Tag Archives: Sam Kean

A few minutes on the fabulousness of the periodic table of elements

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I love the periodic table of elements and thought I was alone in my appreciation. I kept the secret close to me right into adulthood where I received quite a shock. It turns out I’m not alone and many, many others are just interested, if not downright obsessed.

In her Feb. 7, 2012 posting for the Guardian Science blogs, GrrlScientist profiles a new book about the periodic table of elements (The Periodic Table: A Very Short Introduction by University of California at Los Angeles lecturer and writer Eric Scerri). From the posting,

… we are introduced to an interesting cast of international characters, including physicists, chemists, geologists, teachers, tradesmen and nobleman, all who played a role in the discovery and evolution of the periodic table. Notably, we meet Scottish physician, William Prout, whose proposal that all matter was composed of hydrogen atoms motivated the scientists of the day to obtain ever more accurate weights for each atom in their quest to prove whether his hypothesis was correct. We meet Danish-American eccentric, Gustavus Hinrichs, who saw the connection between the frequencies of spectra emitted by the elements and the internal structures of their atoms. We also meet German physical chemist, Julius Lothar Meyer, who is considered by some historians to be the co-discoverer of the periodic table, along with the Russian scientist, Dimitri Mendeleev, who sketched out his periodic table on the back of an invitation to a local cheese factory.

This isn’t the only recent book about the periodic table of elements. Sam Kean’s The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World From the Periodic Table of the Elements published in 2010 was mentioned in my July 15, 2010 posting. In that posting I also mentioned and rhapsodized about a visual reworking of the periodic table of elements by Philip Stewart into something he called The Chemical Galaxy.

I see you can now purchase the poster through The Chemical Galaxy store but you can also order it from the Science Mall. At the time I purchased the poster, the Science Mall was the only option for someone in North America and I had a very good experience with them. Here’s what the poster looks like,

The Chemical Galaxy by Philip Stewart

Unfortunately, this image is too small to offer much detail but The Chemical Galaxy website does offer a larger version. Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite convey the sheer gorgeousness of Stewart’s visualization.

For those who prefer a more musical approach, here’s Daniel Radcliffe (of Harry Potter fame) singing ‘The Elements’ song (originally written and performed by Tom Lehrer)

I look forward to reading the new book once I shoehorn it into my schedule. Who knows? Maybe I’ll finally write that suite of poems based on the elements in the periodic table.

Women writing popular science books

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It seems to be a week for asking: Why aren’t there more women …

  • on the Royal Society’s Winton Prize for Science Books shortlist?
  • entrepreneurs?
  • leaving comments on VC (venture capital) blogs?

The first question was asked by Jo Marchant in her Oct. 4, 2011 posting on the Guardian Science Blogs. From the posting,

I couldn’t help being a bit disappointed by the shortlist, announced last week, for the 2011 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books. From Alex Bellos’s mathematical adventures to Sam Kean’s poetic tour of the chemical elements, this is an inspiring collection of well-deserving books. But, yet again, all the authors are men.

This made me wonder how many women have been shortlisted for this prestigious prize since it was established in 1988. A quick glance at the society’s website reveals that of 144 shortlisted books – six each year over 24 years – just nine were by women, with two others that had a woman as second author, including a husband-wife team. Out of these female authors, only one has won (the husband-wife team).

…

Much comes down to the individual tastes of the judges each year. But surely the overall statistics – only around 5% of shortlisted books are by female authors, with just one shortlisted woman in the last five years (me, since you ask) – show that there is a problem to be addressed here.

Marchant suggests that at least part of the problem lies in the fact that most science books are authored by men and so the lists reflect that reality. She does suggest that perhaps the judges could seek out books by women and by various ethnic minorities, which are also under-represented, instead of passively choosing from the male-dominated lists presented to them.

Mark Suster writing for Fast Company asked the question about women entrepreneurs in his Oct. 4, 2011 posting,

I’m often asked the question about why there aren’t more women who are entrepreneurs. On my blog I’ve been hesitant to take the topic head on. Somehow it seems kind of strange for a man to answer this question that obviously comes from a man’s point of view.

