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

“Never underestimate spite as a motivator for genius.”
― Sam Kean, quote from The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

“If anything runs deeper than a mathematician’s love of variables, it’s a scientist’s love of constants.”
― Sam Kean, quote from The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

“Lithium tweaks many mood-altering chemicals in the brain, and its effects are complicated. Most interesting, lithium seems to reset the body’s circadian rhythm, its inner clock. In normal people, ambient conditions, especially the sun, dictate their humors and determine when they are tuckered out for the day. They’re on a twenty-four-hour cycle. Bipolar people run on cycles independent of the sun. And run and run.”
― Sam Kean, quote from The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

“Think of the most fussy science teacher you ever had. The one who docked your grade if the sixth decimal place in your answer was rounded incorrectly; who tucked in his periodic table T-shirt, corrected every student who said "weight" when he or she meant "mass", and made everyone, including himself, wear goggles even while mixing sugar water. Now try to imagine someone whom your teacher would hate for being anal-retentive. That is the kind of person who works for a bureau of standards and measurement.”
― Sam Kean, quote from The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

“Even a good, inveterate atheist like physicist Richard Feynman once said of the fine structure constant, “All good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it…. It’s one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the ‘hand of God’ wrote that number, and we don’t know how He pushed His pencil.”
― Sam Kean, quote from The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

“Despite the earnest belief of most of his fans, Einstein did not win his Nobel Prize for the theory of relativity, special or general. He won for explaining a strange effect in quantum mechanics, the photoelectric effect. His solution provided the first real evidence that quantum mechanics wasn’t a crude stopgap for justifying anomalous experiments, but actually corresponds to reality. And the fact that Einstein came up with it is ironic for two reasons. One, as he got older and crustier, Einstein came to distrust quantum mechanics. Its statistical and deeply probabilistic nature sounded too much like gambling to him, and it prompted him to object that “God does not play dice with the universe.” He was wrong, and it’s too bad that most people have never heard the rejoinder by Niels Bohr: “Einstein! Stop telling God what to do.”
― Sam Kean, quote from The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

“Since before even the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians, human beings used the stars and seasons to track time and record their most important moments. Cesium severed that link with the heavens, effaced it just as surely as urban streetlamps blot out constellations.”
― Sam Kean, quote from The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

“So if big enough droplets fell far enough fast enough, someone floating right near the metallic hydrogen layer inside Jupiter maybe, just maybe, could have looked up into its cream and orange sky and seen the most spectacular show ever--fireworks lighting up the Jovian night with a trillion streaks of brilliant crimson, what scientists call neon rain.”
― Sam Kean, quote from The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

“A few years later, Mendeleev, now famous, divorced his wife and wanted to remarry. Although the conservative local church said he had to wait seven years, he bribed a priest and got on with the nuptials. This technically made him a bigamist, but no one dared arrest him. When a local bureaucrat complained to the tsar about the double standard applied to the case- the priest was defrocked-the tsar primly replied, "I admit, Mendeleev has two wives, but I have only one Mendeleev.”
― Sam Kean, quote from The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

“One popular trick, since gallium molds easily and looks like aluminum, is to fashion gallium spoons, serve them with tea, and watch as your guests recoil when their Earl Grey "eats" their utensils.”
― Sam Kean, quote from The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

“(Never underestimate spite as a motivator for genius.)”
― Sam Kean, quote from The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

“Chance favors only the prepared mind.”
― Sam Kean, quote from The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

“Because our lungs regularly deal with carbon dioxide, they see nothing wrong with absorbing its cousin, SiO2, which can be fatal. Many dinosaurs might have died this way when a metropolis-sized asteroid or comet struck the earth 65 million years ago.”
― Sam Kean, quote from The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

“Mendeleev, unlike the squeamish Meyer, had balls enough to predict that new elements would be dug up. Look harder, you chemists and geologists, he seemed to taunt, and you’ll find them.”
― Sam Kean, quote from The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

“(In the 1920s, two Chicago chemists had to puree several thousand pounds of bull testicles from a stockyard to get a few ounces of the first pure testosterone.)”
― Sam Kean, quote from The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

“If certain bacteria, fungi, or algae inch across something made of copper, they absorb copper atoms, which disrupt their metabolism (human cells are unaffected). The microbes choke and die after a few hours.”
― Sam Kean, quote from The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

“Lithium regulates the proteins that control the body’s inner clock. This clock runs, oddly, on DNA, inside special neurons deep in the brain. Special proteins attach to people’s DNA each morning, and after a fixed time they degrade and fall off. Sunlight resets the proteins over and over, so they hold on much longer. In fact, the proteins fall off only after darkness falls—at which point the brain should “notice” the bare DNA and stop producing stimulants. This process goes awry in manic-depressives because the proteins, despite the lack of sunlight, remain bound fast to their DNA. Their brains don’t realize they should stop revving. Lithium helps cleave the proteins from DNA so people can wind down. Notice that sunlight still trumps lithium during the day and resets the proteins; it’s only when the sunlight goes away at night that lithium helps DNA shake free. Far from being sunshine in a pill, then, lithium acts as “anti-sunlight.” Neurologically, it undoes sunlight and thereby compresses the circadian clock back to twenty-four hours—preventing both the mania bubble from forming and the Black Tuesday crash into depression.”
― Sam Kean, quote from The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

