Cadmium missiles for Godzilla and other tales from Chemistry (IANS Column: Bookends)

"I can teach you how to bewitch the mind and ensnare the senses. I can tell you how to bottle fame, brew glory, and even put a stopper to death," Professor Severus Snape told his students. Though his subject was potions, or rather, alchemy, his spiel would serve as the most enticing introduction to this field's modern and rational avatar.

Yet, what students are taught in the name of chemistry like many other science subjects is just to memorise a lot of names of elements and compounds, their properties, vital statistics, and uses, a host of equations of reactions, strange concepts such as the Periodic Table of Elements, abstruse calculations, and a few controlled experiments in labs.

What this goes on to do is to rob chemistry of any interest and its real world aspect and applications say, to understand why cutting onions makes us cry, why chilies can leave us gasping, or even, why did the Japanese use missiles made of cadmium against Godzilla? And where can we find these since the existing textbooks are too technical even for students?

But, for this, we must first understand what chemistry is, or rather, what it entails in our lives.

Stripped of its scientific connotations, chemistry for lay people means an abiding mutual attraction, or attachment, as we say so and so enjoys a "special chemistry", or interaction as in "they lack chemistry". Thus, in a way, the subject can be seen as a microcosm of our personal, social, and professional lives.

In its academic manifestation, it is the study of properties and behaviour of matter, but then so is physics. The American science writer and educator Anne Marie Helmenstine notes that chemistry focuses on compounds, the molecules, atoms and ions they are composed of, their composition, structure, and the changes they undergo during an interaction or reaction with other substances, while physics deals more with the nuclear part of the atom, as well as the subatomic realm.

Thus, they are "two sides of the same coin" and chemistry is significant because a knowledge of it helps people understand the world around them everything that can be touched or tasted or smelled is a chemical, and thus under its domain.

The study of chemistry enables us to understand a bit about how everyday things work, say why gold gleams and can stay untarnished, or why laundry detergent works better in hot water, or why sending an electric spark through a gas can create magic, or why not all pain relievers work equally well on a headache, and so on.

Like for many other varied subjects, there are a number of books that can reveal the deep mysteries of the chemical world, spanning organic, inorganic, and physical, to give the most basic classification.

Of them, it is the middle one, dealing with the 118 elements at the most basic form as part of compounds that make us and our universe that receive the most emphasis due to the exotic substances that populate it.

We are all familiar with carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, sodium, iron, silicon, gold, and silver, and so on, but what about bismuth, cobalt, krypton, yttrium, thorium, astatine, and many others.

Many of us in India had full access till the late 1980s, due to the Soviet government's largesse, to D.N. Trifonov, a prolific writer on various facets of the subject, with books such as "Silhouettes of Chemistry", which had vignettes on a broad range of chemical matters. Then, there was O.M. Olgin's "Experiments Without Explosions", which detailed a number of simple chemistry experiments that young people could do in their homes with commonly available substances.

As these are not easily available, let's check out some which can be obtained.

For a most elementary

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