The Periodic Kingdom (Science Masters Series)

by P.W. Atkins

Hardcover, 1997

Status

Available

Call number

541.24 Atk

Genres

Collection

Your library

Publication

Basic Books (1997), 175 pages

Description

Come on a journey into the heart of matter--and enjoy the process!--as a brilliant scientist and entertaining tour guide takes you on a fascinating voyage through the Periodic Kingdom, the world of the elements. The periodic table, your map for this trip, is the most important concept in chemistry. It hangs in classrooms and labs throughout the world, providing support for students, suggesting new avenues of research for professionals, succinctly organizing the whole of chemistry. The one hundred or so elements listed in the table make up everything in the universe, from microscopic organisms to distant planets. Just how does the periodic table help us make sense of the world around us? Using vivid imagery, ingenious analogies, and liberal doses of humor P. W. Atkins answers this question. He shows us that the Periodic Kingdom is a systematic place. Detailing the geography, history and governing institutions of this imaginary landscape, he demonstrates how physical similarities can point to deeper affinities, and how the location of an element can be used to predict its properties. Here's an opportunity to discover a rich kingdom of the imagination kingdom of which our own world is a manifestation.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member bedda

The book is written in a travel guide format which led me to believe that the point was to make the information accessible to everyone and more enjoyable to read than a text book. I think it only partly succeeded. It does give you some good general ideas about how the periodic table came about and

how everything goes together but when it goes into detail the narrative bogs down and becomes hard to read. Sometimes the information is just too dense and without some previous knowledge of the subject it will be read but not quite understood and then quickly forgotten.

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LibraryThing member neurodrew

I bought this book because I became interested again in chemical elements, and I had been searching for a non-technical book on elements. It was lightweight, although I recognized the author of a quantum mechanics book that I used in college and still have on my shelf, mostly to impress the unwary.

Atkins describes the periodic table in a geographic sense, plotting various features of the elements as altitudes across the kingdom. He eventually gets to atomic orbitals as an explanation for the features of ionization energies, density, mass and other properties. I was reminded of very early days at the Mitchell Library in New Haven, looking at a book on the elements.

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LibraryThing member kencf0618

Engaging introduction to the kingdom of the elements.

LibraryThing member fpagan

Short, gentle, at times lyrical.

LibraryThing member MartyBriggs

A guided tour through the land of the periodic table. Could be used as separate chapters or as whole book.

LibraryThing member themulhern

A pleasant, brightly written book, using the analogy of a kingdom with various regions for the periodic table. The analogy is a bit strained, but I can still see the lakes of mercury and bromine in my mind's eye. The chapter titles support the analogy, "The History of Discovery", "The

Cartographers", "Physical Geography". Unfortunately, the publishing company did not stand by their author. There is no table of figures, which is awkward, as the author refers to them several chapter after they are introduced, and the periodic table at the back is drawn into the spine, so that one whole group is more or less invisible. The editors failed to catch unfortunate errors, like the one in which bronze works its way into a sentence as an element. The illustrations are line drawings, mostly 3-D charts of properties of the periodic table as well as some diagrams of electron orbitals and so forth. Unfortunately, the 3-D charts are poorly constructed, and not all that well captioned.

I would certainly read more books by this author. "Molecules" is a much better constructed book, with much better diagrams and illustrations throughout.

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LibraryThing member librisissimo

The author puts the fundamental elements of matter in perspective to each other and to the material world by imagining the periodic table as a geographical entity in three dimensions, and giving it properties analogous to an earthly landscape.

He does make the chemisty and physics interesting, but I

found it helpful to get a grounding in the basics by first reading "The Search for the Elements" by Isaac Asimov.

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