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The ingredients: A Guided Tour of the Elements By Philip Ball Oxford University Press, 2003; $22.00

When I was in college nearly half a century ago, we students were entranced by the inimitable campus bard, Tom Lehrer, singing "The Elements." At a breathtaking pace he rattled them off:

There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,/And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium/And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium,/ And iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium,/Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium/And lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium/And gold, protactinium and indium and gallium [inhale]/And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium.

The song went on to list a total of 102 elements, but Lehrer, then a math instructor at Harvard, was well enough informed to end on a cautious note: "These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard,/And there may be many others but they haven't been discovered." His caveat turned out to be well advised. The most recent element to be discovered, number 118, was promptly undiscovered again.

What a world of drama and mystery is evoked by those wonderful names! The occasional familiar one--life-giving oxygen, much-coveted gold--saves the list from academic obscurity and imbues it with an aura of relevance. At the same time, the strange names cry out for more information. What does that one look like? Is it normally a gas, or a solid, or perhaps even a liquid like mercury? Who discovered it? When? Where? How? What does the name mean? What's it good for? The lore and lure of the elements--the stuff that we and the rest of the universe are made of--cast their spell far beyond the circle of professional chemists.

For answers to the questions conjured up by Lehrer's ditty back in the `50s, I used to turn to my "rubber bible." We all called it that, rather than The Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, because it was published by The Chemical Rubber Publishing Company and printed on thin India paper, like a bible. Now in its eighty-third edition (my tattered copy is the thirty-eighth), this fat book has been an indispensable reference for four generations of scientists. Before computers, that's where you looked up stuff like the value of the tangent of 79.7 degrees, the density of sulfur, and all the other grains of information that give physical science its gritty texture.

In the middle of the good book, between a list of electronic configurations and the periodic table, there was an essay titled "The Elements"--like the song. It was an alphabetical list of thumbnail sketches, each no longer than a paragraph, of the properties and histories of the elements, from actinium to zirconium. In 3,000 pages, one brief chapter was the only repository in the great reference for anecdotes about people and stories about places of origin, discoveries, applications, and etymologies. This brief section of my bible relieved the tedium of the surrounding pile of dry data, and provided a reassuring reminder that the entire enterprise is of human origin.

Although an alphabetical listing of the elements is more practical than Lehrer's purely poetic arrangement, it is not much more scientific. The number of ways to shuffle a hundred names is almost unlimited. A historian of science might compile a list by year of discovery--starting with Aristotle's element of water, which Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier unmasked as a compound in 1783, and ending with the nameless superheavies that seem to be forever embroiled in controversy. An economist might classify the elements by price, an industrialist by usefulness, a geologist by abundance on Earth, an astronomer by their place in the scheme of nucleosynthesis, a physician by necessity for health. By far the most significant list for scientists is Dmitri Mendeleyev's periodic table of 1869 one of the great triumphs of the human intellect.

But what if you want to conduct a guided tour for the public? How would you choose your itinerary? Which of the possible enumerations of nature's building blocks would most suit your stroll? The answer, of course, is "none of the above." The Italian writer Primo Levi's semi-autobiographical book The Periodic Table comprises only twenty-one elemental chapter names. "Brilliant Light," the English-American neurologist Oliver Sacks's reminiscences of his chemical boyhood (published in The New Yorker and later expanded in his book Uncle Tungsten), pushes the envelope of inclusiveness with mentions of forty-five elements. Sacks recalls how he once drove his parents to distraction with an enraptured chemical monologue until they were forced to exclaim: "Enough about thallium!" List mania, even in the scientific realm, is not a universal passion.

Philip Ball, an English science writer and contributing editor for Nature, is far too experienced to become boxed in by the lure of comprehensiveness. He explains his approach in the preface: "No piano tutor would start by instructing a young pupil to play every note on the keyboard. Far better to show how just a few keys suffice for constructing a host of simple tunes." Accordingly, his little book is divided into just seven chapters, with the history and explanation of the periodic table taking pride of place in the middle. Leading up to it is a short history of the elements, from Aristotle to the seventeenth-century chemist Robert Boyle, followed by two intimate portraits of individual elements.

The first close-up describes oxygen as "a bridge between the new and the old, between the alchemical roots of Robert Boyle's `chymistry' and the syntheses of endless wonders in today's chemical plants." The second sketch, of gold, begins with the story of King Midas and his golden touch. Here Ball stumbles. His degrees in physics and chemistry establish his authority in things scientific, but like other scientists he can become careless when re counting myths--as though it didn't matter, since they are fictitious anyway! He conflates various versions of the Midas tale, moves Midas's land-locked kingdom of Phrygia from central Anatolia to the distant shores of the Aegean Sea, and, without comment, injects a gruesome nineteenth-century embellishment in which Midas turns his daughter to gold.

The chapter of Ball's book devoted to the convoluted history of the periodic table describes its profound impact on chemistry and physics. For Sacks, who as a boy was enchanted with chemistry, the table was "the most beautiful thing in the world." Its explanation in terms of Niels Bohr's 1913 model of the atom shone like a "brilliant light" of understanding.

Ball's own youthful experiences with the periodic table were less lyrical but more productive. When he was required to write an examination essay on niobium, for instance, his mere knowledge of its position in the periodic table encoded enough chemical information to enable him to fill several pages. The genius of Mendeleyev shines brightly from the pages of Ball's book, underlining the blatant injustice of his being passed over for a Nobel Prize. (He was a leading candidate in 1905 but was edged out by Adolf von Baeyer, my great-grandfather.)

The final three chapters bring the story up to date. Ball describes nuclear accelerators as atom factories for synthesizing short-lived, heavy elements--atom by expensive atom. He explains the isotopes--chemically identical forms of an element, which differ only in atomic weight--with special emphasis on their usefulness in historical, geological, and even astronomical dating. And he ends the tour with a glimpse at the world of applications, starting with ubiquitous iron and concluding with the noble gas argon which, after a century of haughty celibacy, was finally induced to form a compound in the year 2000.

After I finished reading this charming little book, I felt a bit short-changed: How can a map (the periodic table), two leisurely stops (at oxygen and gold), and four tutorials add up to a "guided tour"? But when I looked for the names of elements in the index, I was astonished to count eighty-four, excluding tabulations. Practically all of them are there! Bali's achievement is the exact opposite of Lehrer's: It teaches by seduction, where the latter startles by exhibitionism. By weaving the elements seamlessly into a coherent narrative, the author has given meaning to the entire system without overwhelming the reader with the profusion of its parts. That's good writing.

Hans Christian von Baeyer is Chancellor Professor of Physics at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, and the author of Taming the Atom: The Emergence of the Visible Microworld. His next book, on information, will be published this summer by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.