“Today alpha equals 1/137.0359 or so. Regardless, its value makes the periodic table possible. It allows atoms to exist and also allows them to react with sufficient vigor to form compounds, since electrons neither roam too freely from their nuclei nor cling too closely. This just-right balance has led many scientists to conclude that the universe couldn’t have hit upon its fine structure constant by accident.”
― Sam Kean, quote from The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

“Today, just two generations on, the Monte Carlo method (in various forms) so dominates some fields that many young scientists don’t realize how thoroughly they’ve departed from traditional theoretical or experimental science.”
― Sam Kean, quote from The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

“Unlike modern pills, these hard antimony pills didn’t dissolve in the intestines, and the pills were considered so valuable that people rooted through fecal matter to retrieve and reuse them. Some lucky families even passed down laxatives from father to son. Perhaps for this reason, antimony found heavy work as a medicine, although it’s actually toxic. Mozart probably died from taking too much to combat a severe fever.”
― Sam Kean, quote from The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

“Dr. Rush made patients ingest the solution until they drooled, and often people’s teeth and hair fell out after weeks or months of continuous treatment. His “cure” no doubt poisoned or outright killed swaths of people whom yellow fever might have spared. Even so, having perfected his treatment in Philadelphia, ten years later he sent Meriwether and William off with some prepackaged samples. As a handy side effect, Dr. Rush’s pills have enabled modern archaeologists to track down campsites used by the explorers. With the weird food and questionable water they encountered in the wild, someone in their party was always queasy, and to this day, mercury deposits dot the soil many places where the gang dug a latrine, perhaps after one of Dr. Rush’s “Thunderclappers” had worked a little too well.”
― Sam Kean, quote from The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

“Similarly deadly to small wriggling cells, if a bit more quackish, is vanadium, element twenty-three, which also has a curious side effect in males: vanadium is the best spermicide ever devised. Most spermicides dissolve the fatty membrane that surrounds sperm cells, spilling their guts all over. Unfortunately, all cells have fatty membranes, so spermicides often irritate the lining of the vagina and make women susceptible to yeast infections. Not fun. Vanadium eschews any messy dissolving and simply cracks the crankshaft on the sperm’s tails. The tails then snap off, leaving”
― Sam Kean, quote from The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

“Hat manufacturers once used a bright orange mercury wash to separate fur from pelts, and the common hatters who dredged around in the steamy vats, like the mad one in Alice in Wonderland, gradually lost their hair and wits.”
― Sam Kean, quote from The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

“Acid strength is measured by the pH scale, with lower numbers being stronger, and in 2005 a chemist from New Zealand invented a boron-based acid called a carborane, with a pH of -18”
― Sam Kean, quote from The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

“Furthermore, because silicon packs on more protons than carbon, it's bulkier, like carbon with fifty extra pounds. Sometimes that's not a big deal. Silicon might substitute adequately for carbon in the Martian equivalent of fats or proteins. But carbon also contorts itself into ringed molecules we call sugars. Rings are states of high-tension- which means they store lots of energy-and silicon just isn't supple enough to bend into the right position to form rings. In a related problem, silicon atoms cannot squeeze their electrons into tight spaces for double bonds, which appear in virtually every complicated biochemical.”
― Sam Kean, quote from The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

“... thirteen aluminum atoms grouped together in the right way do a killer bromine, the two entities indistinguishable in chemical reactions.”
― Sam Kean, quote from The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

“All the elements other than hydrogen and helium make up just 0.04 percent of the universe. Seen from this perspective, the periodic system appears to be rather insignificant. But the fact remains that we live on the earth… where the relative abundance of elements is quite different.”
― Sam Kean, quote from The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

“Scarily, cadmium is not even the worst poison among the elements. It sits above mercury, a neurotoxin. And to the right of mercury sit the most horrific mug shots on the periodic table—thallium, lead, and polonium—the nucleus of poisoner’s corridor.”
― Sam Kean, quote from The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

“Also unlike a planet, an electron—if excited by heat or light—can leap from its low-energy shell to an empty, high-energy shell. The electron cannot stay in the high-energy state for long, so it soon crashes back down. But this isn’t a simple back-and-forth motion, because as it crashes, the electron jettisons energy by emitting light.”
― Sam Kean, quote from The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

“Sir Isaac Newton famously said that he had achieved everything by standing on the shoulders of giants—the scientific men whose findings he built upon. The same might be said about silicon. After germanium did all the work, silicon became an icon, and germanium was banished to periodic table obscurity.”
― Sam Kean, quote from The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

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