Radiolab - From the Archives: Oliver Sacks' Table of Elements

Episode Date: August 6, 2015

As we're busy working on our next episode, with stories inspired by the Periodic Table of Elements, we thought we'd bring you one of its chief inspirations.  As a young boy, neurologist, author and Radiolab favorite Oliver Sacks pored over the pages of the Handbook of Physics and Chemistry, fantasizing about the day that he, like the shy gas Xenon, would find a companion with whom to connect and share. That companion turned out to be the Periodic Table of the Elements itself, a relationship he's never outgrown. He introduces us to the elements that he's known and loved. 

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And we're getting ready for, well, this whole podcast you're about to hear is an invitation to you join us in the next podcast. We will be going. Happy birthday. Not a second year. This is not, I hate Facebook. I hate that everybody knows this. There's so many of them. Jesus!

Ladies and gentlemen are witnessing the death of privacy. Yes, so that happened. We thought we threw it in. Anyhow, back to the flow. So I'm Jared, I'm Robert. This radio lab. And this particular episode is more or less, an invitation for you to get ready for the next episode.

Yeah, today we have a preview of an episode that we are working on furiously right now about the periodic table of elements. We're going to tell individual stories about the different elements, and those stories are going to take us into outer space, into deep man-made holes in the middle of America, into ourselves, all kinds of places.

So this week we decided to make a small telescoped preview in which we go to one apartment in one building in the city of New York occupied by the rather singular Dr. Oliver Sack. We should say this was a visit we paid to him about six, seven years ago, I think. And this is the story that, in a very real way, inspired us to do this upcoming episode

about the elements. And we also know, by the way, that Oliver isn't feeling so well right now, which makes it particularly wonderful to hear him in joy. Off we go. I think there's always been a desire to somehow categorize and classify the world around us. Remember it?

And when you were in, I don't know when it would be, like in eighth grade, when the teacher comes in in general science and he pulls down the periodic table of elements. Oh, yeah, sure. I mean, that was one of the first times where I was like, yeah, I don't want to be a scientist. It's not for me. But for kids who love this kind of thing, take Oliver Sacks, for example. Yeah, Chad, you should come in. I should come in?

Yeah, so a couple of years ago, we had went to talk to Oliver Sacks about something. Well, it was actually mostly you that was going to talk to him, and I was just tacking along for the hell of it. And for some reason, we ended up in his bathroom. Maybe to look at a book or something? He seems to have facts and figures in his as well. There's a lot of us in there. I'm sorry. And that's when we noticed.

Well, you know the periodic chart in the bathroom. In every box. But he had a periodic table of the elements on the wall in the bathroom. We thought, wow, how funny, periodic table in the bathroom. But then he said, well, you know, if you go out into the couch, you'll see some cushions. Some cushions embroidered with the periodic table, and then he took us to his bedroom. Although I don't usually take people into my bedroom. Oh, welcome.

Where he showed us his periodic table comforter. I tend to sleep here right under tungsten. But the cool part was when he took us to the living room, where you had this... Describe what isn't before us here. It looks like an altar. It's like a little dictionary stand on top of which was a beautiful mahogany box. A fine wooden box. About the size of a backgammon set.

It's a periodic table of the elements. It is a very fine wooden box. And if you care to open it, it's made of some sort of fine wood. It comes from Russia. It does. Is there a trick to opening this? Okay. We've all seen the periodic table of green on a chart, but in Oliver's box, there,

there were the actual elements. These are all these, we have here, like 90-some-odd little tubes. Little samples. Little T-E vials. Almost all the elements. Silver, arsenic, bismuth, co-oxygen, cop-hydrogen, phosphorus, iron, manganese, mercury, nitrogen, molybdenum, gold. Since I'm, for example, having my 77th birthday tomorrow.

and element 72 is hafnium, there is a little hafnium. Two little rocks. Here's what they sound like if you straddle them. I have coming to me, I hope it arrives today an ingot of hafnium, which will be very much more satisfying.

What would you do with an ingot but you can't do with the two little pebbles? I'll be able to hold it in my hand. My first love of chemistry had to do with the sensuous. Here, one of the liquid elements, Romey, I loved the colors, the brown, faintly brown fluidy thing.

The luster, pale golden mercury. Very, very beautiful. The physical properties. This is a gas trapped in a little vial? Yes. One wouldn't want to drop that. Why not? Well, it's not good to breathe.

Can I just jump in here for a second? Sure. Because I really need to jump in. But the thing that's really crazy about that box, and this you don't get from looking at a periodic chart on a wall, is it all those elements? Lithium, beryl, ballon, carbon, nitrogen.

That's like the world. I mean, everything that we can see and perceive this table right here, the teeth in my mouth, the sky, the ocean, the mountains, it's all made of some combination of elements from that box. And the box itself gives it all a deep, deep order.

I had noticed myself, I can't help noticing, that the elements are organized in a very special sort of way. For example... I have managed to not notice. I find it a little odd that you could organize them at all. I don't even know how to begin the process of figuring out they're related in some way. Well, then you are sort of recapitulating what everyone felt in the early days.

Of course, in the really early days, people thought there were really early days. people thought there were just four elements. The ancient notion of elements took the form of earth, air, fire, and water. Basically, the thought that the whole world could be composed of these four ingredients in different ways. But then, in the 18th century, we're skipping ahead a bit. Chemists began to break things down into smaller pieces, like wind became. Gases like oxygen and hydrogen and nitrogen. And Earth, got it.

divided up into things like sulfur, ion. And eventually, chemists got all the way down to the root of it, which was the atom. That's really what an element is. It's a particular kind of atom. The problem was, though, when chemists began to start measuring these atoms,

they found that they were all different sizes and types. Like one would be heavy, another would be light. Third one would be really friendly, likes to link up with their atoms, whereas the fourth would be a loner. And they would come in combinations, like heavy, friendly, heavy, shy. Light friendly, light shine.

