Superheavy
Making and Breaking the Periodic Table
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- £8.49
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- £8.49
Publisher Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2020 AAAS/SUBARU SB&F PRIZE FOR EXCELLENCE IN SCIENCE BOOKS
How new elements are discovered, why they matter and where they will take us.
Creating an element is no easy feat. It's the equivalent of firing six trillion bullets a second at a needle in a haystack, hoping the bullet and needle somehow fuse together, then catching it in less than a thousandth of a second – after which it's gone forever. Welcome to the world of the superheavy elements: a realm where scientists use giant machines and spend years trying to make a single atom of mysterious artefacts that have never existed on Earth.
From the first elements past uranium, and their role in the atomic bomb, to the latest discoveries stretching the bounds of our chemical world, Superheavy reveals the hidden stories lurking at the edges of the periodic table. Why did US Air Force fly planes into mushroom clouds? Who won the transfermium wars? How did an earthquake help give Japan its first element? And what happened when Superman almost spilled nuclear secrets?
In a globe-trotting adventure that stretches from the United States to Russia, Sweden to Australia, Superheavy is your guide to the amazing science filling in the missing pieces of the periodic table. You'll not only marvel at how nuclear science has changed our lives – you'll wonder where it's going to take us in the future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
British science journalist Chapman takes readers on a tour of the far end of the periodic table in his lively debut, chronicling the discoveries of the transuranium chemical elements those with atomic numbers greater than uranium's 92. Using a mix of secondary sources and new interviews, he narrates the experiments that, between 1945 and 2016, yielded elements 93 to 118. Chapman emphasizes the fierce competition between the U.S. research group, led by Glenn Seaborg and Albert Ghiorso in Berkeley, and their Soviet (later, Russian) counterparts, led by Georgy Flerov and Yuri Oganessian, in the small town of Dubna. However, he doesn't neglect the two other teams, in Tokyo and in Darmstadt, Germany, also responsible for filling in some of the blanks on the periodic table. Chapman's sweeping narrative includes plenty of memorable incidents and details, from Ghiorso's 1955 midnight run in a supercharged VW Beetle in the hills above San Francisco Bay to deliver a new sample of element 101 to the lab before it decayed, to the injustices weathered by nuclear chemist Darleane Hoffman, twice robbed by institutional sexism of an element discovery during her career. This is a must-read for anyone interested in how humans have expanded, and continue to expand, the boundaries of scientific knowledge.
