chemistry

The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

by Sam Kean

Kean walks through the periodic table element by element, telling the human stories behind each square: Marie Curie and radium, Lise Meitner and fission, Seaborg and the transuranics, gallium spoons that melt in tea. The result is a history of science told as a series of chemical biographies.