Elementary schooling

TLS review, 31st January 2003

Michael Peel reviews Nick Lane, Oxygen: The molecule that made the world; John S Rigden, Hydrogen: The essential element; and Philip Ball, The Ingredients: A guided tour of the elements.

Richard Feynmann, the late US physicist, once said that the reason he and his peers were so successful was that they studied hydrogen and helium - and then stopped. The remark, quoted in Hydrogen: The essential element, is a measure of the continuing limits on scientific understanding of even the two simplest elements. More than a century after the birth of quantum theory, the grand unifying theory to explain the world's complex workings remains elusive. By scrutinising the elements and those who have studied and exploited them, Rigden and his fellow authors celebrate the central place of uncertainty in research and warn implicitly and explicitly against those who give the public simple answers to questions that are hard and may be impossible to resolve.

The most broad-ranging and densely argued of the troika is Oxygen: The molecule that made the world, by the biochemist Nick Lane. The author, an honorary Research Fellow at University College London, examines the apparent paradox of oxygen: it keeps us alive, yet it is toxic and instrumental in the processes that cause our tissues to decay and eventually to stop working. Along the way, he questions those who argue that life can be prolonged and diseases halted by straightforward means such as taking supplements of antioxidant substances like vitamin C.

Lane's learning and historical scope enable vivid descriptions of the role oxygen has played in determining the course of evolution. He describes how increasing levels of the gas in the atmosphere preceded the "Cambrian explosion" of multicellular plants and animals more tan 500 million years ago and possibly even the rise of the dinosaurs. Atmospheric oxygen levels may have risen as high as 35% - compared with 21% today - during the Carboniferous and early Permian period between 320 and 270 million years ago, helping the growth of monstrous creatures such as millipedes of over a metre long and Megaranea, a spider with a leg span of almost half that size. "The inescapable conclusion, that Oxygen is a Good Thing, may give few people a sleepless night, Lane writes. "But it will certainly help constrain our ideas of oxygen toxicity in ageing and disease."

Drawing on so many sources that the volume of material can sometimes seem overwhelming, Lane ends his ambitious and detailed work with a moderate and home-spun conclusion. Oxygen is the most important cause of age-related disease, he says, but adds that for the moment our best hope of a long life is to eat well and stay active rather than to seek solace in supposed chemical panaceas. "If all the advances of biology and medicine can do no more than explain the wisdom of our grandparents, may that restore some lost dignity to wise old age", he writes.

Rigden's treatise on hydrogen is a variation on the theme of incomplete comprehension. "H stands not only for hydrogen, but also for humility", Rigden writes" The hydrogen atom still beckons - its story far from over." The result is a fan's eye view of the men who have investigated hydrogen, and through it quantum mechanical theory, over the past two centuries. Rigden evokes the sense of excitement as physicists such as Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schroedinger broke theoretical barriersm with extraordinary speed. The author makes good use of letters sent between the protagonists, who write with an eloquence and a generosity towards one another that suggests they suspected the communications might be read by a larger audience one day.

Good potted biographies of the famous names help lift a writing style that is generally workmanlike and occasionally awkward. Rigden describes the behaviour of Paul Dirac, whose taciturnity led his peers to decide that standard scientific quantities such as seconds and metres should be complemented by a unit of silence known as the Dirac. At the end of one lecture, Dirac listened to a comment and then sat quietly for some time - when asked by the host if he would respond, he replied that no question had been asked. The book becomes less engaging and heavier going technically as it moves into modern-day research. In part this is because the subject matter is more abstruse and refined, with less of the epoch-making change triggered by Einstein, Bohr et al. Rigden seems constrained at times by his personal relationships with scientists such as the late I. I. Rabi, who the author admits "often seemed to be hovering over my shoulder" during writing.

Rigden's reverential approach contrasts with the mischievous tenor of Philip Ball's brief tour of the elements, which makes his book the most entertaining and least demanding of the three. The seven chapters are pacily written and filled with anecdotes, although the selection of subjects - ranging from the elements in antiquity to gold and isotopes - has a rather arbitrary feel.

One of the book's most interesting and original sections relates to the manufacture of new elements by bombarding existing materials in particle accelerators. An increasingly bizarre race developed during the 1940s and 50s to make new substances that sometimes decayed within thousandths of a second, raising implicit questions about the trade-off between perceived experimental merit and the desire for personal kudos. When scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, made elements 97 and 98 and called them berkelium and californium, New Yorker magazine asked flippantly why they had not named them "universiteum" and "offium" and reserved californium and berkelium for their next two discoveries.

The story is an oblique reminder that the most valuable research is generally little publicized and is the product of incremental and imperfect theorizing and experiment. The idea of scientific knowledge emerging in complete and comprehensible gobbets may satisfy the modern media and the human mind's desire for neatness, but is generally far from reality. As Feynmann suggested the greatest researchers are defined by their ability to admit and critically scrutinize gaps in their understanding as by the acuteness of their insights.