A Quote by Sam Kean

Despite its obscurity, probably no element on the periodic table has as colorful a history as antimony. Money, madness, poison, linguistics, charlatanism, sex - pretty much every theme that runs through the periodic table can be found in Element 51.

Sam Kean

Quote Author

Sam Kean
American - Writer

If studying the periodic table taught me nothing else, it's that the credulity of human beings for periodic table panaceas is pretty much boundless.

Sam Kean

Everywhere in the universe, the periodic table has the same basic structure. Even if an alien civilization's table weren't plotted out in the castle-with-turrets shape we humans favor, their spiral or pyramidal or whatever-shaped periodic table would naturally pause after 118 elements.

Sam Kean

The element of surprise wasn't allowed near the Periodic Table.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

One theme I ran into over and over while writing about the periodic table was the future of energy and the question of which element or elements will replace carbon as king.

Sam Kean

Vince Russo destroyed the Periodic Table as he only recognises the element of surprise.

Jim Cornette

Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.

Diane Ackerman

Over the years, humans have managed to incorporate nearly every element, light and weighty, common and obscure, into our daily lives. And given how small atoms are and how many of them there are all around us, it's almost certain that your body has at least brushed against an atom of every single natural element on the periodic table.

Sam Kean

Despite the disreputable company it keeps, bismuth is harmless. In fact, it's medicinal: Doctors prescribe it to soothe ulcers, and it's the 'bis' in hot-pink Pepto-Bismol. Overall, it seems like the most out-of-place element on the periodic table, a gentleman among scoundrels.

Sam Kean

If you memorize the periodic table it will speed you up if you're a chemist, but by and large, the reason you have a periodic table is so that you can store that information outside of your body. That way it frees up some part of your brain to do something else...

Bill Nye

... and holy hell the chocolate is so intense and pure it should be named an element and given a spot on the periodic table. It would be Ch, which isn't even taken.

Laini Taylor

After a few years of intensive research, we found a way to use a pulsed laser directed into a nozzle to vaporize any material, allowing for the first time the atoms of any element in the periodic table to be produced cold in a supersonic beam.

Richard Smalley

In some sense, what you might have suspected from the first day of high-school chemistry is true: The periodic table is a colossal waste of time. Nine out of every 10 atoms in the universe are hydrogen, the first element and the major constituent of stars. The other 10 percent of all atoms are helium.

Sam Kean

Most people who have encountered mercury have done so after breaking a mercury thermometer. And many of us who saw the liquid balls of mercury scatter across a floor or countertop considered the element the most beautiful on the periodic table.

Sam Kean

What the ocean was to the child, the Periodic Table is to the chemist.