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 may not emerge with a comprehensive knowledge of how the periodic elements work in a practical sense (at least not as much as they would from a textbook or a chemistry course), the book does provide a thorough, wide-ranging, and deliberately entertaining group of stories that situate the elements in different contexts. Kean ultimately shows that having the contextual information provided by the elements’ narratives is more useful than just knowing about the way elements work in a purely scientific, isolated, and abstract sense. Furthermore, he uses narrative to make the periodic table more accessible and relevant by showing how the elements play a role in every aspect of existence. He also challenges unjust and untrue narratives that are often rooted in sexism and other forms of prejudice.
Kean argues that the periodic table is “both a scientific accomplishment and a storybook”—each element is not just a substance in the universe, but the central subject of a set of stories. A selection of these narratives is collected in The Disappearing Spoon, which is itself the “storybook” Kean mentions. The book includes stories of how an element was discovered, how it has been used to advance technology, and the negative side effects of an element, such as its capacity to poison people or be used as a weapon. Most—though not all—of the stories involve humans, and thus The Disappearing Spoon is a “storybook” that situates the elements in relation to humanity via narrative.
Through Kean’s use of narrative, he challenges the idea that science is a dry, dull discipline, instead showing that science can be filled with excitement, surprise, terror, and awe. Indeed, it is through storytelling that Kean conveys the emotional component of science. For example, the narrative about the German chemist Fritz Haber demonstrates the full range of emotion that scientific discovery can produce. Haber’s discoveries were used to both positive and negative ends, but his focus was always on their most destructive side: the production of gas weapons of war. Kean tells the story of how Haber’s wife, Clara (a talented scientist herself), tried to stop him from producing these gas weapons and how Haber didn’t listen. This emotionally rich and poignant story draws on human emotion and interpersonal conflict while also educating readers on the chemical elements involved, thus illustrating that scientific research is anything but dull.
Kean’s use of scientific stories also makes the periodic table more accessible in the sense that he shows different levels on which the periodic table is relevant to existence. The narratives he includes range from the most large-scale and important (e.g., the Big Bang) to far more minor tales, such as the story of the C.I.A.’s idea of making Fidel Castro’s hair fall out by powdering his socks with thallium. The inclusion of these relatively unimportant and silly stories makes the book entertaining, but it also serves as a key reminder that the elements play a role in every aspect of existence. The periodic table is not just relevant to major, foundational phenomena like the Big Bang, DNA, and nuclear weapons—it is equally relevant to all the mundane and trivial aspects of life.
Another way in which Kean’s use of scientific narrative makes the periodic table more relevant to a wider group of people is his inclusion of counternarratives that challenge accounts which are widely accepted but actually false. One example of this is the story of how Lise Meitner, an Austrian physicist of Jewish descent, did not receive credit for her role in discovering protactinium due to the combination of sexism and antisemitism. Kean lays out the full story of Meitner’s collaboration with the German chemist Otto Hahn, her flight from Nazi Germany, and the way in which the discovery of protactinium ended up being entirely attributed to Hahn. When Hahn won the Nobel Prize, he omitted Meitner’s involvement in the story of his research. In replacing a false narrative with a correct one, Kean further highlights how scientific narratives are wrapped up with interpersonal conflicts and wider societal issues of justice. Telling scientific stories, then, is not just an effective way to teach people about the periodic table—it is also a necessary aspect of making science fair and ethical.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Storytelling and Science ThemeTracker
Storytelling and Science Quotes in The Disappearing Spoon
I latched on to those tales, and recently, while reminiscing about mercury over breakfast, I realized that there’s a funny, or odd, or chilling tale attached to every element on the periodic table. At the same time, the table is one of the great intellectual achievements of humankind. It’s both a scientific accomplishment and a storybook, and I wrote this book to peel back all of its layers one by one, like the transparencies in an anatomy textbook that tell the same story at different depths.
The periodic table is, finally, an anthropological marvel, a human artifact that reflects all of the wonderful and artful and ugly aspects of human beings and how we interact with the physical world—the history of our species written in a compact and elegant script.
People are used to reading from left to right (or right to left) in virtually every human language, but reading the periodic table up and down, column by column, as in some forms of Japanese, is actually more significant. Doing so reveals a rich subtext of relationships among elements, including unexpected rivalries and antagonisms. The periodic table has its own grammar, and reading between its lines reveals whole new stories.
