the disappearing spoon

i'm about a third of the way into the disappearing spoon by sam kean, and i have been pleased to find that it's a very good book. having both spoon and jane eyre going at the same time has been a bit of a challenge. not that one would ever confuse the plot or characters of the two, but constantly facing a choice of what to read, i find myself reaching for the fiction with a pathetic predictability.

i picked up spoon today for the first time in... well... in a few days. i had last left off in the middle of a chapter, interrupted by life in some way, and didn't remember that until i opened it again today. i was anxious that i would not remember my place and quite pleasantly surprised to find that i did. i credit mr kean for that, as his writing style is straightforward and approachable. he marches through the facts with an understandable rhythm and just the right touch of humor. he's got an unobtrusive yet thorough way of reminding you who and what he is talking about, without causing you to feel you've wasted his time. in short, mr kean is a superb teacher-narrator.

are you interested in science at all? most people would say, "no, not really" but read this excerpt and tell me you're not interested:

Mortified, Berkeley retracted the claim for 118. Ninov was fired, and the Berkeley lab suffered major budget cuts, decimating it. To this day, Ninov denies that he faked any data--although, damningly, after his old German lab double-checked his experiements there by looking into old data files, it also retracted some (though not all) of Ninov's findings. Perhaps worse, American scientists were reduced to traveling to Dubna to work on heavy elements. And there, in 2006, an international team announced that after smashing ten billion billion calcium atoms into a (gulp) californium target, they had produced three atoms of element 118. Fittingly, the claim for element 118 is contested, but if it holds up--and there's no reason to think it won't--the discovery would erase any chance of "ghiorsium" appearing on the periodic table. The Russians are in control, since it happened at their lab, and they're said to be partial to "flyorium".

al ghiorso! georgy flyorov! berkeley! dubna! ten billion billion calcium atoms used to create only three of 118! so many atoms, dollars, and years went into these experiements. i am continually surprised by the recentness of discoveries documented in the book. 2006? that's only 5 years ago! (i know, right?)

ninov had tried to create 118 by firing krypton into lead, and found that it would work if you faked some of the data. physicists, unlike novelists, frown on faking data. the krypton->lead idea was proposed by a theoretical physicist from poland. i shall close this post by not making a snide remark about nationality and its relation to his bright idea.