Superheavy: Making and Breaking the Periodic Table

British science journalist Chapman takes readers on a tour of the far end of the periodic table in his lively debut, chronicling the discoveries of the transuranium chemical elements—those with atomic numbers greater than uranium’s 92. Using a mix of secondary sources and new interviews, he narrates the experiments that, between 1945 and 2016, yielded elements 93 to 118. Chapman emphasizes the fierce competition between the U.S. research group, led by Glenn Seaborg and Albert Ghiorso in Berkeley, and their Soviet (later, Russian) counterparts, led by Georgy Flerov and Yuri Oganessian, in the small town of Dubna. However, he doesn’t neglect the two other teams, in Tokyo and in Darmstadt, Germany, also responsible for filling in some of the blanks on the periodic table. Chapman’s sweeping narrative includes plenty of memorable incidents and details, from Ghiorso’s 1955 midnight run in a supercharged VW Beetle in the hills above San Francisco Bay to deliver a new sample of element 101 to the lab before it decayed, to the injustices weathered by nuclear chemist Darleane Hoffman, twice robbed by institutional sexism of an element discovery during her career. This is a must-read for anyone interested in how humans have expanded, and continue to expand, the boundaries of scientific knowledge. [em](Aug.) [/em]