By 1972, the mining company began paying restitution to 178 survivors, who collectively sought more than 2.3 billion yen annually. Thirteen years later, the horror of element forty-eight still retained such a hold on Japan that when filmmakers needed to kill off Godzilla in the then-latest sequel, Return of Godzilla, the Japanese military in the film deployed cadmium-tipped missiles. Considering that an H-bomb had given Godzilla life, that’s a pretty dim view of this element.
This quote gives a pretty good indication of the patina of information that is layered on top of the straight-up biographical and historical stories of the men and women who discovered the elements on the periodic table. Every element on the table gets a mention in the book, though some bigger superstars than others, of course. Most of those mentioned also receive the courtesy of interesting little oddball bits of trivia or tweaks of lesser-known history that pack an extra little punch to those occasions when the hardcore scientific stuff starts to get a little too dense or dry.
Some literary scholars think that L. Frank Baum’s 1900 book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz——whose Dorothy wore silver, not ruby, slippers and traveled on a gold-colored brick road to a cash-green city—was really an allegory about the relative merits of the silver versus the gold standard.
This quote serves as a representative example of extent and myriad ways in which the periodic table—or, at least, the elements making up the table—permeates our everyday existence in ways we don’t even connect. Literary references, historical facts, mythological allusion and dozens of others aspects of the world far away from chemistry all contribute creating a vast tidal wave of imagery that washes the central focus of the hard science of the matter. The content of the periodic table—the elements themselves—are entities those of us alive today have grown always knowing and just naturally imagine they themselves must stretch far back in time. Of course, the actual elements themselves do, but the date of discovery of even many of the most familiar may be far more recent than most think. Sodium, for instance, was discovery in 1807 and it would take nearly another century for helium’s discovery.
Most important, in 2006, in food science, students at Appalachian State University finally determined what makes Diet Coke explode when you drop Mentos into it. Bubbles. The grainy surface of Mentos candy acts as a net to snag small dissolved bubbles, which are stitched into large ones. Eventually, a few gigantic bubbles break off, rocket upward, and whoosh through the nozzle, spurting up to twenty magnificent feet. This discovery was undoubtedly the greatest moment in bubble science since Donald Glaser eyed his lager more than fifty years before and dreamed of subverting the periodic table.
This extract may seem like a joke appended onto a more serious section. In fact, this is the final paragraph of the chapter subtitled “Spheres of Splendor: The Science of Bubbles.” That chapter nine densely written, detail-rich, information packed pages that may well cause many readers to never be able to take a bubble bath with quite the same sense of peaceful relaxation. Bubbles, it turns out, have been essential tools in chemistry research in ways impossible for the layman to imagine. This revelation is exactly the sort of texture that makes the book such an interesting read. Even for those who do not necessarily bring an inherent interest in science with them.
