Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Disappearing Spoon, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Storytelling and Science
Experimentation, Accidents, and Discovery
Nature vs. Culture
Science for Good vs. for Evil
The Expansion and Limits of Human Knowledge
Summary
Analysis
Humans are flawed beings and thus the periodic table, which is a human invention, is necessarily flawed as well. As the reader has witnessed thus far, the periodic table may strive to be scientifically pure and objective but in reality is endowed with all the social problems, influences, and biases that surround its creation. When Marie Skłodowska—one of the most important Poles to ever live—was born in Warsaw in 1867, the Polish city was technically part of tsarist Russia. Educational opportunities for women were limited; after being tutored by her father, Skłodowska moved to Paris to study for her PhD at the Sorbonne. It was here that she fell in love with her future husband, Pierre Curie.
Again, this passage emphasizes that Marie Curie—one of the most important scientists to ever live, whose work profoundly changed the world—might have easily never become a scientist at all, simply by being denied an education. The reader is led to imagine all the women like Marie Curie whose fathers wouldn’t (or couldn’t) tutor them, or who were too poor to study, or who would have been denied access to the Sorbonne due to racism, and so on.
Themes
Marie and Pierre Curie had “perhaps the most fruitful collaboration in science history” thus far when they worked together in the 1890s. Studying uranium, Marie concluded that the radioactivity of an atom was unaffected by whatever electron bonds it may have. This vastly simplified—and enhanced—knowledge of radioactivity. She and Pierre were jointly awarded the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics as a result. Like many 20th-century scientists, Marie was a refugee whose career was obstructed by imperial politics. Shortly after her Nobel Prize win, Marie noticed that the waste produced during the process of purifying uranium was 300 times more radioactive than the uranium itself. She immediately set to work researching what could explain this and ended up discovering two whole new elements. She won a second Nobel (in Chemistry this time) in 1911.
As this passage shows, one of the main aims of science is to simplify existing knowledge. If scientific principles are too complicated—or if a rule has too many exceptions—then this is often a sign that scientists have misinterpreted the rule or are missing vital knowledge. This isn’t because the universe is necessarily simple but because there is a certain elegance to natural laws and principles. Messiness is usually an indication that human knowledge has gone wrong somewhere.
Themes
Marie named one of the elements polonium, after her “nonexistent” home country. It was the first time an element had been named for political reasons in this manner. Pierre was tragically killed in a street carriage accident in 1906. Shortly after, Marie was rejected from the French Academy of Sciences due to her gender and the suspicion that she was Jewish (she wasn’t). Not long after that, a newspaper published correspondence between Marie and her colleague, with whom she was having an affair. Fortunately for her (though not the world), World War I soon distracted the public from anything as trivial as her personal life. Polonium did not go down in history as a very important element. Ultimately, both Marie and her daughter, Irène, died of leukemia provoked by radiation exposure from their scientific research.
As Marie and Irène’s fates show, even the most intelligent scientists sometimes fail to predict the consequences of their research—including on themselves. Marie was working at the very early stages of knowledge about radioactivity and it is thus not so surprising that she did not realize how handling radioactive atoms would affect her. Of course, it is poignant and tragic that her similarly gifted daughter met the same end.
Themes
In 1910, a Hungarian aristocrat named György Hevesy began studying radioactivity in Manchester, England, under Ernest Rutherford. Frustrated with his inability to separate radium-D, Hevesy changed tactics and decided to inject a small amount into a living creature to see if the radioactive and nonradioactive lead that together constitute radium-D. He first tested it on dead tissue—in fact using the unappetizing meat that his landlady served him for dinner. He succeeded in detecting radiation in the meat, a discovery that triggered an upward turning point in his career. In 1920, he moved to Copenhagen to study with the quantum physicist Niels Bohr. This was at a time when the disciplines of chemistry and physics were moving further and further apart.
Kean’s note about the fields of chemistry and physics moving apart might seem rather uninteresting, of relevance perhaps only to historians of science. However, this could not be less true. The splitting of science into multiple distinct disciplines—and the solidification of those discipline as distinct—has had a profound effect on research and knowledge. While there are many advantages to having specialists in each particular subdiscipline, it has also prevented visionary, cross-disciplinary work from taking place.
Themes
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At the time, element 72 was yet to be discovered. According to legend, Bohr developed a mathematical proof that 72 was not a rare earth based on quantum mechanics. Working alongside a physicist and based on Bohr’s calculation, Hevenesy found 72 on his first try. The team named it hafnium, after the Latin name for Copenhagen. Despite this success, chemists tended to remain suspicious of quantum mechanics. Bohr won the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physics; around this time, people began to spread rumors that he had prophetic abilities. However, these beliefs were strongly influenced by legends that didn’t quite match up to reality. The calculation that Bohr made, which led to the immediate discovery of element 72, was actually built off the research of three chemists who’d come before him.
Modern science may seem miles away from the old practice of alchemy, wherein people used magical explanations for material phenomena. However, the awed speculation that Niels Bohr had prophetic power shows that these two historical moments—and forms of knowledge—are actually not as different as one might assume.
