Today I read the tenth chapter in “The Ascent of Man,” by J. Bronowski, World Within World. It was quite interesting and focused on atoms and the progression of human knowledge about those atoms. It began by describing Mendeleev’s classification and ordering of the elements known of then, better known as the periodic table today. Mendeleev’s ability to put together the table without knowing of a great amount of elements and to be able to think of reasons for the gaps was a phenomenal tale of inductive reasoning, and I enjoyed learning of it very much. Originally, people thought of atoms as indivisible, the basic building block of the universe — but Joseph Thomson proved this theory untrue when he discovered the electron, which explained the reason for atomic weight and number. The discovery of further electrons within atoms — the world of atoms within the real world — inspired not only further developments in science, but also different forms of art, such as the Cubist style of painting. Other scientists continued to advance the knowledge of atoms to present-day knowledge. This chapter taught me a lot about atoms as well as history, so I would recommend it to anyone interested in atoms, particularly the history of how humans learned of them, and rate it 9.7/10.
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