From the Archives: Oliver Sacks' Table of Elements

Summary

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Episode Summary: Radiolab – "From the Archives: Oliver Sacks' Table of Elements"

Date: August 6, 2015
Host(s): Jad Abumrad, Robert Krulwich
Guest: Dr. Oliver Sacks

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Overview

In this warm, curious, and intimate episode, Radiolab dives into the world of the periodic table through a personal tour of Dr. Oliver Sacks’ New York apartment. Blending scientific lore, personal fascination, and a dash of whimsy, the hosts use Sacks’ idiosyncratic home as a window into the order and wonder within the elements. The episode offers a precursor for a forthcoming series on the periodic table, but stands beautifully alone thanks to Sacks’ awe and lifelong affection for chemistry’s fundamental building blocks.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

A Home Filled with Elements

• [03:00-04:00] Upon entering Sacks’ apartment, the hosts discover his deep obsession with the periodic table, evident in every room.
  • Bathroom: Periodic table chart on the wall.
  • Living Room: Cushions embroidered with the table.
  • Bedroom: Periodic table comforter.
  • Centerpiece: A mahogany box containing vials of actual elements.
• Sacks explains:

  “I tend to sleep here, right under tungsten.” – Oliver Sacks, [03:27]

The Mahogany Box of Elements

• [03:39-04:59] The heart of the visit is Sacks’ curated wooden box:

  “Little tubes, little samples, little teeny vials of almost all the elements.” – Oliver Sacks, [04:20]

  • Sacks celebrates his 72nd birthday, noting Hafnium is element 72:

    “Since I'm, for example, having my 72nd birthday tomorrow. And element 72 is hafnium. There is a little hafnium...” – Oliver Sacks, [04:43]

  • He delights in the tangible, "sensuous" experience of chemistry, recalling his childhood fascination:

    "My first love of chemistry had to do with the sensuous...the lustre, pale, golden, mercury. Very, very beautiful." – Oliver Sacks, [04:59]

Elements as the World’s Building Blocks

• [05:25-06:04] Jad reflects on the profoundness of the physical table vs. a wall chart:

  “Everything that we can see and perceive...it's all made of some combination of elements from that box.” – Jad Abumrad, [05:42]

  • The table represents not just scientific abstraction, but the tangible world and its underlying order.

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The Origin Story of the Periodic Table

Ancient Simplicity to Modern Marvel

• [06:34-07:47] Sacks recounts how ancient thinkers imagined only four elements (earth, air, fire, water), which chemistry later expanded to dozens, each with unique properties.
  • The central puzzle: are chemical elements’ patterns random, or is there deeper order?

Mendeleev and the Dream

• [07:54-10:56]
  • Sacks introduces his hero, Dmitri Mendeleev, “the Siberian bigamist.”
    • Mendeleev used playing cards on Russian train rides to sort elements by their properties and search for underlying order.
    • [10:38-11:01] The pivotal moment: Mendeleev dreams the schema of the periodic table, awakening with his vision and scribbling it on an envelope.

    “He awoke with a vision of the periodic table.” – Oliver Sacks, [10:56]

Periodicity and Patterns

• [11:01-11:53]
  • Jad and Robert explain the table's simple genius: as elements get heavier, their properties periodically repeat.
    • Jad:

      "...while they're getting heavier, their other traits, like whether they're shy or magnetic, repeat periodically..." [11:22]

  • The table is infinitely rich—"a table that you can read in a million ways." – Robert Krulwich, [11:41]

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Personal Connections and Metaphor

The “Inert” Kid

• [11:59-13:13]
  • Sacks draws a moving parallel between his own childhood shyness and the noble gases:

    “I was a rather shy kid with difficulty forming relationships. And I sometimes compared myself to the inert gases.” – Oliver Sacks, [11:59]

    • He delighted to discover, years later, that chemists had managed to combine xenon (the loner gas) with fluorine, showing that even the most isolated elements (and people) could form bonds.
    • Robert:

