Hydrogen: The Essential Element

Seduced by simplicity, physicists find themselves endlessly fascinated by hydrogen, the simplest of atoms. Hydrogen has shocked, it has surprised, it has embarrassed, it has humbled--and again and again it has guided physicists to the edge of new vistas where the promise of basic understanding and momentous insights beckoned. The allure of hydrogen, crucial to life and critical to scientific discovery, is at the center of this book, which tells a story that begins with the big bang and continues to unfold today.

In this biography of hydrogen, John Rigden shows how this singular atom, the most abundant in the universe, has helped unify our understanding of the material world from the smallest scale, the elementary particles, to the largest, the universe itself. It is a tale of startling discoveries and dazzling practical benefits spanning more than one hundred years--from the first attempt to identify the basic building block of atoms in the mid-nineteenth century to the discovery of the Bose-Einstein condensate only a few years ago. With Rigden as an expert and engaging guide, we see how hydrogen captured the imagination of many great scientists--such as Heisenberg, Pauli, Schrödinger, Dirac, and Rabi--and how their theories and experiments with this simple atom led to such complex technical innovations as magnetic resonance imaging, the maser clock, and global positioning systems. Along the way, we witness the transformation of science from an endeavor of inspired individuals to a monumental enterprise often requiring the cooperation of hundreds of scientists around the world.

Still, any biography of hydrogen has to end with a question: What new surprises await us?

I think this kind of humanizing of physics is overdue and marks a welcome development for future efforts in physics writing. Physics is, in the end, a human endeavor and can only be understood in detail when presented as such.

As an example of the difference, I will quote from page 216 in reference to David Schramm-- "David was a first-rate scientist, 'but,' as Margaret Geller has written, 'perhaps more important in this harsh world, he was an extraordinary person of great generosity and kindness.'"

These words are apt for this effort by John Rigden... the book is a work of great generosity and kindness. I look forward to seeing this sentiment be taken up in future works in the field of physics.
August 01, 2003

Hydrogen is element number one, only a single electron orbiting a single proton. Repeatedly Rigden shows that this simplicity has been a boon to research. The lessons learned from this basic atom, in Rigden's story, form a history of physics in the twentieth century. The refinements to theory have largely been to explain the dark bands in the spectrum produce when hydrogen is made to glow. Niels Bohr produced the first modern picture of the atom, incorporating the experimental data from Rutherford and the hydrogen spectrum, but recklessly disregarding the historic laws of physics which he felt could not apply within the atom. He thus began the amazingly successful and fabulously strange quantum explanation for the behavior of matter. Rigden has not just included experimenters and theorizers, but also appealing stories about them, such as I. I. Rabi developing magnetic resonance in the 1930s to measure the nucleus, but then in 1988 being wheeled into a Magnetic Resonance Imaging machine. He said, "It was eerie... I would never have dreamed that my work would come to this." _Hydrogen_ is not just about understanding the inner workings of the atom, but also about hydrogen as the ticker of a clock, as anti-matter, and as a confirmer of big bang cosmology.

There are plenty of challenging chapters here, meant for the non-scientist but not necessarily easy reading. Although the mathematics is not detailed, there are some equations shown that could be intimidating; Dirac's equation, predicting antiparticles and electron spin, Rigden assures us is a "little equation" that can be "written in one line," and while this is true, the line has twenty algebraic symbols in it. Also, surprisingly, there is little about the hydrogen bomb. Rigden decided that the bomb did not fit into the theme of how the hydrogen atom has led and will continue to lead to improved scientific knowledge. His charming and informative book shows how some mysteries have been solved but that we should never come to the conclusion that we are close to knowing all: "After all, H stands not only for hydrogen, but also for humility."
September 08, 2002