What was the pattern? That was the question. Could they fit all of these differences and similarities into one big scheme? Since we mentioned his name, let me here show you a picture of the... Here's where we get to Oliver's hero. The Siberian bigamist, as he is called.

That would be Dimitri Mendeleev. The great Mendeleev, whom we will talk about. Oliver has a black and white picture of him on his kitchen cabbis. not going to win any beauty contest. No, he looks like a mixture between Rasputin and, um, who do I mean? Well, you mean he has a big nose, a shaggy, slightly unkempt white beard, a mustache that goes all over the place, piercing eyes, thick eyebrows, and looks like he's in a hunchback position.

Generally, if you met him on the sidewalk, you'd probably want to walk around him. Yeah, he didn't believe in wasting time going to a bar, but. Let me just ask you as the degree of your passion. When you look at this man, do you think he's a beautiful-looking guy? Or do you see what I see? I think Mendelev had a beautiful mind. And when that mind gets on a train and it was a long, long ride from Irkutsk to Moscow, strange things will happen, as you're about to hear.

We'll be right back. My name's Annalise, and I'm calling right before going to bed in Des Moines, Iowa. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P.C. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Hey, I'm Chad. I'm Robert Krollich. This is Radio Lab. And we're going to go back to Oliver Sacks talking about his hero, Dimitri Mendeleev, now about to take a trip. Okay, in 1860, around 1860, there were trains going all over

Russia, and Mendeleuze could afford to take trains. He was often on a new. enormous journeys, and to while away the time, since he couldn't do chemical experiments or whatever, he would take playing cards with the name of various elements, their chemical and physical properties, and he would play what he called chemical solitaire. Sorting them for likeness or sorting them? I'm afraid I don't know the details. But you know what we can imagine, right? Sure.

So let's just say he's sitting there on the train, he's looking out the window. He sees trees made of carbon. Carbon nitrogen. A lake made of hydrogen and oxygen. Behind that a mountain. Mountain theater. Made of silica. And he's shuffling.

Their properties and their atomic weights in his mind. Wondering. How do these things go together? What's the pattern? And he's shuffling. I'm shuffling. Shuffling. Shuffling.

Shuffling. Shuffling. And he did this for years. Until one night. This we think is true. In February of 1869, he is said to have had a dream. In his dream, all the atoms of all the elements of all the world. The fat ones, the small ones, the dense ones, the heavy ones, the friendly ones, the shy ones.

They all began to dance in his mind. And then they snapped into a grid. He awoke with a vision of the periodic table. This is one of those dreams. Which he then wrote on the back of an envelope. The thing about what he wrote on the back of that envelope is that it starts out so simply. Left to right, the atoms just get heavier and heavier and heavier. Heavier, heavier.

But every so often, and this is what he intuited in his dream, is that while they're getting heavier their other traits, like whether they're shy or magnetic or whatever, those traits repeat. Periodically changed back again. Every time they do, start a new row. The properties repeat again. Out of this simple repeating structure. Hush, Mandalayov, you get a table that you can read in a million ways. There are so many ways to read this table.

I think I'm going to call this the periodic table. That if you use your imagination, you can see yourself in there. I was a rather shy kid with difficulty forming relationships. And I sometimes compared myself to the inert gases. Inert gases are very isolated. They react with nothing. Because I felt they too had difficulties forming relationships. But I did...

He has now left the chair and has moved to the library and is taking it in a hugely thick, actually a dangerously thick book. This is the handbook of physics and chemistry. As you see, it says 5,000 pages. I had a smaller version as a boy and from brooding in this book. It seemed to me just possible that one of the inert gases, xenon, might be seduced into combination by the most active element of ore, which was fluorine. This lonely, lonely gas might find a partner somehow.

Did they ever get together? In fact, it came to me with great joy when I found out in the 1960s that a, actually a Canadian chemist had in fact made a fluoride of xenon. Elemental love. And speaking of love, he then took us... I think let's come here, one sec. To the living room, and he showed us a small painting. In the painting, there was this dramatic figure of a bearded, scowling character

on the side of a mountain, holding two stone tablets over his head, and the sky was filled with lightning. And who was it? It was Dimitri Mendeleev. When I heard of how Mendeleev, had discovered the periodic table. I imagined Mendeleif as a sort of Moses,

going up to a chemical cyanide and coming down with the tablets of the periodic law. And when I mention this fantasy to Peter Selgen, my friend, an artist, he did this imaginative picture of the young Mendeleif, the peaks of a chemical cyanide behind him, behind him holding aloft the tablets of the periodic table. Which raises maybe the deepest question of all.

Did Mendelief think this up and impose it upon the world? Or was this pattern always there? In which case, Mendelief just removed the veil and said, oh, there you are. Is the periodic table a discovery or an invention? Is it a human construct or is it a revelation of the cosmic or divine order? is it, so to speak, God's abacus. Okay, so that was our visit with,

wow, did I just get carried away with the sound? Yes, it is a little bit closet cluttered, but still. It was a long time ago. It was a long time ago. Anyhow, that was our visit to Oliver Sacks, and also a preview to an upcoming episode that we're making right now about elements, which we're really excited about. I hope you'll be back for that.

In the meantime, I'm Robert Krollwich. I'm Jad Abumrad. This is Radio Lab. Thanks for listening. Hi, this is Jemana calling from Chobar, Saudi Arabia. Radio Lab is produced by Jad Abumrat. Our staff includes Renna Farrell, Ellen Horn, David Gable, Dylan Keefe, Matt Kielty, Andy Mills,

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