Antimony, Gold and Jupiter's Wolf

Antimony, Gold and Jupiter's Wolf - Peter Wothers ****

There aren't many popular science titles on chemistry topics, so it was great to see Antimony, Gold and Jupiter's Wolf (the last, in case you are wondering, is tungsten, aka wolfram). As a science writer I think I was the perfect target audience, because Peter Wothers combines history of science, the study of the origin of the names of the elements and general chemical revelations in his elemental tour, which proved delightful.

Wothers begins with the original seven metals, each with their links to the heavenly bodies (a number stubbornly held-to significantly after it was clear there were way more than seven metals), then brings in a range of other elements (and occasional element names that never made it, such as anglium, scotium and hibernium) in a series of equally entertainingly linked chapters, whether its 'Goblins and Demons' (think bismuth, antimony, cobalt, arsenic and zinc) or 'Lodestones and Earths'.

The book is primarily looking back quite a way in time, so all the radioactive elements only get a six-page chapter at the end - but there was never a need for this book to be comprehensive. It's more like one of those old cabinets of curiosities. It's often the little details that caught my attention. So, for example, when I saw in a film yesterday a US medical facility with the caduceus symbol on it, I knew, thanks to this book, that this symbol was perpetuating a common error. The caduceus is the staff of Mercury (a stylised version became the alchemical symbol for the metal). What the medical facility should have displayed was the staff of Asclepius, the god of medicine, which has a single snake unlike the double snake on Mercury's staff - Mercury had nothing to do with the medical arts.

I do need to temper my enthusiasm and point out that this is a book that will appeal to chemical word geeks more than most. Wothers quotes a lot from old texts, which can be quite wearing to read, and though (thankfully) there's no attempt to work systematically through the periodic table, some of the elements are more exciting than others, and there are probably rather too many. But if, like me, chemistry, history of science and the derivation of words all interest you, this is a must-read title.

Hardback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin Five Way Interview

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin (born in 1999) is a distinguished composer, concert pianist, music theorist and researcher. Three of his piano CDs have been released in Germany. He started his undergraduate degree at the age of 13 in Kazakhstan, and having completed three musical doctorates in prominent Italian music institutions at the age of 20, he has mastered advanced composition techniques. In 2024 he completed a PhD in music at the University of St Andrews / Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (researching timbre-texture co-ordinate in avant- garde music), and was awarded The Silver Medal of The Worshipful Company of Musicians, London. He has held visiting affiliations at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and UCL, and has been lecturing and giving talks internationally since the age of 13. His latest book is Quantum Mechanics and Avant Garde Music . What links quantum physics and avant-garde music? The entire book is devoted to this question. To put it briefly, there are many different link...

The Bright Side - Sumit Paul-Choudhury ***

When I first saw The Bright Side (the subtitle doesn't help), I was worried it was a self-help manual, a format that rarely contains good science. In reality, Sumit Paul-Choudhury does not give us a checklist for becoming an optimist or anything similar - and there is a fair amount of science content. But to be honest, I didn't get on very well with this book. What Paul-Choudhury sets out to do is to both identify what optimism is and to assess its place in a world where we are beset with big problems such as climate change (which he goes into in some detail) that some activists position as an existential threat. This is all done in a friendly, approachable fashion. In that sense it's a classic pop-psychology title. For me, Paul-Choudhury certainly has it right about the lack of logic of extreme doom-mongers, such as Extinction Rebellion and teenage climate protestors, and his assessment of the nature of optimism seems very reasonable, if presented at a fairly overview leve...

Phenomena - Camille Juzeau and the Shelf Studio ****

I am always a bit suspicious of books that are highly illustrated or claim to cover 'almost everything' - and in one sense this is clearly hyperbole. But I enjoyed Phenomena far more than I thought I would. The idea is to cover 125 topics with infographics. On the internet these tend to be long pages with lots of numbers and supposedly interesting factoids. Thankfully, here the term is used in a more eclectic fashion. Each topic gets a large (circa A4) page (a few get two) with a couple of paragraphs of text and a chunky graphic. Sometimes these do consist of many small parts - for example 'the limits of the human body' features nine graphs - three on sporting achievements, three on biometrics (e.g. height by date of birth) and three rather random items (GNP per person, agricultural yields of various crops and consumption of coal). Others have a single illustration, such as a map of the sewers of Paris. (Because, why wouldn't you want to see that?) Just those two s...

Search This Blog