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Uncle Tungsten
Oliver Sacks is a noted neurologist, and author of a number of books for popular audiences, including The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. I came across Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood while browsing through a bookstore a few months ago, and decided to give it a read.
Uncle Tungsten is billed as "Memories of a Chemical Boyhood" in the title, but it's actually far more than a simple biography of his childhood. The real focus of the book is trifold: the influence of chemistry upon his early life and his early chemistry experiments and researches into chemistry, the stories behind the discoveries of the elements comprising the periodic table and of the discovery of the periodic table itself, and the non-chemical aspects of his childhood.
We learn early on that Sacks' family was chock-full of chemists (the title of the book refers to an uncle whose factory produced light bulbs using tungsten filaments), physicists, and doctors (including both of his parents). As a result, he had access to volumes of information about chemistry and access to chemicals of every sort, not to mention a family that was quite happy to indulge his interests. He made good use of these resources, ultimately gaining his own chemistry lab at home (complete with fume cupboard) where he experimented with a little of everything in an attempt to find out as much as possible about the chemical world.
His stories about how various elements had been isolated are given color by his own experiences with these same elements as a child. When he reaches the radioactive elements, for example, he illustrates some of the properties of uranium by describing his experiments with a chunk of uranium ore given to him by one of his uncles! Other experiments include dropping sodium (which is highly reactive with water) into a pond in a nearby park to watch it burn, bleaching red roses by holding them over burning sulphur, and using a spectroscope to examine the absorption Sacks' childhood experiments, however, are only part of the picture. Tales of his childhood are frequently interrupted by stories about the pioneers of chemistry (such as the Curies, Mendeleev, and Humphry Davy) who identified and isolated the various elements. As he discusses the discoveries of the elements, he includes descriptions of those researchers who ferreted out these elements, the puzzles they encountered during their work, and the hazards they faced when working with dangerous substances.
The book does include "non-chemical memories," too. Although chemistry was his first love, Sacks got the opportunity (and, with physician parents, the encouragement) to dissect worms, octopi, and even human cadavers! He also shares his wartime memories of growing up as a child during the blitz and being sent away from home to live in a boarding school for his own safety, although he ultimately returned home before the war was over. Often, however, the non-chemical memories are offered as background for the rest of the story.
I enjoyed this book very much, even though the extent of my chemistry background consists of getting a "C-" in high-school chemistry. My father, a design engineer who worked for many years in a chemical engineering department at a university, also enjoyed it. Based on these two opinions, at least, I can conclude that the book probably would appeal to a fairly wide geek-audience.
More can be discovered about the author at www.oliversacks.com
You can purchase Uncle Tungsten from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
If you teach chemistry to children, you could be helping terrorists, never mind the profiteering of the Thief-In-Chief
Cheers,
W00t
I majored in Chemistry and Biochemistry and I feel that Chemistry is the foundation of practical science. Everything that we interact with is matter, and this matter follows fundamental rules of chemistry. This includes computers and the transmission of digital information.
Without a sound knowledge of chemistry, we would still be living in the middle ages and still be trying to convert lead into gold.
Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat said when she realized he had mistaken her for a hat?
'You're putting me on'
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
Kids will go to the library to rent this, and then be confronted by men in dark suits with earpiece communicators, then dragged off in unmarked cars... Their crime will be "attempted possesion of intelligent material." They will be considered a threat to the US because they tried to learn how to use chemicals correctly...
From what I have managed to read of the book, it's incredibly witty but also gives a lot of nifty scientific trivia (I have spouted his facts about element name histories, etc., at my dad, who, even with a metallurgical background, was suitably impressed), as well as being a great story about what an unusual life Oliver Sacks has been blessed with. He made me wish I had been there, or even had some of his experiences myself, and there are very few autobiographies I have read that have left me feeling the first, much less the second. In fact, I had intended this book to be my first review for Slashdot, but I misplaced it in one of my moving boxes back in November. (cry!)
Thanks for reminding me that I haven't finished unpacking.
Get off my launchpad!
