My Friend

Long before I read the Gordon book, I found it intuitively obvious that overall progress from the middle of the 19th century through most of the 20th could be traced to filling out the periodic table. Turns out, which I had long forgotten, that the table as we know it today is credited to Mendeleev. And the year was 1869.

A helpful review is in today's NYT.

"In a physical mixture, you get the sum of the parts when you mix A with B. In chemistry, you combine A and B and you get something qualitatively new."

Counterintuitively perhaps, is the fact that much of the table was constructed without understanding how atoms were built. That didn't happen until Bohr (1913). Kind of like a blind monkey typing out "Macbeth".