Get in touch with your elemental nature
By Bill Schweber -- EDN, January 9, 2003
It's easy to be so involved with software and system design that you can forget how critical basic materials are to society's needs and our industry's capabilities. Nature's Building Blocks: an A-Z Guide to the Elements by John Emsley will change that feeling. I expected this alphabetical reference to each element of the periodic chart—from actinium to zirconium—to be as plodding and dull as a standard reference handbook, but I was wrong. The book devotes two to six pages to each element and provides fascinating facts and background on them. These features are the results of the author's laborious research. For each element, he provides not only basic chemical and physical facts, but also information on where to find it and how to extract it, its common and commercial forms, its estimated available quantity on our planet, how it got its name, and more.
But this $29.95 book (Oxford University Press, 2002, ISBN 0-19-850341-5) goes beyond these facts. It also explores the history of each element; its discovery and often-false paths that ancient societies and recent experimenters followed; scientific misattributions; and its application to various industries, humans, animals plants, agriculture, warfare, myths and misconceptions, and more. In many cases, the elements are harmless in their pure form but dangerous or toxic in some of their common combinations or vice versa. Many are harmless or even essential to life in trace amounts but a problem in larger amounts; life is not a linear system. After you read this fascinating book, which defines how much you need basic materials science, you'll better appreciate engineering discussions of copper versus aluminum interconnects, or nickel-cadmium versus lithium-ion batteries. You'll think in a new way about these words and the materials that they represent and that we count on for their capabilities and characteristics. The periodic table will no longer be a 2-D chart, but it will transform into a vivid summary of scientific exploration and adaptation.
Oxford University Press, www.oup.co.uk.
