Claim Now Molecules: The Elements And The Architecture Of Everything, Book 2 Of 3 Constructed By Theodore Gray Made Available In Audio Book

picked up Molecules from the library's "just in" shelves to see if this would be a good book for teaching people about chemistry, As I flipped open the first few pages, I was intrigued by the fact that all the pages were black and had full, glossy coloured images on them, It really made the chemistry stand out in a way I've never seen it before,

The layout is amazing, easy to read, easy to follow, and more importantly, makes sense, While I was explaining polymers to students, major polymer examples were right there so I could easily flip to them and show the students the importance these have on their lives.
And ore processing The entire thing within a page of each other so you can easily put together a story about how we go from elements to molecules to using things in our lives.


The best thing about this book is not the ease of teaching yourself, but rather that it easily captured the attention of an apathetic teen with a penchant for rolling his eyes screaming "I don't care" and hold it for over an hour while he flipped through the pages quietly and reading the descriptions.


Put those two things together and this became an amazing tool to help tutor people in chemistry, As someone that is interested in chemistry and soil chemist, I found it really delightful to look at and wished I had something like this growing up, It really brings the concepts to life in a way that the dull chemistry books of old never could, I've known about Theodore Gray for a long while, I've been a fan of sitelink him, his periodic table, and his webpage since I stumbled across it my first year teaching, I read the entirety of his webpage before he made his now sitelink famous poster or acquired the modern incarnation of his webpage based off it, I subscribed to Popular Science magazine solely because he wrote a monthly article for them at the time, I didn't mind cancelling the subscription either after I confirmed that he had stopped writing for them, Ten members of the Class ofpurchased the big version of his poster for me when they were freshmen as a Christmas gift, It hangs prominently in my classroom, I have been a fan for a while and so when his sitelinkThe Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe book came out I purchased it and read it cover to cover.
I've looked at his sitelinkMad Science amp sitelinkMad Science books, but since they were just reprints of his Popular Science articles I decided not to purchase them.
I'll admit that I haven't bought a lot of the ancillary merchandise nor did I buy the sitelink app , although I did snag it up when it became free.

So I was excited to learn that sitelinkTheo was doing a sequel to sitelinkThe Elements, Again I have not purchased the sitelink app and I waited until I received the book as a Christmas gift to read it, I read it all the way through in about two days, I was not as visually appealing as sitelinkThe Elements, but there was still a lot that I learned from it, sitelinkTheodore Gray even made fun of the book himself several times as he commented that it was difficult to find ways to make piles of white powder interesting.
There were times where I wished the book spent more time on one pigments topic or less on others fibers, As much as I liked to molecular representation of molecules there were times where the differences only come out indimensions, and although I appreciate the consistency of format there were other times where it was broken to show complicated molecules and I wish the same had been done on these exceptions.

I was also excited to hear in a sitelink talk that he gave at Google that there will be a third in the future that will focus on Reactions.
The first was certainly better, but I liked this book a lot and am glad to have it as a reference, Molecules, the 'sequel' to sitelinkElements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe, isn't quite as good as the original but still a fascinating book, The main draw for the book are the outstanding photos on every single page, For instance, the chapter on colours is page after page of eyepopping photos of dyes, fruit, minerals and other assorted colourful objects, Its not all pretty pictures though, you can learn quite a bit, I didn't expect to see orbital cloud diagrams, but there they were,

It probably says a lot about me that the prospect of the next book being called 'Reactions' excites me

quite a bit, I read it covertocover the day it came in the mail! And I read it again, two hours later, . . and again, the next day, . . It's awesome! You learn a lot! Can't put it down! You get the picture! Love this series and it's funny I wish I'd had this book before I took college chemistry.
Whereas a chemistry text presents the subject as one the student must understand thoroughly before beginning study, Gray shows some of the simplicity, Where university chemistry presents Organic Chemistry as this vast, incomprehensible field, with millions of compounds, Gray shows us how carbon atoms combine with each other and with hydrogen, in simple, predictable ways.


Pages, and page, are particularly illuminating, Pagesshow all theways,,, orcarbon atoms can form molecules with just each other and hydrogen,
Carbon atom can form just one such molecule: CH, methane,
Carbons can form three distinct molecules: CHacetylene, CHethylene ethene, CHethane,
carbons can form nine distinct molecules:
Cno hydrogen, cyclopropatriene,
CHtwo ways
CHthree ways
CHtwo ways
CHone way,methylpropene
carbons can formdistinct molecules:
Cno hydrogen,ways
CH,ways
CH,ways
CH,ways
CH,ways
CH,ways
Gray shows us pictures of all of these: in every case each carbon hasbonds to other carbon or hydrogen atoms each hydrogen has one bond.


Pageshows DNA's code,

A DNA molecule is a library of books called chromosomes, composed of sentences called genes, Each gene codes for one protein, Genes are written in a language that haswords in its dictionary, The words are called codons: each codon specifies a particular amino acid building blocks of proteins, or a "STOP: end of gene: end of sentence, end of protein. " The codons are all threeletter words, The letters are the bases adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine: A, G, C, T,
Gray shows us which amino acidin all is coded for by each of the possiblecodons, each a threeletter word of AGCTs,

It's a picture book, Gray bemoans how many of the pictures are of white powders, which many organic compounds are,

Gray explains how the structure of the molecule gives rise to the physical and chemical properties of the compound,

Molecules is a kind of a sequel to Gray's book, The Elements, However, comparing the two books makes clear that it is in combining that chemical elements become interesting, The Elements seems to be largely just a set of photos of Gray's odd collection of items fashioned from pure or nearly pure chemical elements, The Molecules book demystifies some of the basics of chemistryand points out how very few chemical elementsindeed, just two, carbon and hydrogenit takes to make a great many of the most useful and ubiquitous compounds.


Gray's other books, on Mad Science, feature him doing impressive and dangerous demonstrations, such as salting popcorn in the smoke formed by bubbling pure chlorine through molten sodium.


Gray is a true egghead: one of the authors of Mathematica software, which does seemingly impossible computation, He's a lifelong amateur chemist, and very good at explaining how things work,
sitelink wolfram. com/books/search .

Some of Gray's insights I've put into Goodreads trivia question form:
sitelink goodreads. com/trivia/auth .