From the Archives: Oliver Sacks' Table of Elements
As we're busy working on our next episode, with stories inspired by the Periodic Table of Elements, we thought we'd bring you one of its chief inspirations. As a young boy, neurologist, author and Radiolab favorite Oliver Sacks pored over the pages of the Handbook of Physics and Chemistry, fantasizing about the day that he, like the shy gas Xenon, would find a companion with whom to connect and share. That companion turned out to be the Periodic Table of the Elements itself, a relationship he's never outgrown. He introduces us to the elements that he's known and loved.
- Duration
- 18m
- Broadcast on
- 06 Aug 2015
- Audio Format
- other
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As we're busy working on our next episode, with stories inspired by the Periodic Table of Elements, we thought we'd bring you one of its chief inspirations. As a young boy, neurologist, author and Radiolab favorite Oliver Sacks pored over the pages of the Handbook of Physics and Chemistry, fantasizing about the day that he, like the shy gas Xenon, would find a companion with whom to connect and share. That companion turned out to be the Periodic Table of the Elements itself, a relationship he's never outgrown. He introduces us to the elements that he's known and loved.
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Oh, wait, you're listening to Radio Lab from WNYC. So, okay, ready? Mm-hmm. Hey, I'm Jad Abumran. I'm Robert Krollich. This is Radio Lab. And we're getting ready for, well, this whole podcast you're about to hear is an invitation to you. Join us in the next podcast. We will be going... Happy Birthday! Not a second year! This is not... I hate Facebook. I hate that everybody knows this, and there's so many of them. Jesus! Happy Birthday to you, ladies and gentlemen, are witnessing the death of privacy! Yes, that happened. We thought we'd throw it in. Anyhow, back to the flow. So, I'm Jad. I'm Robert Krollich. It was Radio Lab. And this particular episode is more or less an invitation for you to get ready for the next episode. Yeah, today we have a preview of an episode that we are working on furiously right now about the periodic table of elements. We're going to tell individual stories about the different elements and those stories are going to take us into outer space, into deep, man-made holes in the middle of America, into ourselves, all kinds of places. So this week we decided to make a small telescope preview in which we go to one apartment in one building in the city of New York, occupied by the rather singular Dr. Oliver Sad. We should say this was a visit we paid to him about six, seven years ago, I think. And this is the story that, in a very real way, inspired us to do this upcoming episode about the elements. And we also know, by the way, that Oliver isn't feeling so well right now, which makes it particularly wonderful to hear him enjoy. Off we go. There's always been a desire to somehow categorize and classify the world around us. Remember it? And when you were in, I don't know when it would be, like in eighth grade, when the teacher comes in and general science and he pulls down the periodic table of elements, remember that? Oh, yeah, sure. I mean, that was one of the first times where I was like, yeah, I don't want to be a scientist. It's not for me. But for kids who love this kind of thing, take Oliver Sacks, for example. Yeah, so a couple of years ago we had went to talk to Oliver Sacks about something. Well, I was actually mostly you that was going to talk to him and I was just tacking along for the hell of it.
Transcription truncated.
As we're busy working on our next episode, with stories inspired by the Periodic Table of Elements, we thought we'd bring you one of its chief inspirations. As a young boy, neurologist, author and Radiolab favorite Oliver Sacks pored over the pages of the Handbook of Physics and Chemistry, fantasizing about the day that he, like the shy gas Xenon, would find a companion with whom to connect and share. That companion turned out to be the Periodic Table of the Elements itself, a relationship he's never outgrown. He introduces us to the elements that he's known and loved.