      “This lonely, lonely gas might find a partner somehow.” [12:55]
      Sacks:
      “Yeah.” [12:58]
      “…it came to me with great joy when I found out in the 1960s that actually a Canadian chemist had…made a fluoride of xenon.” [13:00]

Mendeleev as Moses

• [13:20-14:18]
  • Sacks shares an imaginative painting depicting Mendeleev as a kind of Moses, descending from a “chemical Sinai” with the periodic law etched in stone tablets.
  • Quote:

    “I imagined Mendeleev as a sort of Moses going up to a chemical Sinai and coming down with the tablets of the periodic law.” – Oliver Sacks, [13:41]

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Deep Philosophical Questions

• [14:18-15:01]
  • Robert raises the essential mystery: Did Mendeleev invent the periodic table, or discover a pre-existing cosmic order?
  • Sacks ponders:

    “Is the periodic table a discovery or an invention? Is it a human construct, or is it a revelation of the cosmic or divine order? Is it, so to speak, God's abacus?” – Oliver Sacks, [14:33]

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Notable Quotes

• Oliver Sacks: “I think there's always been a desire to somehow categorize and classify the world around us.” [02:06]
• Robert Krulwich (on Mendeleev): “Generally, if you met him on the sidewalk, you'd probably want to walk around him.” [08:16]
• Jad Abumrad: “I mean, everything that we can see and perceive...it's all made of some combination of elements from that box.” [05:42]
• Oliver Sacks: “Is the periodic table a discovery or an invention?...Is it, so to speak, God’s abacus?” [14:33]

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Memorable Moments (with Timestamps)

• [03:02] – Sacks nonchalantly reveals he has a periodic table in every bathroom.
• [03:43] – The hosts encounter Sacks’ “altar”: the beautiful, tactile periodic box.
• [10:38-11:01] – The magical origin story of the periodic table: Mendeleev’s dream.
• [11:59] – Sacks relates to the inert gases as a shy child—and the later scientific realization that even the most isolated atoms aren’t truly alone.
• [13:41] – Sacks’ vision of Mendeleev as Moses, dramatizing the border between scientific insight and revelation.
• [14:33] – The episode’s philosophical crescendo: What is the periodic table’s ultimate nature?

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Time | Segment Description | |-------------|---------------------------------------------------------| | 02:06 | Sacks on humanity's drive to classify | | 03:00-04:00 | Tour of Sacks' periodic commonplaces and his element box | | 04:59 | Sacks’ “sensuous” love of chemistry | | 05:42 | Philosophical meaning of the periodic table | | 07:54 | Mendeleev’s introduction and portrait description | | 10:38-11:01 | Mendeleev’s dream of the periodic table | | 11:59-12:13 | Sacks as the “inert gas kid” | | 13:41 | Painting of Moses-like Mendeleev | | 14:33 | Is the periodic table discovered or invented? |

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Tone & Style

The episode brims with curiosity, reverence, and humor. Sacks’ gentle British wit, Krulwich’s irreverent asides, and Jad’s thoughtful observations combine for an atmosphere that’s both welcoming and wonder-filled. The hosts’ playfulness and Sacks’ childlike awe serve as an invitation to explore not just the world of elements, but the greater philosophical questions of science itself.

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For New Listeners

This episode is a loving, personal meditation on the periodic table—one part science, one part biography, and one part philosophical reverie. Through Oliver Sacks’ home and mind, Radiolab reminds us that behind every chart and scientific breakthrough lies a story of human longing, discovery, and beauty.

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Transcript

[Robert Krulwich]

Oh, wait, you're listening.

[Caller]

Okay.

[Robert Krulwich]

All right.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay. All right, you're listening to Radiolab Radio Lab from wnyc. So, okay, ready?

[Robert Krulwich]

Mm.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krolwich, this is Radiolab and.

