The Disappearing Spoon Themes

In The Disappearing Spoon, Sam Kean argues that storytelling is a vitally important part of scientific knowledge and can play a key role in enhancing understanding of science, particularly for non-experts. He drives this message home using his own personal perspective as someone who has always been interested in science yet is drawn more to writing and narrative than he is to conducting experiments in a lab. While the reader of The Disappearing Spoon…

One of the main subjects of The Disappearing Spoon is how the elements of the periodic table were discovered. By including a diverse variety of discovery stories, Kean shows that learning about new elements often involves accidental circumstances. This relates to one of the fundamental paradoxes of scientific discovery: at its core, discovery is the process of finding something that already exists before definitively knowing that it exists. The fact that such discoveries must involve…

While Kean generally writes with a tone of admiration and wonder for the periodic table, he is also clear about the fact that the elements have been put to both good and evil uses. Indeed Kean provides many examples of negative and destructive uses of science alongside positive ones. These include poisoning (both deliberate and accidental), chemical weapons, and the unimaginable devastation caused by nuclear bombs. Yet, at the same time, Kean shows all…

The Disappearing Spoon provides a summary of the knowledge that humans have acquired thus far about the elements and an account of how this knowledge was acquired. However, Kean makes clear that the process of learning about the periodic table is far from over. He does this by showing how knowledge about the periodic table has grown continuously over many centuries and has been subject to constant revision. Humanity may know more about the elements…