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The truth is I have been thinking a lot about the topic, I just haven’t been writing about it. And when asked about the topic, I definitely don’t shy away from the topic as you can see in this 8-minute YouTube interview that Pemo Theodore asked me to do on the subject of Women in Entrepreneurship.

…

My inspiration to become an entrepreneur came from my mom, not my dad. She was the dominant figure in my family and was both an entrepreneur and a community leader. She opened a bakery and a restaurant. She was president of the UJA (United Jewish Appeal). She bought our first computer – an IBM XT with a 10MB hard drive – in order to do her books electronically. It’s how I learned to build spreadsheets. She encouraged me to get a job when I was 14. She encouraged me to take acting classes as a child, which gave me confidence as a public speaker.

I love my dad equally, of course. But he was a doctor and a long-distance runner and cared little about business.

So the role is [sic] a strong woman leader has always been a comfortable idea for me.

Even more interesting is that at GRP Partners (the VC firm where I’m a partner) our two most successful returns from our previous fund [which is ranked as the top performing fund in the country for its 2000 vintage according to Prequin] were both run by women!

But then the truth sets in. My guess is that probably only 2-3 out of every hundred pitches I receive are from women. This certainly isn’t anything conscious on my side. It’s just the facts.

I’m a little confused by Suster’s comment about receiving “only 2-3 out of every hundred pitches” followed by the conclusion that consciousness on his side is required but he has an interesting perspective although he does not venture any answers.

Suster also comments on a recent posting by Tara Tiger Brown where she asked the question about women and venture capital blogs. From her Sept. 22, 2011 posting on her Tara the Tiger blog,

For a long time we’ve all been hearing women in tech complain about being left out of the conversation, yet blog posts are the easiest way to participate. Anybody can comment on a blog post. We know there are women in tech and we know there are women entrepreneurs, so, why aren’t more women commenting on these VC’s posts?

The comments section of any blog post is just as valuable, if not more so, than the actual post. That’s where the real conversation is, and any decent blogger will contribute to that conversation well past the point of hitting publish. These VCs are the guys that give out the money to startups, so people listen to them. The question is, why are mostly men replying back to them?

I did a little Googling and came across the post “The Top 20 VC Power Bloggers of 2010” and decided to put my math skills to the test. I picked out the top VCs from their list that allow for comments (all men, BTW), and their most recent 5 posts (I didn’t include guest posters) and the number of comments by women divided by the number of total comments. If someone was anonymous, I didn’t count them as a woman (would be interesting to know if they are though).

Not surprisingly, hardly any of the comments were by women. It was easily observable that out of all the VC’s blog posts, more women comment on Fred Wilson’s blog but usually the same 3 or 4 women.

She goes on to list some open questions and at this point has gotten over a dozen comments from women about why they do and don’t comment on VC blogs.

I don’t have a definitive answer for women why do or don’t do things so I was never able to answer a boss at a technical company that I worked for who used to ask why women didn’t like his and his partners’ company? Personally, I always thought he was asking the wrong question. I would have rephrased it this way, why doesn’t our company like women? In short, were there systemic and personal issues and or barriers within the company that discouraged women?

As you can see from this posting, women are still under-represented in many situations and I think it’s going to take a variety of strategies, much discussion, and a willingness to keep asking the questions before more progress is achieved.

BTW, I read Sam Kean’s book (mentioned in Marchant’s posting as one of this year’s shortlisted books) about the periodic table of elements and was quite charmed until about 2/3 through the book when he seemed to lose focus. I’m surprised it made the shortlist.

Canadian helps to revise periodic table of elements

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A professor (Michael Wieser) at the University of Calgary is making a bit of a splash, so to speak, with his contributions to the changes being made to the periodic table of elements. According to the Dec. 15, 2010 news item on the CBC News website,

Science’s ubiquitous periodic table of the elements is getting a fresh face courtesy of a team led by an Alberta researcher.