The discovery of eka-aluminium, now known as gallium, raises the question of what really drives science forward—theories, which frame how people view the world, or experiments, the simplest of which can destroy elegant theories.
With cheap industrial fertilizers now available, farmers no longer were limited to compost piles or dung to nourish their soil. Even by the time World War I broke out, Haber had likely saved millions from Malthusian starvation, and we can still thank him for feeding most of the world’s 6.7 billion people today.
What’s lost in that summary is that Haber cared little about fertilizers, despite what he sometimes said to the contrary. He actually pursued cheap ammonia to help Germany build nitrogen explosives […] It’s a sad truth that men like Haber pop up frequently throughout history—petty Fausts who twist scientific innovations into efficient killing devices.
But notice the dates here. Just as the basic understanding of electrons, protons, and neutrons fell into place, the old-world political order was disintegrating. By the time Alvarez read about uranium fission in his barber’s smock, Europe was doomed.
Now, mistakes in science don’t always lead to baleful results. Vulcanized rubber, Teflon, and penicillin were all mistakes. Camillo Golgi discovered osmium staining, a technique for making the details of neurons visible, after spilling that element onto brain tissue. Even an outright falsehood—the claim of the sixteenth-century scholar and protochemist Paracelsus that mercury, salt, and sulfur were the fundamental atoms of the universe—helped turn alchemists away from the mind-warping quest for gold and usher in real chemical analysis. Serendipitous clumsiness and outright blunders have pushed science ahead all through history.
Pauling’s and Segrè’s were not those kind of mistakes.
The human mind and brain are the most complex structures known to exist. They burden humans with strong, complicated, and often contradictory desires, and even something as austere and scientifically pure as the periodic table reflects those desires. Fallible human beings constructed the periodic table, after all […] The periodic table embodies our frustrations and failures in every human field: economics, psychology, the arts, and—as the legacy of Gandhi and the trials of iodine prove—politics. No less than a scientific, there’s a social history of the elements.
Like any human activity, science has always been filled with politics—with backbiting, jealousy, and petty gambits. Any look at the politics of science wouldn’t be complete without examples of those. But the twentieth century provides the best (i.e., the most appalling) historical examples of how the sweep of empires can also warp science. Politics marred the careers of probably the two greatest women scientists ever, and even purely scientific efforts to rework the periodic table opened rifts between chemists and physicists.
Unlike Crookes, or the megalodon hunters, or Pons and Fleischmann, Röntgen labored heroically to fit his findings in with known physics. He didn’t want to be revolutionary.
The story starts in the early 1920s when Satyendra Nath Bose, a chubby, bespectacled Indian physicist, made an error while working through some quantum mechanics equations during a lecture […] Unaware of his mistake at first, he’d worked everything out, only to find that the “wrong” answers produced by his mistake agreed very well with experiments on the properties of photons—much better than the “correct” theory.
So as physicists have done throughout history, Bose decided to pretend that his error was the truth, admit that he didn’t know why, and write a paper. His seeming mistake, plus his obscurity as an Indian, led every established scientific journal in Europe to reject it. Undaunted, Bose sent his paper directly to Albert Einstein. Einstein studied it closely and determined that Bose’s answer was clever—it basically said that certain particles, like photons, could collapse on top of each other until they were indistinguishable. Einstein cleaned the paper up a little, translated it into German, and then expanded Bose’s work into another, separate paper that covered not just photons but whole atoms. Using his celebrity pull, Einstein had both papers published jointly.
Not every breakthrough in periodic-table science has to delve into exotic and intricate states of matter like the BEC. Everyday liquids, solids, and gases still yield secrets now and then, if fortune and the scientific muses collude in the right way. According to legend, as a matter of fact, one of the most important pieces of scientific equipment in history was invented not only over a glass of beer but by a glass of beer.
I wish very much that I could donate $1,000 to some nonprofit group to support tinkering with wild new periodic tables based on whatever organizing principles people can imagine. The current periodic table has served us well so far, but reenvisioning and recreating it is important for humans (some of us, at least). Moreover, if aliens ever do descend, I want them to be impressed with our ingenuity. And maybe, just maybe, for them to see some shape they recognize among our own collection.
