Best book about the periodic table | Bill Gates - Gates Notes

When you walk into my office, one of the first things you see is a huge version of the periodic table.

Aside from being a neat piece of art, the periodic table reminds me of how one discovery can lead to countless others.

But until Thales of Miletus figured out that the presence of seashell fossils on land must mean the entire world was once a sea, Strathern reminds us that people were more focused on questions of religion than on questions of science.

He was known to get so angry that he would dance “with Rumpelstiltskin-like rage,” and the book’s title refers to his claim that the periodic table came to him in a dream.

Mendeleyev’s Dream is the best book I’ve ever read on the periodic table.

Strathern describes the story of the periodic table as “a wayward parable of human aspiration,” and I agree