“For once, we could find a chemical solution to all the world’s problems.”
A story about elements told by a monster writer who loves chemistry.

The sour taste of the plum wine I drank today is the taste of hydrogen that existed 13 to 14 billion years ago?
Could there be a time when we no longer see helium balloons being carried around for fun at amusement parks?
You can make nuclear weapons with fluorine, or you can fry and eat pancakes with it?
Neon signs are disappearing from the dazzling city streets at night?
Why does our tongue like salty tastes when sodium is said to be harmful to the body?
Is it thanks to humans that we can travel on trains with comfortable seats?

As it turns out, eating, drinking, and playing go hand in hand with the periodic table!

Author Jae-sik Kwak, a science fiction novelist and doctor of engineering, has delved into the realities of atoms in an easy and fun way through a story that is closely related to everyday life, even though we only memorized their names during our school days without knowing where they are or what they are used for.
Adults who finished their school days with the prejudice that chemistry is not fun, and students who find chemistry difficult, will come to realize just how fascinating the world of chemistry is by listening to author Kwak Jae-sik's story.

Hydrogen atoms tend to be positively charged.
Up to here, there is no problem.
There are several more such atoms.
But among them, hydrogen atoms can not only be in a state of being cleanly (+) charged, but they can also be in a strange state of slightly attracting other substances that are prone to being (-) charged, with a feeling of being slightly (+) charged but not quite.
This phenomenon, where hydrogen atoms gently attract other substances that are prone to being (-) charged, is called hydrogen bonding.
Hydrogen bonds are not very strong.
The strength of hydrogen bonds is weak compared to the strength that holds iron atoms together in a block of steel or the strength that holds carbon atoms together in carbohydrate foods.
As a result, the parts connected by hydrogen bonds sometimes stick together slightly, and sometimes fall apart due to other forces.
It is precisely because of these properties that hydrogen can undergo all sorts of complex and strange reactions.
---From "Hydrogen and Plum Wine"

Because hydrogen was created in the Big Bang at the beginning of time and still remains throughout the universe, the human tongue also has the ability to detect hydrogen.
The human tongue perceives a stronger sour taste when there is more positively charged hydrogen.
Orange juice tastes sour and vinegar tastes even sourer, even though it has no taste in plain water. This is because orange juice and vinegar contain a lot of positively charged hydrogen.
So, if you tasted something sour in a food, you can guess that it was hydrogen that was created in the beginning and has been wandering around the universe until it ended up on your tongue.
---From "Hydrogen and Plum Wine"

If there were a planet somewhere far out in space with a peculiarly lithium-rich ocean, organisms growing on that planet might have bodies rich in lithium instead of sodium or potassium.
In such a place, lithium could be easily extracted from the trees, grass, or seawater growing there.
It's just a fantasy, but if aliens live on that planet, they would have developed lightweight, long-lasting batteries long before humans, given their easy access to lithium.
If so, they may be living in a unique culture that embraced smartphones and flying cars much earlier in history.
---From "Lithium and Old Songs"

Given its many uses, boron might seem like a very unusual element, but that's not the case.
It is neither an element that undergoes chemical reactions very well, like lithium or fluorine, nor an element that does not undergo chemical reactions at all, like helium.
It doesn't have the ability to stick together in all sorts of complex shapes like carbon, nor is it an element that is easily accessible because it's so ubiquitous in the air like nitrogen.
It's not a pretty element like gold or silver, and it doesn't even have a unique name like beryllium.
So, I think boron is a bit of an ambiguous element in all aspects.
But if you look closely at the materials made using boron, it seems that they have made amazing use of such ambiguous properties.
---From "Boron and Apple Pie"

This is something that bacteria have been doing continuously since time immemorial, but humans only managed to do it in the early 20th century.
They build factories and install huge machines that use expensive hydrogen gas and high pressure to barely convert nitrogen gas into other substances.
When news finally broke in the early 20th century that humanity had accomplished this, the world was thrilled.
To grow crops well, fertilizers must contain nitrogen atoms and contain substances that are good at causing chemical reactions, but until then, there was no technology to artificially produce such substances.
German scientist who discovered how to make ammonia from nitrogen gas
Scholar Fritz Haber won the Nobel Prize in 1918.
Thanks to Harvard, humanity has finally gained access to a mysterious technology previously only possessed by bacteria.
The use of ammonia, produced from nitrogen gas, as a raw material for chemical fertilizers greatly increased global food production, freeing people from hunger.
---From "Nitrogen and Bath"

Because oxygen gas is so good at causing chemical reactions, oxygen atoms often cause chemical reactions not only when they are attached to each other but also when they are attached to other atoms.
For example, when an oxygen atom is paired with one of the world's most common atoms, hydrogen, it becomes the basic material that can be turned into alcohol.
When oxygen and hydrogen are attached to a substance made of carbon, the atom that shows the most diverse chemical reactions, various alcohol-based substances such as methanol, ethanol, and octanol are created.
Among them, ethanol, the raw material for alcohol, actively causes chemical reactions in our bodies, confusing people, damaging the liver, and even making them send text messages to their ex-lovers in the middle of the night.
---From "Oxygen and Sunbathing"

The periodic table is packed with 118 element names, but when Dmitri Mendeleev published it in 1871, there were far fewer.
The periodic table is a table that lists the names of elements in order from lightest to heaviest, with elements with similar properties arranged in the same vertical row.
But when I organized it according to this principle, there were some boxes where there was nothing to write.
This was a problem that could be considered to be a mistake in the principle of creating the periodic table, as there was a blank space.
However, if you think about it the other way around, you could say that it is not that the periodic table is wrong, but that the elements that fill in the blank spaces have not yet been discovered.
And we can expect that someday a new substance will be discovered to fill that void.
In fact, in 1898, a new substance called neon was discovered to be present in the air at about 0.002%, and this substance truly filled what had seemed to be a gap in the periodic table.
It was 27 years after Mendeleev published the periodic table.
After the discovery of neon, scientists became more convinced of the principle of the periodic table, which states that atoms with similar properties can be grouped together according to certain rules.
And this confidence has been a great help in studying quantum theory, which was the theory behind the rules.
Neon was an important substance that filled the missing piece in the puzzle of scientific advancement.

---From "Neon and the Night Street"