Readable history of chemistry, based on the development of important theories and the discovery of the elements. ( )

8 September 2001
Mendeleyev's Dream
Paul Strathern

This is a brief history of chemistry and the discovery of the elements, culminating in the periodic table. Wellwritten and interesting, it started with Mendeleyev at his desk, dreaming of the periodic table, and ended in the same way, but described interesting stories about alchemy, the development of chemistry and the discovery of the elements. Odd tidbits about elements: the name cobalt is derived from the German Kobolds spirits who haunted the mines of Germany, and contaminated the copper ore. As always, the perspective of the sicentists who first came up with ideas like the periodic table shows what great achievements these scientific feats were. It is hard to imagine how hard it would be to create the theories we use each day. Take the heliocentric solar system. Just how was the raw data collected to be analyzed, so that Copernicus could propose a simpler calculation method for eclipses and other events? These concepts are very hard, if you don't presuppose the knowledge that you already have. ( )

I picked up this book at the library because I've been hoping to learn more about Mendeleyev's path to the periodic table. The book jacket--which I don't have on me right now--does mention that it discusses the general history of chemistry. It makes a comment about using Mendeleyev's work as a frame to discuss the larger problem of discovering the elements, which I took to mean that points in Mendeleyev's story would be expanded upon by relevant forays into the history behind those moments. That would have been an interesting structure indeed.

Instead, what I got was essentially a prologue and epilogue about Mendeleyev's work on his periodic table, bookending a long and preachy history of chemistry. The author treated two majorly flawed assumptions as given, and the combination made taking the history seriously almost impossible.

His first assumption is that the entire history of science is the story of empirical science, as it is recognizable today, slowly triumphing over superstition and religion. It may be possible to superimpose this narrative onto the history after the fact if you do assume that science, pure science as it is done today, is self-evidently pure and perfect. This means that it is easy for the author to dismiss out-of-hand those things he considers religion or superstition. But this assumption would not be nearly so problematic if he were simply equating science with straight empiricism. The second assumption is what dooms it.

Said second assumption is that science and philosophy are basically interchangeable concepts. That is, musings on the nature of the universe that cannot, at present, be verified by experimental means can be considered science. The terms "science" and "philosophy" are used seemingy interchangeably in the first few chapters without comment on this fact, or definition of terms; the reader, presumably, is supposed to already understand that these two terms mean the same things. But anything that relies on divinity or mysticism in its explanations of the world is a "dead end" religious belief, not a philosophy.

So: explanations of the world that involve mysticism are religion, and explanations that involve what the author personally believes to be fact are science. What confirms this is the consistent disparaging of the idea that there's something divine about elements (a non-falsifiable idea, which is why I wouldn't consider it science) with praise for wondering what things are "really" made of on a physical level when there's no actual way to confirm it in that time period (well, why were atoms any more believable than being made out of clay by the gods when we didn't have experimental evidence?), followed by an off-hand comment declaring string theory to be true (also non-falsifiable).

Ultimately the author buys into a utopian idea of science, with the clear implication that science is in its truest form now, and everyone who ever thought about the world otherwise was barking up the wrong tree. The idea that we've finely honed the practice of science until it is an instrument of pure truth is a dangerous one. If we discount all other ways of thinking about the world, and assume that our own viewpoint (in his case, non-religious philosopher of science) is the only one that can teach us about the world, then we DO get caught in dead ends, just as he describes throughout the book.

To back off the high horse, it's an okay survey of the history of chemistry, but the book is not what it advertises and subscribes to a viewpoint that is ultimately damaging and disrespectful to the very story it is trying to tell. ( )

It was useful to have re-read this book immediately after having re-read The Glass Bathyscaphe, if only to highlight the very real qualitative differences between two books dealing with popular science and/or popular history.

Mendeleyev's Dream wins the match hands down, being a superior offering in every respect. As a work of history its detail, analysis and exploration of its subject tower above the other book. Strathern indulges in none of the frequent repetition of basic points and arguments which Macfarlane and Martin seem to take refuge in, with the result that Strathern treats his reader with more respect, crediting him with the intelligence to grasp the point being made the first time round.

Using the end point of the discovery of the periodic table in 1869, Mendeleyev's Dream is essentially a history of chemistry, or rather scientific and pseudo-scientific thought. Strathern starts with the startlingly modern ideas of the early Greek natural philosophers, whose use of logic, critical thinking and observation of the world around them allowed them to develop the fundamentals of atomic theory (that all matter is ultimately made up indivisible (a-tomos) components) and the essentials of geology amongst others. He ranges through the rise of the abstract philosophy of the Athenian school, the long and inglorious history of alchemy and the struggle of the new thinkers of early modern period to rediscover the essentials of scientific thought and the gradual discovery, one by one, of the chemical elements in the later 18th and first half of the 19th centuries. By the 1860s enough elements had been identified and their properties explored to give glimpses of patterns and structure to the relationships between them, and it was Mendeleyev's achievement to finally crack the code and range them into the coherent table which has been part of chemistry ever since. ( )

I was quite angered by this book in places. The author takes an extremely judgemental view on history, regarding anything which was later to be revealed as incorrect as a dead end and even damaging to the development of the science of chemistry. His attitude towards alchemy is particularly scathing and very poor form for a historian. Beyond that there are numerous diversions in this book from the history of chemistry, telling the standard stories of general science (eg Galileo) over again. ( )