The Disappearing Spoon: Chapter 1 Reflection

The novel The Disappearing Spoon,  started it's story off in a very generic background information kind of way. The first chapter starts off by giving a brief description of what the table of elements is while also showing how the table is set up and why it is set up that way. The first chapter also relays information regarding all the backgrounds of the elements in the table, such as the noble gases and alkali metals. The author went into depth about early discoveries in chemistry by various scientists during the early 19th and 20th centuries. He describes D-shells, which are misshapen and incomplete layers of electrons and also describes  how they lay underneath other layers of electrons. On the same note he describes F-shells, which are found in lanthanides and bury F-shells even deeper than the transition metals stored their D-shells. The author went into depth about a very aspiring woman scientist, Maria Goeppert, a woman from Germany in the early 1900s. He talks about her discoveries in chemistry and how she was able to prove what made elements more stable. Lastly, he finished off the chapter by telling how reading the table vertically down the column helps us to understand the connections between the elements more fully. On a personal side, I really enjoyed the beginning of the book. It was very informative and supplied a lot of background stories that tied in how the chemistry evolved over the years. It was sort of depressing in the fact that most of these people's great work was never recognized or acknowledged for quite a long time. I think that the stories were a great way to get chemistry terms across in a way that wasn't extremely boring. The book got a little repetitive at times but all of the information was valuable. Overall, the first chapter was very informative and interesting.