The Disappearing Spoon Chapter Summary

Sam Kean, a physicist who graduated from the University of Minnesota, wrote The Disappearing Spoon a work of nonfiction that tackles and explains the mysteries of the periodic table, its history, its changes, its breakthroughs, and its contributions on mankind. Chapter 6 or Completing the Table… with a Bang deals with the revolutionary findings of the Manhattan Project, how the holes of the periodic table were filled and last but certainly not least, how the apocalypse may occur. In the sixth chapter of The Disappearing Spoon Kean explains the basics of the works of Henry Moseley. Moseley was a student at the University of Manchester right before World War I broke out. Moseley had the ingenious idea to start studying elements by hitting them with an electron beam. At only 25 years old Moseley had figured out the problems chemists had been having for centuries, how to order the elements on the periodic table.
We see the big change with World War II. This chapter shows how sciences change to what the world needs. This chapter also hints at the probable nuclear doom for our world. The organization of this chapter I believe to be quite great. Showing the change of interest in the field of chemistry changing drastically from finding the elements and figuring out how to use the elements was quite interesting. The clarity of this chapter I thought was also quite good. I understood what Kean was trying to say throughout this chapter. Kean put things in terms that most people would understand, he compared something to Pac-Man, on pg 64, which made it seem less than just a textbook and more like a story experience. Another term he uses is “doomsday device” something any science-fiction loving person would know making the book fun. His word choice includes not only very intellectual words but also more colloquial terms making it very different from a