Disappearing Spoon-Chapters 3 and 4

Chapter three talks mostly about the formation of the periodic table. Who organized it, the different attempts to organize it and all who were involved. Dmitiri Mendeleev is the man given credit for the periodic table. He was able to draft a table and predict where new element would be when they were eventually discovered. However, Mendeleev couldn't have done it alone. The work of Bunsen and Lecoq de Boisbaudran helped immensly. Boisbaudean brought in the idea of gallium and then rethought his predictions afterbeing corrected by Mendeleev. This chapter also talked about the formation of lanthanides. A teen named Johann Friedrich Böttger convinced a crowd he could turn silver into gold and was promptly arrested for alchemy by the king. The king asked him to turn silver into gold for him however, Johann knew he couldn't because his joke with the crowd was fake but he somehow managed to convince the king to pair him with a porcelain maker. While the pair mined for the rok used to make porcelain they discovered copious amounts of a large, unidentified rock. Later on a geochemist was able to indiviually indentify these rocks, six of them became lanthanides. Chapter 4 was all about the elements in space. The topics included the formation of the earth's crust, information about Jupiter and possible theories about why dinosaurs went extinct. A popular theory is that stars heat hydrogen in their cores and fuse it with other hydrogen atoms, making helium. Then helium fuses with helium. This cycle repeats until iron is formed. Jupiter has been deemed a failed star instead of a planet and so many elements have strange affects there. Father and son Luis and Walter Alvarez began studying a limestone deposit which is dated back to when the dinosaurs are thought to have become extinct. What they learned is that basically when a large meteor hit the earth, very large amounts of iridium-rich dust would have arose. This dust would've blocked out sunlight and kept life from surviving. This chapter also talked about dating the earth but it was incredibly boring.