Philosophy is the foundation of knowledge. Without it we wouldn't be able to make decisions about what we should study.
We raised you to be compliant CONSUMERS . Anything else is unpatriotic!
When Sachs was a boy, kids could get their hands on basically anything. When I was a lad, things were a bit more restrictive, but not much (this is thirty years ago or so.) But now, chemistry sets can't contain much of anything -- it's really sad. I'd like to buy one for my daughter when she's a bit older, but really, what's the point? We've gotten so overprotective as a society that we've lost something in the bargain.
Cantankerous old coot since 1957.
As a chemist I enjoyed this book and cursed Sacks for having the opportunities in childhood that I never had :) He grew up in a time of scienfific learning that will never be repeated.
Interestingly he mentions in the book how he lost interest in Chemistry at a certain point. That happens to be one of the points that most undergrads start freaking out and looking for a different major. LOL.
Readers may, like me, start skipping over the parts of the book where Sacks starts wandering away from science and into personal topics. Do we really need to know how his first orgasm came about?
Timothy McVeigh had no problem at all in getting a truckload of ammonium nitrate, it's the most used fertilizer today. It's also an explosive by itself, but terrorists often mix it with diesel or some other form of combustible liquid.
This convinces me that we need to make available to every family a set of android relatives who can visit and tell the kids about their fascinating professions. This would make up for the fact that most parents these days work in malls and offices and haven't thought about science since their last week in High School.
You wouldn't need to make a set of Aunt & Uncle teacher androids for each family. They could be shared around, and use different names and face-prosthetics so that they appear to be unique.
Stefan
Sex is the foundation of knowledge. If not for the desire to mate, we humans wouldn't have a drive to improve ourselves and the lives of our offspring.
Just watch. Take mating out of the picture, and see how few years it takes for advancement to grind to a halt for lack of grinding.
I had chemistry sets as a child and they definitely helped to turn me on to science. While I wasn't much of a chemist (though I did major in it for 1 year), it has very appealing aspects for children. It's something real that you can touch, see, and sometimes to the chagrin of parents, smell.
I don't even know if you can buy the types of chemistry sets I had as a child. I nearly blinded myself bending glass tubes (don't cool them in water!!!) I can understand why companies would be hesitant to market these in our modern society. After all, the American dream has become, "Sue someone for a million dollars."
My interest in chemistry led to an interest in astronomy and even electronics, so I'm very thankful for the opportunity I had as a child and only hope I can give my child the same opportunity to learn. Hopefully without blinding him/her.
When I told friends and family that I was studying to be an electrical engineer, the next question always was "What will you do with that?" One of the EE professors told us the standard answer on the first day of class: "Whatever they will pay me to do". That was good enough for most people, and good enough for me - I'd take any work that was intellectually challenging and stimulating, and made sure that I didn't have to eat Ramen. EEs seemed to do a lot of different things, and none seemed to be looking for work.
My Aunt was the only one that followed up: "What does that mean? What will you really be doing?"
"Um, I'm not sure. Maybe designing circuits, working with computers, something like that."
"Wow, that sounds really boring. I mean, you might find that interesting, but what will you tell people at parties?"
I had no answer. I still have no answer, and I get asked the question "what do you do" at every single party I've ever been to. Every answer I've come up with gets blank stares and/or nods. Thanks to my Aunt, I was prepared, and now I make sure I have a couple of topics of conversation in my back pocket, because no one wants to know what an engineer does.
When one has access to such resources, the first thing to do is to answer some questions to bother young minds:
- Q: What happens if you drop a piece of potassium into concentrated nitric acid? A: For a few seconds, nothing. Then you get a potassium bullet that shoots out of test tube and embeds itself in the ceiling.
- Q: How to make tear gas from household stuff. A: You need acetone (the original nail polish remover). Pump a chlorine gas though. You can make chlorine by passing DC current though a salt solutio. Hmmm... wonder if bleech would work? Or mixture of bleech with vinigar.
- Q: How to make a contact explosive?