[Robert Krulwich]

We'Re getting ready for. Well, this whole podcast you're about to hear is an invitation to join us in the next podcast we will be going.

[Jad Abumrad]

Happy birthday.

[Robert Krulwich]

Not a second year. This is not.

[Oliver Sacks]

I hate Facebook.

[Robert Krulwich]

I hate that everybody knows this and there's so many of them. Jesus. Happy birthday to you. You ladies and gentlemen, are witnessing the death of privacy.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yes. So that happened. We thought we'd throw it in anyhow, back to the flow.

[Robert Krulwich]

So I'm Jed. I'm Robert, this is Radiolab. And this particular episode is more or less an invitation for you to get ready for the next episode.

[Jad Abumrad]

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 and into deep man made holes in the middle of America, into our cells, all kinds of places.

[Robert Krulwich]

So this week we've decided to make a small telescoped preview in which we go to one apartment in one building in the city of New York occupied by the rather singular Dr. Oliver Sacks, we should say.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Robert Krulwich]

And we also know, by the way, that Oliver isn't, isn't feeling so well right now, which makes it particularly wonderful to hear him in Joy.

[Jad Abumrad]

Off we go.

[Oliver Sacks]

I think there's always been a desire to somehow categorize and classify the world around us.

[Robert Krulwich]

Remember when you were in, I don't know when. It would be like in eighth grade when the teacher comes in in general science and he pulls down the periodic table of elements.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Robert Krulwich]

But for kids who love this kind of thing, take Oliver Sachs for example. Yeah. Chad, you should come in.

[Jad Abumrad]

I should come in.

[Robert Krulwich]

Okay.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah. So a couple years ago we had went to talk to Oliver Sacks about something. Well, it was actually mostly you that he was going to talk to him and I was just tacking along for the hell of it. And for some reason we ended up in his bathroom.

[Oliver Sacks]

I Tend to read a little bit.

[Jad Abumrad]

In the toilet, maybe to look at a book or something.

[Robert Krulwich]

There are any acknowledgements.

[Jad Abumrad]

He seems to have facts and figures.

[Oliver Sacks]

In his as well.

[Jad Abumrad]

There's a lot of us in there. I'm sorry.

[Robert Krulwich]

Sorry.

[Jad Abumrad]

And that's when we noticed you have.

[Robert Krulwich]

The periodic tried in the bathroom.

[Oliver Sacks]

In every bathroom.

[Robert Krulwich]

That he had a periodic table of the elements on the wall in the bathroom.

[Jad Abumrad]

We thought, wow, how funny. Periodic table in the bathroom. But then he said, well, you know, if you go out onto the couch, you'll see periodic table cushions, some cushions embroidered with the periodic table. And then he took us to his bedroom.

[Oliver Sacks]

Although I don't usually take people into my bedroom.

[Robert Krulwich]

Oh, we'll come.

[Jad Abumrad]

Where he showed us his periodic table comforter.

[Oliver Sacks]

I tend to sleep here, right under tungst.

[Jad Abumrad]

But the cool part was when he took us to the living room where he had this.

[Robert Krulwich]

Describe what isn't before us here. It looks like an altar.

[Jad Abumrad]

It's like a little dictionary stand. On top of which was a beautiful.

[Oliver Sacks]

Mahogany box, a fine wooden box about.

[Jad Abumrad]

The size of a backgammon set called.

[Oliver Sacks]

Periodic table of the elements.

[Robert Krulwich]

It is a very fine wooden box.

[Oliver Sacks]

And if you care to open it.

[Robert Krulwich]

It'S made of some sort of fine wood.

[Oliver Sacks]

It comes from Russia.

[Robert Krulwich]

Does all right. Is there a trick to opening this? Okay. We've all seen the periodic table on a chart, but in Oliver's box there, there were the actual elements. These are all these. We have here, like 90 some odd.

