The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean

Author:Sam Kean
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Science
ISBN: 9780316051644
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2010-07-12T07:00:00+00:00

A live body is so complicated, so butterfly-flaps-its-wings-in-Brazil chaotic, that if you inject a random element into your bloodstream or liver or pancreas, there’s almost no telling what will happen. Not even the mind or brain is immune. The highest faculties of human beings—our logic, wisdom, and judgment—are just as vulnerable to deception with elements such as iodine.

Perhaps this shouldn’t be a surprise, since iodine has deception built into its chemical structure. Elements tend to get increasingly heavy across rows from left to right, and Dmitri Mendeleev decreed in the 1860s that increasing atomic weight drives the table’s periodicity, making increasing atomic weight a universal law of matter. The problem is that universal laws of nature cannot have exceptions, and Mendeleev’s craw knew of a particularly intractable exception in the bottom right-hand corner of the table. For tellurium and iodine to line up beneath similar elements, tellurium, element fifty-two, must fall to the left of iodine, element fifty-three. But tellurium outweighs iodine, and it kept stubbornly outweighing it no matter how many times Mendeleev fumed at chemists that their weighing equipment must be deceiving them. Facts is facts.

Nowadays this reversal seems a harmless chemical ruse, a humbling joke on Mendeleev. Scientists know of four pair reversals among the ninety-two natural elements today—argon-potassium, cobalt-nickel, iodine-tellurium, and thorium-protactinium—as well as a few among the ultraheavy, man-made elements. But a century after Mendeleev, iodine got caught up in a larger, more insidious deception, like a three-card monte hustler mixed up in a Mafia hit. You see, a rumor persists to this day among the billion people in India that Mahatma Gandhi, that sage of peace, absolutely hated iodine. Gandhi probably detested uranium and plutonium, too, for the bombs they enabled, but according to modern disciples of Gandhi who want to appropriate his powerful legend, he reserved a special locus of hatred in his heart for element fifty-three.

In 1930, Gandhi led the Indian people in the famous Salt March to Dandi, to protest the oppressive British salt tax. Salt was one of the few commodities an endemically poor country such as India could produce on its own. People just gathered seawater, let it evaporate, and sold the dry salt on the street from burlap sacks. The British government’s taxing of salt production at 8.2 percent was tantamount in greed and ridiculousness to charging bedouins for scooping sand or Eskimos for making ice. To protest this, Gandhi and seventy-eight followers left for a 240-mile march on March 12. They picked up more and more people at each village, and by the time the swelling ranks arrived in the coastal town of Dandi on April 6, they formed a train two miles long. Gandhi gathered the throng around him for a rally, and at its climax he scooped up a handful of saline-rich mud and cried, “With this salt I am shaking the foundation of the [British] Empire!” It was the subcontinent’s Boston Tea Party. Gandhi encouraged everyone to make illegal, untaxed salt, and by the

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