This is the only book in-print and available that gives a comprehensive overview of the history of the organization of elements into a periodic system. There are other books but they are out-of-print and wicked expensive to find.

I recommend this to anyone teaching chemistry, getting a major/minor in chemistry, or anyone really interested in the history of chemistry. ( )

If you want a history of how all of the elements were discovered, and information about each of them, then this isn't the book for you. Go ahead and check out The Disappearing Spoon instead. The Periodic Table doesn't focus on the individual elements but instead looks at the periodic table as a whole.

I found this book interesting on many levels. First, it was enlightening to read a history of the periodic table and how it evolved from individual scientists noticing patterns in atomic weights. Many of the people involved were working with incorrect information, and obviously they weren't able to read "the end of the book" (so to speak) so they were really paving brand new roads along the way.

Mostly I found the book interesting in its take on the "philosophy" of the science. What does the periodic table really MEAN, and what can it tell us, about elements? How have the advances in quantum physics enhanced this understanding? You can tell that Scerri really has a chip on his shoulder about physics taking the "credit" for so many things in science, which may or may not be a valid argument. I found that his constant physics put-downs took away from the message of the book, which was in fact really eye-opening. A lot of the quantum physics that is used to explain the periodic table is based on empirical data that was based on the periodic table. So it's almost like the snake that eats its own tail: we have quantum physics that explains chemistry by using data derived by chemists to help explain physics.

Really, it's impressive how much we understand, and how little we know about atomic structure. Whether or not it's up to a physicist or a chemist to make these final understandings, I don't care. Honestly, it'll probably be a mixture of both groups to help us learn more about atomic structure in the long run. ( )

Reading this book felt like visiting an old friend, namely quantum mechanics. The author makes compelling arguments that chemistry is the central science, not merely "solid state physics" as scientists from another discipline might say. Seeing historical representations of the periodic table, especially three dimensional and/or curved models, is fascinating. ( )

A copy of the Periodic Table of the Chemical Elements hangs in virtually every classroom in which chemistry is taught, and it represents one of the great accomplishments of science. I can think of no other such concise and profound consolidation of scientific knowledge. Yet, its very familiarity leads students (and often their teachers!) not to appreciate the rich intellectual and philosophical history that brought it to its present form. Philosopher of chemistry Eric Scerri has reexamined the steps and the missteps, the breakthroughs and the dead ends that the story weaves the through the eighteenth to the twentieth century. The goal was tantalizing; from the first quantitative measurements by Dalton, Boyle, Gay-Lussac and Lavoisier, experiments pointed to an underlying structure of matter that causes regularity in chemical results. However, the discovery of that cause was elusive; not only were the reported equivalent weights often erroneous, but it was not clear which species were ultimately fundamental or what to make of variations in combining ratios. Some grand and enticing ideas turned out to be red herrings; the triads proposed by Kremers and others, and Prout's hypothesis that elements were a consequence of combining a single fundamental entity formed the basis for many a misguided inquiry. Ironically, these ideas were largely vindicated. Prout's fundamental entity turned out to be the nuclear charge represented by the proton, and the triad idea works with about half of the possible candidates because of the structure of electronic shells. Scerri gives due credit to the amateur scientist Anton van den Broek, who was the first to propose that the fundamental organizing principle of the Table was not atomic weight, but atomic number. This book can enrich your teaching. ( )