[Oliver Sacks]

Little tubes, little samples, little teeny vials of almost all the elements. Silver, arse, bismuth, cobalt, oxygen, copper, hydrogen, phosphorus, iron, manganese, mercury, nitrogen, molybdenum, gold. Since I'm, for example, having my 72nd birthday tomorrow. And element 72 is hafnium. There is a little hafnium, two little rocks.

[Robert Krulwich]

Here's what they sound like if you rattle them.

[Oliver Sacks]

I have coming to me, I hope it arrives today, an ingot of hafnium, which would be very much more satisfying.

[Robert Krulwich]

What would you do with an ingot that you can't do with the two little pebbles?

[Oliver Sacks]

I'll be able to hold it in my hand. My first love of chemistry had to do with the sensuous here. One of the liquid elements drew me. I loved the colors faintly. Brown, fluidy thing, the lustre, pale, golden, mercury. Very, very beautiful. The physical properties.

[Robert Krulwich]

This is a gas trapped in a little vial.

[Oliver Sacks]

Yes, One wouldn't want to drop that.

[Robert Krulwich]

Why not?

[Oliver Sacks]

Well, it's not good to breathe.

[Jad Abumrad]

Can I just jump in here for a second?

[Robert Krulwich]

Sure.

[Jad Abumrad]

Because I really need to jump in. But the thing that's really crazy about that box and this you don't get from looking at a periodoc chart on a wall, is that all those elements.

[Oliver Sacks]

Lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon, nitrogen, that's like the world.

[Jad Abumrad]

I mean, everything that we can see and perceive. This table right here, the teeth in my mouth, the sky, the ocean, the mountains, it's all made of some combination of elements from that box. And the box itself gives it all a deep, deep order.

[Oliver Sacks]

I had noticed myself and can't help noticing that the elements are organized in a very special sort of way. For example.

[Robert Krulwich]

May I? Excuse me. If you want. I have managed to not notice. I find it a little odd that you could organize them at all. I don't even know how to begin the process of figuring out they are related in some way.

[Oliver Sacks]

Well, then you are sort of recapitulating what, you know, what everyone felt in the early days.

[Jad Abumrad]

Of course, in the really early days, people thought there were just four elements.

[Oliver Sacks]

The ancient notion of elements took the form of earth, air, fire and water. Basically the thought that the whole world could be composed of these four ingredients in different ways.

[Jad Abumrad]

But then in the 18th century, we're skipping ahead a bit. Chemists began to break things down into smaller pieces, like wind became gases, like.

[Oliver Sacks]

Oxygen and hydrogen and nitrogen.

[Jad Abumrad]

And earth got divided up into things.

[Oliver Sacks]

Like sulfur, phosphorus, iron.

[Jad Abumrad]

And eventually chemists got all the way down to the root of it, which was the atom. That's really what an element is. It's a particular kind of atom. The problem was though, when chemists began to start measuring these atoms, they found that they were all different sizes and types. Like one would be heavy, another would be light, third one be really friendly, likes to link up with other atoms. Whereas the fourth would be loner. And they would come in combinations like heavy, friendly, heavy, shy, light, friendly, light, shine. What was the pattern? That was the question. Could they fit all of these differences and similarities into one big schema?

[Oliver Sacks]

Since we mentioned his name, let me here show you a picture of the.

[Jad Abumrad]

Here's where we get to Oliver's hero.

[Oliver Sacks]

The Siberian bigamist, as he was called.

[Jad Abumrad]

That would be Dmitri Mendeleev, the great.

[Oliver Sacks]

Mendeleev, whom we will talk about.

[Robert Krulwich]

Oliver has a black and white picture of him on his kitchen cabinet. This man is not going to win any beauty contest.

[Oliver Sacks]

No, he looks like a mixture between Rasputin and. Who do I mean?

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, you mean he has a big nose, a shaggy, slightly unkempt white beard. A mustache that goes all over the place, plays piercing eyes, thick eyebrows, and looks like he's in a hunchback position. Generally, if you met him on the sidewalk, you'd probably want to walk around him.

