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.

We visit both familiar and exotic regions, examining their economic and social significance. The cultivation of copper, a “state” on the eastern edge of the Western Desert, began our long journey out of the Stone Age. Iron has implemented profitable alliances with neighboring cobalt and manganese to form varieties of steel, literally serving as the foundation of modern society. In recent years, the titanium “region” has provided a light, yet noncorrosive metal that is vital to our technological future.

Atkins tells us about the cosmic origins of the elements and introduces the intrepid explorers and cartographers who expanded the frontiers of the kingdom: Humphry Davy, the nineteenth-century chemist who identified and catalogued several of the common metallic elements; Dmitri Mendeleev, the Russian scientist who (legend has it) saw in a dream the prototype of the modern periodic table; and the Manhattan Project scientists who originated the techniques still used today to map the dangerously radioactive regions.

Here’s an opportunity to discover a rich kingdom of the imagination, a kingdom of which our own world is a manifestation.

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http://www.rarefile.net/wjzrhfr52vug/ThePeriodicKingdom.AJourneyintotheLandofChemicalElements.zip
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