As part of the revamp, the atomic weights of at least 10 elements — among them oxygen, carbon and nitrogen — are to be restated, said Michael Wiesner [sic], an associate professor at the University of Calgary.

The update is meant to better reflect how the elements vary in the natural world.

To start with, an international group of scientists will restate the weights of 10 elements, classifying them as a low and a high, known as an interval. The interval varies depending on where the elements are found in nature.

“These are the 10 where we’ve completed the review,” Wieser said on Tuesday. “There’s another series we’re working on right now.”

Apparently, this is the first revision of this type (there have been many additions and moves) to the table since it was developed in 1869 by Mendeleev. (The table is attributed to Dmitri Mendeleev although the history of its development is a little more complicated than I have time for here. Sam Kean’s book, The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements, goes into more detail about it all.)

The implications of these 2010 changes are quite interesting,

Wiesner [sic], who is secretary of the Commission on Isotopic Abundances and Weights for the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, has co-authored a paper outlining the revisions in the journal Pure and Applied Chemistry.

“People have used atomic weight data to look at nuclear processes occurring in the solar system … we can say something about the formation of the solar system and the planets,” he said.

“People are probably comfortable with having a single value for the atomic weight, but that is not the reality for our natural world.

As noted in the Dec. 15, 2010 news item on physorg.com, an impact will be felt in the classrooms,

“Though this change offers significant benefits in the understanding of chemistry, one can imagine the challenge now to educators and students who will have to select a single value out of an interval when doing chemistry calculations,” says Dr. Fabienne Meyers, associate director of IUPAC.

Not all elements will undergo changes (from physorg.com),

Elements with only one stable isotope do not exhibit variations in their atomic weights. For example, the standard atomic weights for fluorine, aluminum, sodium and gold are constant, and their values are known to better than six decimal places.

I think someone got a little overexcited about this,

For the first time in history, a change will be made to the atomic weights of some elements listed on the Periodic table of the chemical elements posted on walls of chemistry classrooms and on the inside covers of chemistry textbooks worldwide. [emphasis mine]

The periodic table of elements is an intellectual construct which was developed in the mid-19 century. For me and most folks, science provides our best guesses but very rarely any certainties. Gravity is a law of physics at the macro level (unless someone manages to prove differently) but when you’re talking about the quantum world, we believe and it seems to be true, experimentally, that a whole other set of rules apply.

More about bubble chambers

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Imagine (or not) my surprise at running across a story about how bubble chambers were developed just a day after discovering The Bubble Chamber blog. I found the story serendipitously when reading the Sam Kean book about the periodic table of elements, The Disappearing Spoon. Here’s my seriously shortened version of the story Kean tells:

A young scientist by the name of Donald Glaser was drinking beer and while staring at the bubbles streaming though it got to thinking about particle physics. (Glaser was a junior faculty member at the nearby University of Michigan in the early 1950s when this took place.) There was a belief amongst physicists of that time that particles might lead to the overthrow of the periodic table of elements as the fundamental map of matter. But, the inability to ‘see’ the particles was holding the physicists back. That night, Glaser, inspired by his beer, decided that bubbles might serve as a means to ‘see’ particles.

In his first attempt to create a bubble chamber, Glaser used beer as the liquid at which he aimed an atomic gun in order to bombard it with particles. The first attempts didn’t work and left a bad smell in the lab so Glaser and a colleague refined the experiment to use liquid hydrogenin place of the beer. This refinement worked so well that Glaser won the Nobel Prize at the age of 33.

ASME’s introductory nanotechnology podcast doesn’t mention the word billionth

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It’s a landmark moment, I have never before come across an introductory nanotechnology presentation where they make no reference to ‘billionth’ as in, nanometre means one billionth of a metre.

The American Society of Mechanical Engineers now known as ASME offers a series of podcasts about nanotechnology on its website. This page is where you can sign up to get free access. (You might want to take a look at that agreement before submitting it. More about that later.) I saw the first installation on Andrew Maynard’s 2020 Science blog here. Andrew is prominently featured in this first podcast.

