ملاحظات
(١) رباعية أرسطو: العناصر في العصور القديمة
‘The four elements are not a conception’. N. Frye, introduction
to G. Bachelard, The
Psychoanalysis of Fire (London: Quartet Books, 1987), p.
ix.
‘I believe it is possible’. G. Bachelard, Water and Dreams (Dallas: Pegasus Foundation, 1983),
3.
‘the region we call home’. Ibid. 8.
‘Out of some bodies’. R. Boyle, The Sceptical
Chymist (1661), quoted in W. H.
Brock, The Fontana History of Chemistry
(London: Fontana, 1992), 57.
‘certain primitive and simple’. R. Boyle (1661). The Sceptical Chymist (1661), quoted in H. Boynton
(ed.), The Beginnings of Modern Science
(Roslyn, NY: Walter J. Black Inc., 1948), 254.
(٢) الثورة: كيف غيَّر الأكسجين العالَم؟
Oxygen, by C. Djerassi and R.
Hoffmann, is published by Wiley-VCH, Weinheim, 2001.
‘We have not pretended’. A. L. Lavoisier, Elements of Chemistry (1789), trans. R. Kerr (1790), quoted in
R. Boynton (ed.), The Beginnings of Modern
Science (Roslyn, NY: Walter J. Black Inc., 1948),
268-9.
‘Chemists have made phlogiston a vague principle’. A. L. Lavoisier
(1785), quoted in W. H. Brock, The Fontana History of
Chemistry (London: Fontana, 1992), 111-12.
‘The same body can pass’: Lavoisier (1773), quoted in Brock,
The Fontana History of Chemistry,
98.
‘It is not enough for a substance to be simple’: C. Coulston
Gillispie (ed.), Dictionary of Scientific
Biography (New York: Scribner’s, 1976), viii. 82; quoted in C.
Cobb and H. Goldwhite, Creations of Fire (New
York: Plenum, 1995), 161.
The detection of light from an extrasolar planet was reported by A.
C. Cameron, K. Horne, A. Penny, and D. James, ‘Probable Detection of Starlight
Reflected from the Giant Planet Orbiting τ Boötis’, Nature, 402 (1999), 751.
(٣) الذهب: العنصر المجيد والملعون
‘He breaks all law’. Virgil, Aeneid, iii. l. 55, quoted in G. Agricola, De re metallica (1556), trans. H. C. Hoover and L.
H. Hoover (New York: Dover, 1950), 16.
‘This is indeed the Golden Age’. Quoted in Ibid. 10.
‘It is almost our daily experience’. Ibid. 10.
‘I have come to take from them their gold’. Pizarro, quoted in L. B.
Wright, Gold, Glory, and the Gospel: The Adventurous
Lives and Times of the Renaissance Explorers (New York: Atheneum,
1970), 229.
‘Gold is the universal prize’. J. Bronowski, The Ascent of Man (London: Book Club Associates, 1973),
134.
‘Out of these laborious mines’. Quoted by Hoover and Hoover in ibid.
279 n. 8.
‘Gold is found in the world’. Pliny, Natural
History, xxxiii. 21.
‘The Colchians placed the skins of animals’. Agricola, De re metallica, 330.
Extracting gold into plant tissues is described by C. W.
N.
Anderson, R. R. Brooks, R. B. Stewart, and R. Simcock, ‘Harvesting a
Crop of Gold in Plants’, Nature, 395 (1998),
553-4.
‘Dost thou not know the value of money’. Horace, Satires. i, l. 73.
‘When ingenious and clever men’. Agricola, De
re metallica, 17.
The economic history of gold is engagingly told in P. L. Bernstein,
The Power of Gold (New York: Wiley,
2000).
‘We have gold’. Quoted in ibid. 346.
‘Currencies’. R. Mundell, quoted in Wall
Street Journal, 10 Dec. 1999, Op-Ed page.
‘As to the True Man’. Quoted in J. C. Cooper (1990), Chinese Alchemy (New York: Sterling Publishing Co.,
1990), 66.
The chemical state of gold in gold-ruby glass was deduced only very
recently: see F. E. Wagner et al., ‘Before
Striking Gold in Gold-Ruby Glass’, Nature,
407 (2000), 691-2.
The explanation for the inertness of gold is given in B. Hammer
and J. K. Nørskov, ‘Why Gold is the Noblest of
all the Metals’, Nature, 376 (1995),
238–40.
(٤) الطريق الثُّماني: تنظيم العناصر
‘encouraged people to acquire a faith’. W. H. Brock, The Fontana History of Chemistry (London: Fontana,
1992), 139-40.
‘Berzelius’s symbols are horrifying.’ Quoted in ibid.
139.
The concept of prote hyle and its
relation to early ideas about stellar evolution are discussed in S. F. Mason,
Chemical Evolution (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1992).