Themes
The legend surrounding Bohr was mostly a testament to people’s enthusiasm about quantum mechanics. Hevesy was nominated for the 1924 Nobel Prize but—in part due to the way he straddled both physics and chemistry—he did not win. He moved to Germany and he was repeatedly nominated for the Nobel without winning, eventually returning to Copenhagen in the 1930s due to his Jewish ancestry. However, Nazi soldiers then arrived in Copenhagen in 1940 and destroyed Hevesy’s office searching for Nobel Prize medals he was keeping for two German winners, one of whom was Jewish and both of whom were persecuted by the Nazis. However, the soldiers didn’t find them, as Hevesy had already dissolved them in hydrochloric acids. Hevesy managed to successfully flee Copenhagen, returning after the end of the war.
The book has jumped back and forth through history several times, but has now arrived back at World War II. During this period, exciting developments in science were thwarted by fascism and conflict. Additionally, major Jewish scientists had their work—along with everything else—stolen from them by the Nazi regime.
Themes
Lise Meitner was a German scientist who worked with a collaborator named Otto Hahn. Together, they proposed renaming the recently-discovered element brevium to protactinium. The Polish chemist who discovered the element, Kazimierz Fajans, narrowly lost out on the 1924 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for reasons that were never fully clarified. In any case, Meitner and Hahn were successfully in lobbying for the name to be changed to protactinium, and sometimes they are given credit for discovering the element itself. Meitner and Hahn had an extremely close (though platonic) bond. Despite the sexism of the time, Hahn recognized Meitner’s extraordinary talent.
Of all the notable and important women scientists Kean mentions, almost all worked in partnerships with men. This was not because they needed men’s input or were less capable, but rather because they would simply not be granted access to scientific institutions or funds and not be taken seriously unless an esteemed man was working alongside them.
Themes
The two made a good team, with Hahn focusing on the chemistry side of their work and Meitner on the physics. However, for the protactinium experiments Meinter ended up doing all the work, as Hahn was focused on the development of gas warfare. Yet Meitner still shared the credit with him equally. After the war, when the Nazis began a crackdown on Jewish scientists, Hahn—a gentile—resigned from his professorship in protest. Meitner’s parents, however, were Jewish converts to Protestantism. Yet she attempted to ignore the escalating threat posed by the Nazi regime, instead focusing on her work.
Meitner and Hahn weren’t just scientists of different genders—they were also in separate categories according to the Nazis’ racist system of categorization. Meitner may have been a convert to Christianity, but the Nazi regime cared about ethnicity, not religion. Hahn’s decision to resign in protest at least seemed to indicate that he was willing to make sacrifices to stand in solidarity with Meitner and other Jewish people.
Themes
Meanwhile, scientists around the world were fixated on the question of whether, as Irène Joliot-Curie argued, the newly discovered transuranic elements could behave like lanthanum, which was a rare earth on the other side of the periodic table. In 1938, a colleague attempted to turn Meitner in to the authorities, and she fled to Sweden. She and Hahn continued their collaboration via letters and would meet secretly in Copenhagen. During one meeting, Hahn explained that he’d repeated Joliot-Curie’s experiments and found that the new elements weren’t like lanthanum—they appeared to be lanthanum (and barium). Whereas Hahn was bewildered, Meitner realized that Fermi hadn’t discovered new elements as everyone believed—he had discovered nuclear fission.
The fact that one of Lise Meitner’s colleagues tried to turn her into the authorities challenges misconceptions about fascism that are particularly prevalent in the present day. Some people claim that the poor and uneducated are more likely to support far-right and white supremacist policies and that the highly-educated elite—including scientists—tend to be more tolerant. Unfortunately, as Meitner’s story shows, scientists are just as capable of embracing fascism as anyone else.
Themes
Hahn and Meitner knew that publishing this finding under Meitner’s name would be politically dangerous and Meitner thus agreed to have it be published in Hahn’s name only. After the war ended, the Nobel committee knew they wanted to award the Physics prize to work on nuclear fission. They were unsure whether Meitner or Hahn deserved it; there was certainly an extent to which they knew the pair had conducted research together, however one member argued that Hahn clearly deserved all the credit as Meitner hadn’t done anything significant in the past few years. (Of course, this was because she was a refugee hiding from the Nazis.) When Hahn was awarded the Prize, he didn’t mention the truth about his debt to Meitner. Meitner never won a Nobel, but in 1997 the element “hahnium” was renamed dubnium, while another new element was christened meitnerium.
The terrible twist in this story is a sad reminder of the way in which people can betray trust, particularly in a climate of fascism and particularly when there is something like the Nobel Prize at stake. Hahn clearly cared about Meitner (along with other people of Jewish descent) to some degree, but perhaps the effects of the Nazi regime normalized prejudice to him and made him lose touch with his principles. Or perhaps he was simply focused on his own personal gain, knowing that Meitner—who was in such a vulnerable social position—would have no one to stand up for her, allowing him to take advantage and steal credit for work she’d done.
Themes