A: Pour amonium solution on iodine crystals until they turn into black powder. While it's wet, drop SMALL crumbs on the school floor. Once dry, it will go off when someone steps on it, giving a satisfying firecracker sound and a wonderful whiff of purple iodine wapor. The fun could go on for hours.
With the essential needs taken care of, I actually started doing research. Not that I was likely to discover anything, but I did stuff based on hunch, kept a journal and had a lot of fun. By heating P with some organic stuff, I got a test tube that not just glowed, but blinked in regular intervals. I also went to student competitions and got a second place in the country once.Is it dangerous to give the good stuff to children/teenagers? Well, we did have one case where someone mishandled acetone peroxide (a much stronger contact explosive than NI3). Basically, they had to scrub the walls of his dorm room to get his cranial matter into the casket. But the truth be told, you WILL do something dangerous when you are growing up. For this one story, I know countless others who died from drugs or got killed in a gang clash. Might as well redirect that risk that one would take anyway to some ultimately good purpose.
So what happened eventually. Well, I came to US to dodge draft. If you are reading this and have a poor country with too many potential scientists/engineers that you just can't get rid of, because they are not that crazy about money... well, I think you know now how to solve this problem nicely. So anyway, chemistry classes here really, insanely suck. I mean, titration!!! Chemistry should have exposions, flashes of light, weird smells, holes in the cloth and multi-colored stains on hands. Not the lame drops of one transparent liquid into another one with nothing happening when they make contact.
So anyway, I saw that this field is pretty much closed to fun in US. And then that another one was, at that time, still wide open. I read a couple of stories. One was "The hacker's crackdown" and of course it's pretty lame, but it introduced a concept that I was never exposed to in Russia. That you can actually visit places around the world without leaving your home and learn something about what people there are doing. Another one was a story about the first internet worm. This made me feel like you can throw a pebble into the ocean and watch it grow into Tsunami. Like finger of the god. So anyway, I played with PC programming a little bit before, but this really made me learn UNIX, to see how people do such wonderous things.
Of course, the first target were school systems. The very first thing I learned is the effect of for(;;) fork(); on old UNIX systems. I actually planned to just run it for a few seconds and then ^C it, but apparently telnetd just didn't get enough CPU cycles to process my keystrokes. I got an angry e-mail and apologized.
The next thing I figured out is about setuid shell scripts and race conditions. I didn't think about link to -i, So I just made a link to the script to my home directory, ran it and then very quickly replaced it with my own script. Sometimes, the shell wouldn't open the file yet and ran my code instead.
After these lucky breaks, I gradually learned less lame stuff. Like booting Sun 3's with -i flag to run my own code instead of /sbin/init, even though -s boot would ask for password. Or replacing the crypt function in libc.so to execl /bin/sh when passed a certain string. The first time I tried this, I messed up the system because I tried to use cp instead of mv and it was itself dynamically linked. I was sorry for the admin who had to restore libc from the backup, but got a good understanding of shared libraries.
Since I behaved myself when I got root access, the university was surprisingly tolerant. Eventually professors started asking me to install programs for their classes, since the regular sysop was too lazy. Then I got a student job doing the same thing officially. As with chemistry, I got my fix of watching things blow up and moved to regular programming, which I am doing to this day.
I wonder though what options are available to students now. With DMCA, and terrorist bullshit that must restrict all the fun activities both in chemistry and programming... I would imagine the current generation would learn programming by writting VB for their palladium-enabled PC and constantly checking if their code infringes on anyone's IP rights or could be possibly misused to let others do the same thing. Thanks god I was born earlier and had a benign way to occupy my mind while growing up.
But, where steam come from? Need fire. Fire Good!
...
I received this book for Christmas last year. I found it very interesting, albeit slightly slow.
One of the things that made the book enjoyable was that Sacks is an excellent writer: He is able to hold his own in both fiction and non-fiction, as scientists often tend to.
Uncle Tungsten gets top marks, especially for an autobiography, which I usually find godawful.
...Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
Churchill