A Well-ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev And The Shadow Of The Periodic Table - Hardcover

Gordin, Michael D.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 046502775X ISBN 13: 9780465027750

Publisher: Basic Books, 2004

Synopsis

Dmitrii Mendeleev: It's a name we recognize, but only as the disheveled scientist pictured in our high school chemistry textbook, the creator of the periodic table of elements. Until now little has been known about the man, but A Well-Ordered Thing draws a portrait of this chemist in three full dimensions.Historian Michael Gordin also details Mendeleev's complex relationship with the Russian Empire that was his home. From his attack on Spiritualism to his humiliation at the hands of the Petersburg Academy of Sciences, from his near-mythical hot-air balloon trip to his failed voyage to the Arctic, this is the story of an extraordinary man deeply invested in the good of his country. And the ideals that shaped his work in politics and culture were the same ones that led a young chemistry professor to start putting elements in order.Mendeleev was a loyal subject of the Tsar, but he was also a maverick who thought that only an outsider could perfect a modern Russia. A Well-Ordered Thing is a fascinating glimpse into the world of Imperial Russia--and into the life of one of its most notorious minds.

About this title

About the Author

Michael D. Gordin is an assistant professor in the history department at Princeton University, where he teaches the history of science and Imperial Russian history. A member of the Harvard Society of Fellows, he lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Reviews

The periodic table of the elements, present in virtually every high school and college chemistry classroom, was conceptualized in large part by the 19th-century Russian chemist Dmitrii Mendeleev. Mendeleev's work was critically important because it brought intellectual order to the many elements and greatly advanced our understanding of how they function. To this day, his work provides a context that enables students' entry into the complexities of chemistry. In this fluid intellectual biography, Gordin, a historian of science and of Russian history at Princeton, focuses on Mendeleev's professional years and puts his scientific activities in the context of the rapidly evolving Russian state. Gordin demonstrates that Mendeleev was adept at using the media to advance his career while attempting to build respect for the role of scientists in a changing society. For example, he played a central role in a scientific endeavor to debunk the spiritualist movement that was spreading rapidly throughout Russia in the 1870s by placing scientific controls on seances. Known during his lifetime as Russia's leading scientist, Mendeleev helped shape imperial policy on a range of scientific and public issues, from taxation to academic policy and from meteorology to metrology. Although Gordin's topic is fascinating, his presentation will be best suited to those with considerable knowledge of Russian history and of science. B&w photos
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Gordin portrays Mendeleev, creator of the periodic table, which hangs in every physics and chemistry classroom, as a man whose limited genius as a chemist left him powerless to resolve the crises--political, economic, and cultural--tearing his beloved Russia apart. Indeed, in chronicling a long and wide-ranging career, Gordin shows how early scientific success persuaded Mendeleev that he was a solitary genius, peculiarly able to wrest order out of chaos. But outside the laboratory, the mind that reduced a welter of chemical data to one elegant periodic law again and again collided with opaque sociocultural forces. Projecting onto an increasingly anarchic world the formulaic tidiness of his scientific formula, Mendeleev naively supposed that he could solve Russia's social problems yet still preserve its traditional autocracy. Thus the man who once predicted the chemical character of undiscovered elements utterly failed to anticipate the revolutionary transformation of the czar's empire. Resisting the national mythology that has enshrined Mendeleev as a stainless icon, Gordin delivers a compellingly vulnerable human being. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 046502775X
• ISBN 13: 9780465027750
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384