Elegant Solutions
Ten Beautiful Experiments in Chemistry
Elegant Solutions
Ten Beautiful Experiments in Chemistry
Philip Ball
Cover image: PhotoDisc
ISBN 0-85404-674-7
PDF eISBN: 978-1-84755-260-0
EPUB eISBN: 978-1-78262-546-9
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
© The Royal Society of Chemistry 2005
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Contents
Introduction What is an Experiment? What is Beauty?
Section 1 Asking Questions of Nature
Chapter 1 How Does Your Garden Grow?
Van Helmont’s Willow Tree and the Beauty of Quantification
Chapter 2 An Element Compounded
Cavendish’s Water and the Beauty of Detail
The Curies’ Radium and the Beauty of Patience
Rutherford’s Alpha Particles and the Beauty of Elegance
Chapter 5 The Elements Came in One by One
Seaborgium’s Chemistry: Small is Beautiful
Divertissement 1 The Chemical Theatre
Section 2 Posing New Questions
Chapter 6 Molecules Take Shape
Pasteur’s Crystals and the Beauty of Simplicity
Divertissement 2 Myths and Romances
Chapter 7 Life and How To Make It
Urey and Miller’s Prebiotic Chemistry and the Beauty of Imagination
Bartlett’s Xenon Chemistry and the Beauty of Simplemindedness
Section 3 The Art of Making Things
Chapter 9 Nature Rebuilt
Woodward, Vitamin B12 and the Beauty of Economy
Paquette’s Dodecahedrane and the Beauty of Design
Acknowledgements
This book wasn’t my idea. Robert Eagling at the Royal Society of Chemistry proposed it to me, and I am grateful for the way he gently yet persistently encouraged me to take the project on. I, of course, bear full responsibility for the lacunae in the final choice of what the book contains. Tim Fishlock at the RSC helped the manuscript through its final stages.
I feel obliged to add a word of warning. I have always tried to ensure that my books can be understood without a scientific training, and this one is no exception to that. But dissecting
