Saturday, October 29, 2022

Essential Elements: Atoms, Quarks and the Periodic Table by Matt Tweed, Book 35 of 2022

 


This little book of chemical facts covers all of the elements and major concepts of chemistry with one page of text and one page of drawings per concept.  

And yet, it is good review of chemistry and dense with basic facts.  Matt Tweed covers bonding in a page: covalent bonds, metallic bonds, ionic bonds and hydrogen bonds all in 200 words and six drawings. 

Hydrogen and Helium get a page all to themselves; they are the most abundant elements in the universe.  The twenty elements of the p-block of the periodic table, like the periodic table itself, are covered in just a page.  The twenty elements of p-block include carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, all of the halogens, all of the semi-conductors, as well as tin, lead and aluminum.  The main elements of life and the digital world are all in this group.

At the end of the book, we get all the forces of the universe, from gravity to the glue holding the nucleus together.  A survey of quarks, baryons, mesons and the weird components of the the nucleus, as well as theories of everything. 

A fun review of chemistry.



First 34 books of 2022:

Les horloges marines de M. Berthoud 

The Red Wheelbarrow and Other Poems by William Carlos Williams

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Cochrane by David Cordingly 

QED by Richard Feynman

Spirits in Bondage by C.S. Lewis

Reflections on the Psalms by  C.S. Lewis

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer

The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Hannah Arendt

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? by Kurt Vonnegut

The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium by Barry S. Strauss. 

Civil Rights Baby by Nita Wiggins

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough


The Life of the Mind
 by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen



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