Much Ado about (practically) nothing – A book review.

This book takes me back to my university physics and chemistry lectures of the late 60’s and early 70’s. My lecturers told us that the discovery, and text books on the make-up of atoms was new “stuff”. Now 40+ years later, this easy reading book (without all the maths) reminds me just how new, how important the science, and how good my lecturers were. 

The noble gasses are inert, and their non-reactive character made them difficult to discover, and we are less aware of them in our industrial lives. For example, we breath the atmospheric nitrogen in and out, without us or the air changing anything. As a geologist, I was particularly keen to read about the roll of noble gasses in the science of isotope dating, with Potassium (feldspars and such) decaying to the noble gas Argon, and Uranium yielding Helium. These age dating techniques were also applied to meteorites to help date aspects of the universe, and to oceanic basalts to look at the nature of our inner planet. Research into finding the coldest temperature (near 0 degrees Kelvin) has brought us to liquid Helium, as now used to support super conductive magnets in hospital MRI machines. 

The author, David E. Fisher provides many brief historical backgrounds to the earlier discoveries of noble gasses. He entertains the reader with many personal stories on the theoretical research into the understanding of some of the noble gasses. An easy read. This 240 page hard back book is published by Oxford university press in 2010.