Reddit reviews Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood

I'm currently reading Oliver Sach's book Uncle Tungsten.

For a less violent experiment, try mixing Iodine with either Zinc or Antimony.

>If I added two or three drops of water to the mixture, it would catch fire and burn with a violet flame, spreading fine brown iodide powder on to everything.

He has particular fascination for the purple cloud emitted from these reactions.

>With chemistry such as this, one was playing with fire… huge energies, plutonic forces, were being unleashed, and I had a thrilling but precarious sense of being in control — sometimes just. This was especially so with the intensely exothermic reactions of aluminum and magnesium; they could be used to reduce metallic ores, or even to produce elemental silicon from sand, but a little carelessness, a miscalculation, and one had a bomb on one's hands.

This (and many other) fascinating chemical reactions can be made with seemingly-inert elements. The book goes in to great description on many wonderful experiments, including most of the atomic theory development through the late 17th to early 20th century chemists' discoveries.

>One could put magnesium in cold water, and nothing would happen. If one put [just] it in hot water, it would start to bubble hydrogen; but if one lit a length of magnesium ribbon, it would continue to burn with dazzling brilliance under the water, or even in normally flame-suffocating carbon dioxide.

All quotes from the chapter "Stinks and Bangs" Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sachs (author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat).

Currently reading Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood

I think it's capable of being very effective in math or science. I'm no expert in either field but:

• A Mathematician's Lament/Lockhart's Lament puts forth a very impressive suggestion of teaching math by way letting students play with its practical effects, make guesses and test them, and guide them with questions to approach the appropriate law, theorem, or method of solving, before presenting it outright.
  
  
• The Montessori education method involves giving the students activities designed to illustrate a given concept and letting them develop an understanding of it by interacting with the materials.
  
  
• Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood by psychologist Oliver Sacks details the author's childhood love of chemistry, in which he describes a predominantly self-fueled course of study wherein he was able to discover concepts in the manner their original discoverers did: by observation and experiment, with books explaining those concepts and the encouragement of the titular uncle providing support and explanations as needed.
  
  Our understandings of math and science are built, discovery after discovery and discovery on discovery; most of these came from people for whom that curiosity, that love of discovery, is what drove them. And it's taken a few thousand years, because they had to find and make those paths and the discoverers were often few and far between, but now? the paths are known and paved and there's no reason why every student can't be given the materials to explore and the questions to answer and the guidance as needed to find out the answers and make those same discoveries the same way (if faster) that their original discoverers did, with confirmation, specifics, background information, history, etc. provided afterwards.
  
  That way the student gets the joy of exploring (especially if the beginning instruction is not too narrow; one wants to start with a "what can you perceive about this stuff? what can you discover about this stuff? what does it do?" set of preliminary instructions, not step-by-step instructions, the lesson starting out general, with free exploration, and then focusing in on the discovery being pursued, with assistance from the teacher as necessary.

The most excellent book you will ever read on the discovery of the elements is Uncle Tungsten. I suggest you pick it up immediately if you haven't already (I can't recall if it specifically answers your question, though).

Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood by Oliver Sacks. Sacks is best known for writing case studies of his patients as a neurologist, such as The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat. Uncle Tungsten is part memoir, part history of and introduction to chemistry. There's nothing quite like it out there.

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. Dawkins's Twitter antics notwithstanding, this book is an unmissable classic in biology.

Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. An ode to consciousness, full of puns, music and metamathematics.

Mind, Body, World by Michael Dawson. This is a textbook, but it's (legally!) available for free online, and it's totally engrossing. The author uses his work in music cognition to introduce the major theories and paradigms of cognitive science and show how there isn't as much separation between them as it seems.

Oh he has some other fascinating quirks too. He's partially blind (occular cancer) and experiences Charles Bonnet Syndrome

Here's his TED talk about it

Transcript

For more on his childhood, he has a book "Uncle Tungsten"

Sadly, he has terminal cancer

Uncle Tungsten

Oliver Sacks is a great writer, while more known for his popular neuroscience books his memoir has both great stories and outlines the history of chemistry really well.

My suggestion would be Uncle Tungsten: Memoirs of a Chemical Boyhood by Oliver Sacks. While not explicitly about chemistry history, it provides large doses of history in a very readable format woven into the narrative of his childhood experiments.

I really liked Uncle Tungsten - Oliver Sacks

Also, if you haven't read it, The Grand Design is a must read. And A Brief History of Time.

The guy that wrote The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat (Dr. Oliver Sachs) also wrote a great book called Uncle Tungsten — he writes of this desire (to be rid of desires) over an entire chapter; although in his case he is writing more as a homosexual (in a time when this was not tolerated publicly) so maybe this influence his writings, more (although he doesn't discern between men or women in his fear of desires).

/r/askscience taught me more about biology and evolution than I ever learned in school.

Uncle Tungsten taught me more about the elements than I learned in high school chemistry. I highly recommend it. Very easy to read, not that long. Kind of an autobiography of a boy that grew up in London during WWII. Who was really interested in chemicals and started collecting the periodic table.