As a work of history its detail, analysis and exploration of its subject tower above the other book. It was useful to have re-read this book immediately after having re-read The Glass Bathyscaphe, if only to highlight the very real qualitative differences between two books dealing with popular science and/or popular history.Mendeleyev's Dream wins the match hands down, being a superior offering in every respect. In this elegant, erudite, and entertaining book, Paul Strathern unravels the quixotic history of chemistry through the quest for the elements. From ancient philosophy through medieval alchemy to the splitting of the atom, this is the true story of the birth of chemistry and the role of one man's dream. What he dreamed would fundamentally change the way we see the world.Framing this history is the life story of the nineteenth-century Russian scientist Dmitri Mendeleyev, who fell asleep at his desk and awoke after conceiving the periodic table in a dream-the template upon which modern chemistry is founded and the formulation of which marked chemistry's coming of age as a science.
Wearied by the effort, he fell asleep at his desk. In 1869 Russian scientist Dmitri Mendeleyev was puzzling over a way to bring order to the fledgling science of chemistry. The wondrous and illuminating story of humankind's quest to discover the fundamentals of chemistry, culminating in Mendeleyev's dream of the Periodic Table. **One of Bill Gates' Top Five Book Recommendations*
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