‘It was quite the most incredible event’. Quoted in G. K. T. Conn
and H. D. Turner, The
Evolution of the Nuclear Atom (London: Iliffe Books, 1965),
136.
‘he is a nice sort of fellow’. Quoted in B. Jaffe, Crucibles:
The Story of Chemistry (New York: Dover,
1976), 151.
‘I saw in a dream’. Quoted in P. Strathern, Mendeleyev’s Dream (London: Penguin, 2000), 286.
(٥) مصانع الذرَّة: تخليق عناصر جديدة
One of the best accounts of the early development of atomic and
nuclear chemistry is R. Rhodes, The Making of the Atom
Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986).
‘some fool in a laboratory’. A. S. Eve, Rutherford (London: Macmillan, 1939), 102.
‘The man who put his hand on the lever’. F. Soddy, Atomic Transmutation (New World, 1953),
95.
‘Your results are very startling’. L. Meitner, letter to O. Hahn, 21
Dec. 1938, reproduced in J. Lemmerich (ed.), Die
Geschichte der Entdeckung der Kernspaltung: Austellungskatalog
(Technische Universität Berlin, Universitätsbibliothek, 1988), 176. See also R.
Lewin Sime, Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996),
235.
‘when fission was discovered’. Quoted in C. Weiner (ed.), Exploring the History of Nuclear Physics, AIP
Conference Proceedings No. 7 (American Institute of Physics, 1972),
90.
‘To change the hydrogen in a glass’. F. Aston, ‘Forty Years of Atomic
Theory’, in J. Needham and W. Pagel (eds.), Background
to Modern Science (London: Macmillan, 1938), 108.
‘We can only hope’. Ibid. 114.
‘first step along the way’. I. McEwan, Enduring Love (London: Vintage, 1998), 3.
A brief and good account of the manufacture of superheavy elements,
and the search for the island of stability, is given by R. Stone, Science, 278 (1997), 571, and Science, 283 (1999), 474. The topic is discussed in
more detail in G. T. Seaborg and W. D. Loveland, ‘The search for new elements’,
in N. Hall (ed.), The New Chemistry
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1.
The chemical properties of seaborgium are described in M. Schädel
et al., ‘Chemical Properties of Element
106 (Seaborgium)’, Nature, 388 (1997),
55.
(٦) الأشقاء الكيميائيون: أهمية النظائر
The story of the discovery of Oetzi the ‘iceman’ is told in
B. Fowler, Iceman (New York: Random House,
2000).
The radiocarbon dating of the Shroud of Turin is described in P. E.
Damon et al., ‘Radiocarbon Dating of the Shroud of Turin’, Nature, 337 (1989), 611.
The evidence for the oldest zircons, and their interaction with
water, is described in S. A. Wilde, J. W. Valley, W. H. Peck, and C. M. Graham,
‘Evidence from Detrital Zircons for the Existence of Continental Crust and
Oceans on the Earth 4.4 Gyr Ago’, Nature, 409
(2001), 175, and S. J. Mojzsis, T. M. Harrison, and R. T. Pidgeon,
‘Oxygen-Isotope Evidence from Ancient Zircons for Liquid Water at the Earth’s
Surface 4,300 Myr Ago’, Nature, 409 (2001),
178.
The uranium dating of a star is reported in R. Cayrel et al., ‘Measurement of Stellar Age from Uranium
Decay’, Nature, 409 (2001),
691.
The new understanding of global climate change that emerged from the
CLIMAP studies of deep-sea sediment cores is described in J. Imbrie and K. P.
Imbrie, Ice Ages (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1986).
Fig. (6-2)a comes from N. J. Shackleton, A. Berger, and
W. R. Peltier, ‘An Alternative Astronomical Calibration of the Lower Pleistocene
Timescale Based on ODP Site 677’, Transactions of the
Royal Society of Edinburgh Earth Sciences, 81 (1990), 251. Fig.
(6-2)b comes from J. Jouzel et al., ‘Extending the Vostok Ice-Core Record of
Palaeoclimate to the Penultimate Glacial Period’, Nature, 364 (1993), 407.
(٧) أغراض عملية: تكنولوجيا العناصر
‘The presence of an element’. J. Chadwick, C. D. Ellis, and
E. Rutherford, Radiation from Radioactive
Substances (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930). The
woeful tale of cold fusion, and the precedent in the work of Pareth and Peters,
is recounted in F. Close, Too Hot To Handle
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
The many industrial uses of rare-earth elements are described in D.
Lutz, ‘The Quietly Expanding Rare-Earth Market’, The
Industrial Physicist, 2/3 (Sept. 1996), 28.
‘The new gas has been leading me a life’. B. Jaffe, Crucibles: The Story of Chemistry (New York: Dover,
1976), 159.
The first compound of argon is reported in L. Khriachtchev,
M. Pettersson, N. Runeberg, J. Lundell, and M. Räsänen, ‘A Stable Argon
Compound’, Nature, 406 (2000),
874.
