The thoughts and deeds of great thinkers always make great stories, and here are a hundred of the most significant. Each story relates a confounding puzzle that became a discovery and changed the way we see the world. We call these Ponderables.
Knowledge does not arrive fully formed, it requires many minds to puzzle over the evidence and, step by step, edge ever closer to the truth. Here we track the history of the Periodic Table, a powerful yet elegant tool that lays bare the building blocks of the Universe. Our story involves philosophers, alchemists, and scientists. It includes Democritus of ancient Greece who said that the four elements of nature - water, air, earth and fire - must be made of atoms, otherwise our world is just an illusion; the French aristocrat Antoine Lavoisier, who was first to show that water was not an element at all: and Dmitri Mendeleev, the wildly bearded Siberian who constructed a table of 60-plus elements and argued, correctly, that there were many others.
A 12-page removable timeline embeds the story in historical context. See who did what and when at a glance. Find out what other great events were happening at the same time. Full scientific data for all 118 elements on the back of the timeline.
Author: Tom Jackson
Publisher: Shelter Harbor Press
Publishing Date: October, 2012
Hardcover: 168 pages
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