Library branch

Chemistry

How matter changes, and how we misread it.

15 pieces

Tool From the Atom to the Periodic Table Blow an atom up to a football pitch and zoom to the grain of rice at its centre, change protons, neutrons and electrons one at a time, count each element's hands to see why water is H2O, then fold the line into the table and sing through all 118. (Korean only)

What Does Fire Burn? What Does a Candle Eat? A birthday candle burns down to nothing. Where did it go? It did not vanish. It joined the air, became invisible — and grew heavier. Chemistry begins with the scale that caught this. 2 questions
What Does Fire Burn? Is There an End to Cutting? Finding Grains No One Could See Cut a sheet of paper in half, and in half again — is there an end? For two thousand years 'no' won. Then, in an age when nobody had seen an atom, a scale showed something that only atoms could explain. 2 questions
What Does Fire Burn? Why Does a Pattern Appear When You Line Up the Elements? The kinds of grain were not simply many. Line them up by weight and the properties repeat every eight steps. One man trusted that rhythm enough to leave gaps — and the gaps were filled within fifteen years. 1 questions
What Does Fire Burn? How Do Atoms Hold On to Each Other? Piece one said the candle 'joins' oxygen; piece two said grains 'find new partners'. What is joining? Atoms have hands. Each has a fixed number, there are three ways to hold hands — and the shape they make decides what a substance is like. 2 questions
What Does Fire Burn? What Happens When You Squeeze Air? Block the tip of a syringe and push: the plunger moves in. The air shrank. But by how much? Push twice as hard — then what? The moment that question got a numerical answer, the invisible grains in air became countable. 2 questions
What Does Fire Burn? How Soft Copper Became a Sword Copper is soft — you can bend it by hand. Yet three thousand years ago, north of the Korean peninsula, people made swords of it. The secret was mixing: the odd fact that two soft things, mixed, make a hard one. 2 questions
What Does Fire Burn? Searching for the Elixir of Life, They Made Gunpowder Some people searched for a medicine of long life. They mixed all manner of things and heated them. Then they burned off their beards and blew up their houses. The record of that accident is the first record of gunpowder. Six hundred years later a man in Goryeo worked out how to make it. 2 questions
What Does Fire Burn? Making Bread from Air Half of what you ate today came from the air. Nitrogen makes up four-fifths of the air and plants could not eat it — until one man found how to pull it apart and join it anew. In the end chemistry does one thing: take apart what is joined, and join what was taken apart. 2 questions
Wrong, and Useful Anyway Phlogiston — A Century Facing the Wrong Way Wood burns down to a little ash and weighs less. Plainly something left it. The theory that named that something was chemistry for a hundred years. It was wrong — but interestingly wrong. The relations were right; only the direction was reversed. 3 questions
Science in Korea — What Is Being Built Here New Medicines — What It Takes for One Pill to Exist One tablet swallowed for a headache. Who found what is inside it, and how? And why does it take so long? Daejeon holds three separate places: one that makes candidate compounds, one that establishes what is in herbal materials, and one that tests whether any of it does harm. That they are separate says what this work is. 2 questions
Science in Korea — What Is Being Built Here The Electron Microscope — How to See What the Eye Cannot At school you look at onion skin through a microscope. Turn up the magnification and it only goes blurry. The reason is not the lens. In Daejeon there is an institute that keeps the instruments that see past that limit and lends them to researchers across the country. 2 questions
Science in Korea — What Is Being Built Here Nano — Why Making It Small Makes It Different Nano means small. But why should making things small be such an achievement? Because past a certain size the same substance starts behaving like a different one. In Daejeon there is a fabrication plant kept for hire, so that people can actually try it. 2 questions
Why the Rows Break Where They Do — Why Rooms Come in 2, 8, 18, 32 Each floor of the atom's apartment block holds 2, 8, 18, 32 electrons. Rooms come in squares, 1, 4, 9, 16, and each larger square adds 1, 3, 5, 7. Two to a room, one of each spin. And the table's rows come in pairs, 8, 8, 18, 18, because the front door upstairs fills before the back rooms downstairs. 2 questions
Atoms Have No Memory — How Much of Admiral Yi's Breath Is in Mine Every breath I take holds 600 to 700 million molecules from the breaths Admiral Yi Sun-sin exhaled. Their carbon becomes trees, fruit, my DNA. Yet an atom has nowhere to record whose it was. Memory lives not in atoms but in how they are arranged. 2 questions
One Director's Questions — The Olive Tree Below How Many Hands Does Carbon Have? — Why Life Is Made of Carbon Carbon has six protons and six electrons and shares its four top-floor electrons with neighbours. Four hands let it build chains, rings and branches, which is why life on Earth is woven from carbon. The glue between atoms is electrons, not neutrons. 2 questions

Routes through this branch

What Does Fire Burn? →Wrong, and Useful Anyway →Science in Korea — What Is Being Built Here →One Director's Questions — The Olive Tree Below →