by Oliver Sacks
This book is one of the options listed for recommended supplemental reading in First Son's ninth grade chemistry course from Sabbath Mood Homeschool. It's a wonderful memoir of an inquisitive and intelligent boy's immersion in a world of scientific inquiry. His grandparents, aunts, uncles, and parents were at the vanguard of scientific inquiry before the Second World War and his relationships with each of them were shaped by their intellectual pursuits.
Dr. Sacks writes eloquently of his fascination with the natural world and the chemistry that holds it together.
Reading Dalton, reading about atoms, put me in a sort of rapture, thinking that the mysterious proportionalities and numbers one saw on a gross scale in the lab might reflect an invisible, infinitesimal, inner world of atoms, dancing, touching, attracting, and combining.As a boy and young man, Dr. Sacks experienced chemistry as it unfolded. Using old chemistry books and a lab his parents allowed, he developed a relationship with the different kinds of elements, allowing him to become intimately familiar with the chemical groups and the similarities in the ways they interacted with each other. The Sabbath Mood Homeschool course is organized in the same way. First Son is reading The Wonders of Chemistry, an older book, but one that invites the reader to engage with the chemical world. Each week, there are experiments, many pulled from the text. Chemistry is not just a series of expressions or elements to memorize, but a world to discover.
The chapter on Mendeleev and the Periodic Table is illuminating. I've read a little about the struggle to organize the elements into this particular order, but reading Sacks's response to the news of the table and his first glimpse of it at the local science museum brought it to life in a remarkable way.
To have perceived an overall organizing, a superarching principle uniting and relating all the elements, had a quality of the miraculous, of genius. And this gave me, for the first time, a sense of the transcendent power of the human mind, and the fact that it might be equipped to discover or decipher the deepest secrets of nature, to read the mind of God.At the end of the chapter, he writes:
In that first, long, rapt encounter in the Science Museum, I was convinced that the periodic table was neither arbitrary nor superficial, but a representation of truths which would never be overturned, but would, on the contrary, continually be confirmed, show new depths with new knowledge, because it was as deep and simple as nature itself. And the perception of this produced in my twelve-year-old self a sort of ecstasy, the sense (in Einstein's words) that "a corner of the great veil had been lifted."This book does include some mentions of disturbing experiences. His mother, a gynecologist and obstetrician, sometimes brought home fetuses to dissect in front of him and even insisted he do so himself at a young age. It also mentions how occasionally she or the nurse would euthanize babies they believed (rightly or wrongly, it's impossible to know) would never have a conscious life. He also participated in a dissection of a girl nearly his own age when he was a young teenager. These are not portrayed as beneficial experiences for Sacks.
Covering Sacks's teenage years, this book does include some mentions of puberty and the kinds of things that entails. I didn't find anything inappropriate for a high schoolers, but people have different opinions about such things. I know there's some in the chapter called Cannery Row, but it might appear in other places as well.
I enjoyed this book tremendously. Despite taking advanced chemistry classes in high school, general and organic chemistry in college, and earning a degree in genetics and cell biology, I feel like I really understood many chemical concepts for the first time while reading this book.
