In the introduction, Kean recalls how he was fascinated by the mercury inside thermometers as a child. Discovering mercury was an element prompted his interest in the periodic table. In The Disappearing Spoon, Kean hopes to tell stories about the ways in which the periodic table interacts with human culture. Most people are familiar with the table but they might be intimidated or uninspired by it. Kean explains basic features of the table, such as the fact that every element is necessary—if a single one were removed, the whole thing would no longer make sense. He also explains that for the elements, “geography is destiny,” meaning that their position on the periodic table determines what properties they have.
Kean then explains the structure of atoms, which are made up of particles called protons, neutrons, and electrons. He describes the different parts of the period table, which contain groups of elements such as noble gases, halogens, rare earths, acids, alkalis, and transition metals.
Kean states that life on Earth is carbon-based but that some science fiction writers have speculated alien life-forms might be based on silicon, the element below carbon on the periodic table. While this is plausible to a degree, silicon also has properties that make it an unlikely basis for life-forms. Kean also discusses germanium, an element which, together with silicon, had a chance to become widely used in electronic technology. Ultimately, silicon won (hence the name “Silicon Valley”).
Kean tells the story of Robert Bunsen, after whom the Bunsen burner is named, used a spectroscope to study the light produced by elements, which led to huge advances in them. However, it was only after this that Dmitri Mendeleev just developed the first version of the periodic table, which would be subject to much revision in later years.
For a long time, scientists assumed that all the elements had always existed. However, this theory then shifted to an understanding that at the very beginning of the universe, during the Big Bang, the only elements that existed were hydrogen, helium, and lithium. All the rest of the elements were formed inside stars. The solar system was formed when a star imploded and exploded again, becoming a supernova, and released a dust cloud that formed into our sun and planets. The age of Earth was first accurately calculated by a graduate student named Clair Patterson, who used the system of radioactive dating to produce the number 4.55 billion years.
Kean shifts to discuss chemical warfare, which was used all the way back in Ancient Greece but only became advanced during World War I. One German scientist, Fritz Haber, dedicated himself to developing particularly brutal chlorine and bromine weapons that had horrifying effects on victims. He also developed a method of capturing nitrogen that was used to make ammonia, a fertilizer that has grown food for billions of people around the world.
In 1939, the American physicist Luis Alvarez heard about the German scientist Otto Hann’s research into nuclear fission, the process of splitting a uranium atom. At the time, understanding of radioactivity was still at a fairly early stage. The U.S. and its allies initiated a research program, the Manhattan Project, which aimed to study nuclear fission with the eventual goal of developing atomic weapons. The Project used a strategy of experimental calculations called the Monte Carlo method, which later became the basis of using computer calculations in scientific research.
Later on, during the Cold War, there was a competitive race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union to find new elements and name them. Kean discusses two scientists, Linus Pauling and Emilio Segrè, who—despite being enormously talented—are remembered for committing two of the most awful mistakes in scientific history. While mistakes can often advance scientific progress, the errors Pauling and Segrè made were decidedly not that kind of mistake.
Elements can often be poisonous. In early 20th-century Japan, cadmium from the Kamioka mines infused nearby rice fields and led to local people experiencing an illness known as “itai-itai” or “ouch-ouch.” Meanwhile, elements like thallium and polonium have been used to deliberately poison people. In the 1990s, a young American named David Hahn poisoned himself by trying to build a nuclear reactor in his backyard.
Many elements also have great medicinal use but they can be unpredictable when they interact with the human body—for better or worse. For example, when a U.S. candidate for Senate, Stan Jones, ingested silver for its health benefits, he ended up turning blue. Two scientists, Gerhard Domagk and Louis Pasteur, broke scientific rules by administering drugs that were still in an experimental phase to patients in an informal context. Fortunately, in both cases the risk paid off and the patients were healed. Similarly, Pasteur’s research on drugs that prevented bacteria from multiplying led to the development of antibiotics.
Elements can be unpredictable and deceptive. For example, modern prosthetics were developed when a Swedish doctor named Per-Ingvar Brånemark attached a titanium window to view the open inside of a rabbit, then realized that the cells of the rabbit’s skin bonded to the titanium. As a result of this finding, titanium came to be used in prosthetics.
Beyond the chemical elements themselves, Kean also addresses the personal and professional obstacles that scientists have faced over the years in the midst of working with these elements. Marie Curie was one of the most important scientists in history, although she nearly missed becoming a scientist at all thanks to the restrictions on women’s education in Warsaw, Poland, where she was born. Curie won two Nobel Prizes, one in Physics and one in Chemistry, and she shaped the earliest understandings of radioactivity. Lise Meitner, meanwhile, was an Austrian scientist of Jewish descent who had a productive collaboration with a German colleague, Otto Hahn, until he betrayed her by taking all credit for their work while she was in hiding during World War II.
In addition to medicinal and military uses, elements also have an important role in the history of money: they have often been used as currency and thus were also used by counterfeiters. At only 23, the scientist Charles Hall found a way to isolate the aluminum that is naturally bonded to oxygen in the earth’s crust, thereby paving the way for aluminum to be mass-produced for household use. He made a fortune with this discovery.
Throughout scientific history, the problem of pathological science—beliefs that use scientific-seeming tools to appear legitimate, but are actually false—has been a recurring problem. Yet even in serious, hard science, deception has occurred. One of the most egregious cases involved B. Stanley Pos and Martin Fleischmann, two scientists who claimed to have discovered cold fusion but in reality fudged their data.
Pivoting from his discussion of pathological science, Kean discusses contemporary research into the periodic table. This often involves cooling elements to ultra-cold temperatures, where they behave differently to how they would normally. Albert Einstein, working in tandem with the Indian scientist Satyendra Nath Bose, realized that if atoms are cold enough, they can condense into a new state of matter. This was a major discovery, although it was years before the technology was available to get atoms cold enough to actually prove it correct. More fields at the cutting-edge of current periodic table research include bubble science (studying bubbles leftover from chemical decay) and the related field of froth science (studying element bubbles from inside rocks).
In the book’s penultimate chapter, Kean discusses national bureaus of standards and measurement, which work to ensure scientific precision to a formidable degree. Recently, such bureaus (and the scientific community in general) have been grappling with the possibility that one of science’s fundamental constants—a principle called alpha, which is tightness of the connection between electrons and a nucleus—might not actually be constant after all. The prospect that alpha could be increasing (even if only by a tiny and gradual amount) has revolutionary implications for science.
At the end of the book, Kean lists some further cutting-edge research on the elements currently occurring. He argues that the current version of the periodic table, while still highly important and useful, is not the only possible version. He dreams about a huge variation of possible tables and wonders how they would correspond to what an alien species would use to depict the elements.
