Customer Reviews

The Ingredients: A Guided Tour of the Elements

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Philip Ball's The Ingredients is a short and sweet introduction to the chemical elements. It is not a comprehensive description of each of the 110+ elements that appear on the periodic table. Rather it is a history of the concept of an element and a definition of what an element is done in context with examples. All the important terms from Chemistry 101 are there - atom, electron, element, isotope, neutron, nucleus, proton - as are all the important people and events in the history of the elements, but it is done in Ball's extremely readable prose style. Even though I've taught basic chemistry at the high school level and I've heard all this stuff before, I thoroughly enjoyed this short, but concept dense book.

There are 92 naturally occuring elements. They have been here since the Earth cooled, but only in the last couple of centuries have we truly come to understand them. In 'the ingredients', Phillip Ball takes the reader on a fast ride through the development of our understanding of the elements. Aristotle and his contemporaries saw everything pretty much as a combination of earth, wind, fire, and water. Variations of this view lasted well in the middle ages.

The chapter on gold, precious from ancient times, is a bridge, bringing us into the modern age, where we see the development of the Periodic Table, an organization of information about the elements. Scientific method and technological advances allowed chemists to identify each of the elements. Physics, radiochemistry and quantum mechanics provided an explanation of why they act as they do.

There are interesting discussions of medicine, alchemy and other topics. The chapter on manmade elements is also interesting.

This little book was fun to read and should be easily followed by the non-scientific reader.

As-of this writing, June 2008, "The Ingredients" is in-print as an Oxford University Press Very Short Introduction titled "The Elements".

Philip Ball is one of the better authors in the realm of general science literature. This short book examines the Periodic Table of Elements and how the various elements were discovered by humans, and what function they serve in nature and human society. Combining a history of discovery, with hard science about many of the elements, the book is a good, interesting, easy-to-read primer in basic chemistry and how materials science.