The Periodic Table
The table itself is the central symbol of the book. Appropriately, then, it is the originating symbol from which all other symbols spring forth. This is appropriate because the table represents the elemental “stuff” of the universe. It therefore symbolizes everything in the universe, the sum of all knowledge.
The Manhattan Project
The effort to construct the atomic bomb before the Nazis in order symbolizes the way that knowledge is neither good nor evil. It is the way that people manipulate that knowledge and the use to which they put it that determines good and evil.
Fritz Haber
Haber is the ultimate individual human symbol of how knowledge exists without morality before a use is created for it. He is a German scientist who used his genius to essentially invent the process of making fertilizer. So far, so good: he was even awarded the Nobel Prize. However, he is also the Nazi who devised the gas used to exterminate millions in concentration camps.
Bubbles
The science of bubbles earn their own chapter and one of the most interesting chapters at that. Situated within their seemingly pointless fragility and temporary quality as an everyday natural occurrence that seems to lack any mystery, bubbles come to symbolize all the myriad ways in which scientists stumble over amazing discoveries while focusing their attention elsewhere.
Marie Curie
Marie Curie is set forward as hardly the only possible selection, but the most famous representative of the impact on the evolution of scientific knowledge by political influences. Politics in this case means not only that with a capital P of the ideological sort, but also office politics; the dynamics of ambition on interpersonal relationships among peers. In this way, Curie’s own story of having to deal with both links to her everything from Rosalind Franklin being squeezed out of the story of the discovery of DNA to hillbilly politicians stifling the response to the hard science of global warming.
