Mendeleev (and a couple of his counterparts), but mostly its about the elements themselves.

If I have to quibble, Kean is not at his best explaining atomic orbits and bonding – I thought that could have been done better – and sometimes the casual phrasing seems a trifle overdone. So for instance we read ‘… had sponsored porcelain research but had succeeded in producing only C-minus knockoffs.’ This feels a bit forced to me. Similarly we hear that Henry Moseley was ‘a pill, stiff and stuffy.’ I’ve no idea what being ‘a pill’ means (unless he was small, white and swallowable), and this sort of one-line characterisation seems more appropriate to 1066 and All That than it is to a modern popular science book. However, such lapses are relatively uncommon. (I ought to also mention that he claims calling a person who does calculations ‘a computer’ was a neologism in the Manhattan Project – if he’d bothered to check, the term has been used since the 17th century.)

Overall this was a book that was a delight to read, taking a very predictable subject and approaching it in an entertaining, original and informative way. If you want to read a serious history of the periodic table and the possible alternatives take a look at Eric Scerri’s The Periodic Table, but if you want to be entertained and find out lots of history and fascinating facts around the elements themselves, this is the one for you. Recommended. (See also Hugh Aldersey-Williams’ Periodic Tales.)

 

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Review by Brian Clegg

Joseph Priestley in Calne – Norman Beale ***

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Of all the well-known names in the history of science, Joseph Priestley is probably amongst the least well served in terms of popular biography. There is a chunk, detailed academic biography, but very little for the general reader about the man who discovered oxygen.

This slim volume fills in a considerable amount of the story in a dry but readable fashion. Author Norman Beale, a retired GP who has made a study of Priestley and his work, concentrates particularly on Priestley’s time in the Wiltshire town of Calne, when his most significant discoveries were made at the nearby Bowood House, home of Priestley’s sponsor the Marquis of Lansdowne. The book does cover the rest of his life, before and after Calne, but in brief form, where there is much more detail for the period that Beale highlights.

The book gives us a detailed and insightful feel for Priestley’s life and work in the period. I would have preferred a little more of the science and perhaps a touch less of the domestic detail, but we get a good feel for Priestley and the way he thought. Although it is self-published, the book is well produced on glossy paper and has been well edited – it hasn’t the sloppy feel of some self-publications.

Just occasionally I found the author’s approach a little over-fussy, or oddly worded. Speaking of a house Priestley rented in Calne he comments ‘This property is always supposed to have been that which is now 19, The Green, so-called “Priestley House.”‘ This sounds rather archaic, and it’s not quite clear from this whether or not Beale really believes this is the right house. Later on, in the chapter where Priestley makes his key discovery, we read: ‘Priestley did not discover oxygen. Since the one thing that most people can tell you about Priestley is that he did discover oxygen, this apparent nonsense needs careful explanation,’ (Author’s italics.) This is pedantry, pure and simple. It’s like saying Newton didn’t invent calculus, or Herschel didn’t discover Uranus, since neither of them called the thing they invented/discovered by those names. The fact that Priestley called oyxgen ‘dephlogisticated air’ doesn’t mean he didn’t discover it.

However, these are small niggles in what is generally an informative and enjoyable book. At 79 pages plus notes it won’t take long to read, but is well worth taking the time over. If you visit Bowood House in Wiltshire (where you can see Priestley’s laboratory), you can pick up a copy of the book there, as an alternative to Amazon.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Boyle: between God and Science – Michael Hunter ***

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I was really looking forward to this book as Robert Boyle is one of the least written about of the important people in the history of science, and before picking up Michael Hunter’s book I knew very little about him. I now know a lot more – but not always the things I wanted to know.

There are broadly three types of biography of a scientist. There’s the detailed historian’s biography, poring over every little document and providing an intensely detailed description of the individual’s life. The sort of biography that would make a great reference source, but frankly isn’t bedtime reading. Then there’s the populist biography, with all the rip-roaring personal details, but not enough about the science. Finally there’s the true popular science biography, which should combine the essentials about the person’s life – enough to get a feeling that you know the person without getting bored – with an exploration of the science this individual was responsible for. After all, what’s the point of reading a biography of a scientist, if you don’t find out about the science? It might as well be a biography of a shoemaker. (Nothing personal about shoemakers, here.)

Sadly, though it is, I am sure, a superbly researched tome, Hunter’s biography sits squarely in the first category. You can get a feel for the writer’s enthusiasm for all the minutiae and documentation on which it is based – which is fine – but the writing never captures the imagination. I don’t care about Robert Boyle as a result of this – it could just as well be an extremely long (beautifully documented) laundry list.

But the reason this book is, for me, an abject failure is that it skips over the science. Boyle is, of course, famous for Boyle’s Law, the gas law that tells us pressure times volume is constant. If you don’t concentrate hard you could miss Hunter’s reference to this altogether, it is so summarily covered, with no feeling for the context of the discovery and its implications. To give another example (there are many), we are given some details of an experiment that Boyle makes with nitre – but no attempt is made to even say what nitre is, let alone whether the experiment has any modern significance. We are just given a description of what was undertaken in Boyle’s own terminology. This isn’t good enough.

I’m not saying that I didn’t learn a lot from this book – I did. I vaguely knew that Boyle was Anglo-Irish, not in the sense of being half English and half Irish, but in the period sense of being of an English family with (extensive) landholdings in Ireland. But I didn’t know how rich he was, or about his life of celibacy, his relationship with the Royal Society, his extensive theological writings or his time spent in Oxford. Similarly I knew that Boyle stood at the crossroads where chemistry veered away from alchemy, but didn’t realize that (like Newton) his interest in alchemy was not an early concern to be discarded as he learned more, but rather something he got deeper into when his chemical ideas where already matured.

So, if you need to read up on Boyle, this is certainly a book worth consulting. But don’t expect either good writing on the science, or an enjoyable, readable text. Michael Hunter is a pure historian, not a historian of science, and an academic one at that. This isn’t a bad thing per se – but doesn’t make him the ideal choice if what you want is a popular scientific biography.

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Review by Brian Clegg