I enjoyed the podcast and found this new approach to introducing nanotechnology quite intriguing and I suspect they’re going in the right direction. 1 billionth of a metre or of a second doesn’t really convey that much information for most of us. Personally, I visualize the existence of alternate realities, tiny worlds of atoms and molecules which I believe to be present but are not perceptible to me through my senses.

It’s been decades since I first saw a representation of an atom or a molecule but the resemblance to planets has often played in my imagination since. They will always be planets for me, regardless of the fact that more accurate representations exist than the ones I saw so many years ago.

I think it’s the poetic aspect of it all, as if we carry worlds within us while our own planet may be simply an atom in someone else’s universe. One of these days when I have a better handle on what I’m trying to say here,  I will write a poem about it.

Actually, I’ve been meaning to do a series of poems based on the periodic table of elements ever since I saw a revisioning of the periodic table, The Chemical Galaxy by Philip Stewart. The desire was reawakened recently on finding Sam Kean’s series Blogging the Periodic Table, for Slate Magazine. From Kean’s first entry,

I’m blogging about the periodic table this month in conjunction with my new book, The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World From the Periodic Table of the Elements. Now, I know not everyone has fond memories of the periodic table, but it got to me early—thanks to one element, mercury. I used to break those old-fashioned mercury thermometers all the time as a kid (accidentally, I swear), and I was always fascinated to see the little balls of liquid metal rolling around on the floor. My mother used to sweep them up with a toothpick, and we kept a jar with a pecan-size glob of all the mercury from all the broken thermometers on a knickknack shelf in our house.

But what really reinforced my love of mercury—and got me interested in the periodic table as a whole—was learning about all the places that mercury popped up in history. Lewis and Clark hauled 600 mercury-laced laxative tablets with them when they explored the interior of America—historians have tracked down some places where they stayed based on deposits in the soil. The so-called mad hatters (like the one in Alice in Wonderland) went crazy because of the mercury in the vats in which they cleaned fur pelts.

Mercury made me see how many different areas of life the periodic table intersects with, and I wrote The Disappearing Spoon because I realized that you can say the same about every single element on the table. There are hidden tales about familiar elements like gold, carbon, and lead and even obscure elements like tellurium and molybdenum have wonderful, often wild back stories.

There are eight more entries as of 11:25 am PST, July 15, 2010. I wish Kean good luck as he sells his book. By the way, he’ll be blogging until early August 2010.

Getting back to ASME and their nanotechnology podcasts. I haven’t signed up and am not sure I will. They are insisting on copyright in their  user agreement (link to page),

Copyrights. All rights, including copyright and database right, in this Site and its contents (including, but not limited to, all text, images, software, video clips, audio clips) (collectively, “Content”), are owned by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), or otherwise used by ASME as permitted by applicable law or agreement.

…

Content Displayed on the Website. User shall not remove, obscure or alter the Content. User shall not distribute, rent, lease, transfer or otherwise make the Content available to any third party, or use the Content for systematic downloading, and/or the making of print or electronic copies for transmission to non-subscribers. User may download only the video clips designated on the Website as downloadable and may not share video URLs with non-subscribers. [emphases mine]

If I read those passages correctly, I’m prevented from copying any portion of the materials from their website and reproducing them on this blog to nonsubscribers. (I trust reproducing portions of their ‘user agreement’ won’t land me into trouble.) Since I copy and excerpt with a very high rate of frequency (being careful to give attribution and links while excerpting portions only), I don’t want to be placed in the position of having to ask for permission each and every time I’d like to copy something from the ASME site.  A lot of my entries are timely so I don’t want to wait and, frankly, I don’t understand what their problems with activities such as mine might be.  I suspect that this agreement will prove overly prohibitive and I hope the ASME folks will reconsider their approach to copyright. I really would like to view a few of their podcasts.