I went down the rabbit hole for a couple of days with Theodore Gray’s The Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe.
I read somewhere that Oliver Sacks, who loved the periodic table more than most good writers, had been fascinated by this book. I found a copy in the public library.
Two days later I can say this: The book is full of information — atomic weights, density, graphics on the order in which electron rings are filled, spectral emissions, charts of melting and boiling points. Some of the photographs show elements in pure forms. Others show elements in common products.
I know that few people would share my enthusiasm for the book. You might have to have an interest in chemistry and metaphysics, disciplines that are interested, in different ways, in the question of what is, to love this book. Gray introduces that question of what is this way:
The periodic table is the universal catalog of everything you can drop on your foot. There are some things, such as lights, love, logic, and time, that are not in the periodic table. But you can’t drop any of those things on your foot.
There are all kinds of things in the cosmos and some of the naturally occurring material things are wonderful and just barely believable.
I can also tell you this about The Elements: It hit me like Material World: A Global Family Portrait, first published a generation ago. That book is a collection of photographs of typical families in various countries worldwide, posing in front of their houses with their possessions. And so you had an American family with its television sets, furniture sets and appliances, and families from other parts of the world who were proud of their bicycles and livestock. With both books, I was absorbed, unable to do much else until I’d finished, regretfully, the last page.
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