Sloppy science
I've recently been reading The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean (Little, Brown and Company, 2010). It's a sort of anecdotal meander around the periodic table, touching on each element at least once. (The title refers to an old practical joke, in which a spoon is moulded out of gallium. When the spoon is put into a cup of hot beverage - or, for that matter, left too long in someone's hand or mouth - it melts.)
The structure seems to be a bit forced. I get the impression that the material was rearranged several times, from the way that some people and some elements are mentioned several times - not that material is repeated, but the phrasing of the "see also this other chapter" stuff and the way the descriptions are split between the two sections. In some cases, an element gets less coverage in its "own" chapter than in another chapter where it's compared to some other element.
The book isn't bad, but it could be better. It's the sort of thing that Asimov did well, and the anecdotal stuff is less engaging than, say, the books by Richard Feynman or Oliver Sacks.
My main complaint about the book is that it's sloppy. I keep hitting things that make me say "No, that's not right" in my head. I gather that Asimov had the same problem when he was writing some of his non-science books, such as the ones about Shakespeare or the Bible, but his science writing was usually rigorously correct (at least, as far as then-current information went). He didn't let the explanations for non-scientists drag his content away from accuracy. I'm finding The Disappearing Spoon rather irritating. One paragraph I read yesterday had no fewer than three "gotcha"s.
Bismuth has helped scientists probe the deeper structure of radioactive matter as well. For decades, scientists couldn't resolve conflicting calculations about whether certain elements would last until the end of time. So in 2003, physicists in France took pure bismuth, swaddled it in elaborate shields to block all possible outside interference, and wired detectors around it to try to determine its half-life, the amount of time it would take 50 percent of the sample to disintegrate. Half-life is a common measurement of radioactive elements. If a bucket of one hundred pounds of radioactive element X takes 3.14159 years to drop fifty pounds, then the half-life is 3.14159 years. After another 3.14159 years, you'd have twenty-five pounds.
Only if radioactive isotope X is a liquid or finely-powdered solid to stay in the bucket, and decays into a gas to leave the bucket. There aren't a lot of elements / isotopes of which that's true. Otherwise, sure, you'd have only half the weight of X in the bucket after one half-life, but you'd still have the weight of the daughter product(s).
Nuclear theory predicted bismuth should have a half-life of twenty billion billion years, much longer than the age of the universe. (You could multiply the age of the universe by itself and get close to the same figure - and still have only a fifty-fifty shot of seeing any given bismuth atom disappear.)
If you multiply the age of the universe by itself, you get about 189 billion billion years2. Or 1.88x1035 s2. You can't compare a time multiplied by a time with a time. It's the same mistake that came up in one or two of George O. Smith's earlier "Venus Equilateral" stories, where a beam propagated at "the speed of light, squared. [...] Thirty-five billion miles per second." In a later story, the author retconned the value as a numerical coincidence; (186,000 miles/second)2 = 3,596,000,000 miles2/second2.
The French experiment was more or less a real-life Waiting for Godot. But amazingly, it worked. The French scientists collected enough bismuth and summoned enough patience to witness a number of decays. This result proved that instead of being the heaviest stable atom, bismuth will live only long enough to be the final element to go extinct.
No, the isotope bismuth-209 (the only naturally occurring isotope of bismuth) will be the last unstable element to go extinct. Assuming that protons aren't unstable, of course; some of the particle-physics theories predict that protons decay with an extremely long half-life, but there are no observations that support them.
I've got the book on loan from the library, with about another week before I have to return it. At the moment, my brain is mushy enough that I don't want to start either of the new books I just had delivered from Amazon (Seanan McGuire's One Salt Sea and Patricia Wrede's Across the Great Barrier); I want to wait until I can enjoy them properly (which will likely involve reading the earlier books in each series first). I'm going to continue to read it for now, but if the irritant frequency gets any higher, I'll probably give up. Perhaps I should just go back to one of my Asimov essay collections.
The structure seems to be a bit forced. I get the impression that the material was rearranged several times, from the way that some people and some elements are mentioned several times - not that material is repeated, but the phrasing of the "see also this other chapter" stuff and the way the descriptions are split between the two sections. In some cases, an element gets less coverage in its "own" chapter than in another chapter where it's compared to some other element.
The book isn't bad, but it could be better. It's the sort of thing that Asimov did well, and the anecdotal stuff is less engaging than, say, the books by Richard Feynman or Oliver Sacks.
My main complaint about the book is that it's sloppy. I keep hitting things that make me say "No, that's not right" in my head. I gather that Asimov had the same problem when he was writing some of his non-science books, such as the ones about Shakespeare or the Bible, but his science writing was usually rigorously correct (at least, as far as then-current information went). He didn't let the explanations for non-scientists drag his content away from accuracy. I'm finding The Disappearing Spoon rather irritating. One paragraph I read yesterday had no fewer than three "gotcha"s.
Bismuth has helped scientists probe the deeper structure of radioactive matter as well. For decades, scientists couldn't resolve conflicting calculations about whether certain elements would last until the end of time. So in 2003, physicists in France took pure bismuth, swaddled it in elaborate shields to block all possible outside interference, and wired detectors around it to try to determine its half-life, the amount of time it would take 50 percent of the sample to disintegrate. Half-life is a common measurement of radioactive elements. If a bucket of one hundred pounds of radioactive element X takes 3.14159 years to drop fifty pounds, then the half-life is 3.14159 years. After another 3.14159 years, you'd have twenty-five pounds.
Only if radioactive isotope X is a liquid or finely-powdered solid to stay in the bucket, and decays into a gas to leave the bucket. There aren't a lot of elements / isotopes of which that's true. Otherwise, sure, you'd have only half the weight of X in the bucket after one half-life, but you'd still have the weight of the daughter product(s).
Nuclear theory predicted bismuth should have a half-life of twenty billion billion years, much longer than the age of the universe. (You could multiply the age of the universe by itself and get close to the same figure - and still have only a fifty-fifty shot of seeing any given bismuth atom disappear.)
If you multiply the age of the universe by itself, you get about 189 billion billion years2. Or 1.88x1035 s2. You can't compare a time multiplied by a time with a time. It's the same mistake that came up in one or two of George O. Smith's earlier "Venus Equilateral" stories, where a beam propagated at "the speed of light, squared. [...] Thirty-five billion miles per second." In a later story, the author retconned the value as a numerical coincidence; (186,000 miles/second)2 = 3,596,000,000 miles2/second2.
The French experiment was more or less a real-life Waiting for Godot. But amazingly, it worked. The French scientists collected enough bismuth and summoned enough patience to witness a number of decays. This result proved that instead of being the heaviest stable atom, bismuth will live only long enough to be the final element to go extinct.
No, the isotope bismuth-209 (the only naturally occurring isotope of bismuth) will be the last unstable element to go extinct. Assuming that protons aren't unstable, of course; some of the particle-physics theories predict that protons decay with an extremely long half-life, but there are no observations that support them.
I've got the book on loan from the library, with about another week before I have to return it. At the moment, my brain is mushy enough that I don't want to start either of the new books I just had delivered from Amazon (Seanan McGuire's One Salt Sea and Patricia Wrede's Across the Great Barrier); I want to wait until I can enjoy them properly (which will likely involve reading the earlier books in each series first). I'm going to continue to read it for now, but if the irritant frequency gets any higher, I'll probably give up. Perhaps I should just go back to one of my Asimov essay collections.