[Oliver Sacks]

Yeah, he didn't believe in wasting time going to a barber.

[Robert Krulwich]

Let me just ask you, as the degree of your passion, when you look at this man, do you think he's a beautiful looking guy or do you see what I see?

[Oliver Sacks]

I think Mendeleev had a beautiful mind.

[Robert Krulwich]

And when that mind gets on a train, and it was a long, long ride from Irkutsk to Moscow, strange things will happen. As you're about to hear. We'll be right back.

[Jad Abumrad]

My name's Anneliese, and I'm calling right before going to bed in Des Moines, Iowa. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about [e-mail]. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm Robert Krulwich.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Radiolab.

[Robert Krulwich]

And we're gonna go back to Oliver Sacks talking about his hero. Dmitri Mendeleev now about to take a trip.

[Oliver Sacks]

Okay. In 1860, around 1860, there were trains going all over Russia. And Mendeleev could afford to take trains. He was often on enormous journeys. And to while away the time, since he couldn't do chemical experiments or whatever, he would take playing cards with the name of various elements, their chemical and physical properties. And he would play what he called.

[Robert Krulwich]

Chemical solitaire, sorting them for likeness or.

[Oliver Sacks]

Sorting, I'm afraid I don't know the details.

[Jad Abumrad]

But you know what we can imagine, right?

[Robert Krulwich]

Sure.

[Jad Abumrad]

So let's just say he's sitting there on the train. He's looking out the window, sees trees made of carbon, a lake made of hydrogen and oxygen.

[Robert Krulwich]

Hydrogen, oxygen.

[Jad Abumrad]

Behind that, a mountain made of silica.

[Oliver Sacks]

And he's shuffling their properties and their atomic weights in his mind, wondering how.

[Robert Krulwich]

Do these things go together?

[Jad Abumrad]

What's the pattern? And he's shuffling. I'm shuffling, shuffling, shuffling, shuffling, shuffling, shuffling. And he did this for years. Until one night, this we think, is true.

[Oliver Sacks]

In February of 1869, he is said to have had a dream.

[Jad Abumrad]

In his dream, all the atoms of all the elements of all the world, the fat ones, the small ones, the dense ones, the heavy ones, the friendly ones, the shy ones, they all began to dance in his mind. And then they snapped into a grid.

[Oliver Sacks]

He awoke with a vision of the periodic table.

[Robert Krulwich]

This is one of those dreams which.

[Oliver Sacks]

He Then wrote on the back of an envelope.

[Jad Abumrad]

The thing about what he wrote on the back of that envelope is that it starts out so simply left to right, the atoms just get heavier and.

[Robert Krulwich]

Heavier and heavier, heavier, heavier.

[Jad Abumrad]

But every so often, and this is what he intuited in his dream, is that while they're getting heavier, their other traits, like whether they're shy or magnetic or whatever, those traits repeat periodically, change back again, and every time they do.

[Robert Krulwich]

Start a new row, the properties repeat.

[Jad Abumrad]

Again out of this simple repeating structure.

[Robert Krulwich]

Very nice.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hush, Mendeleev. You get a table that you can read in a million ways. There are so many ways to read this table.

[Robert Krulwich]

I think I'm going to call this the Periodic table, that if you use.

[Jad Abumrad]

Your imagination, you can see yourself in there.

[Oliver Sacks]

I was a rather shy kid with difficulty forming relationships. And I sometimes compared myself to the inert gases.

[Robert Krulwich]

Inert gases are very isolated.

[Oliver Sacks]

They react with nothing because I felt they too had difficulties forming relationships. But I did.

[Robert Krulwich]

He has now left the chair and has moved to the library. He's taking out any hugely thick, actually a dangerously thick book.

[Oliver Sacks]

This is the Handbook of Physics and Chemistry. As you see, it has 5,000 pages. I had a smaller version as a boy. And from brooding in this book, it seemed to me just possible that one of the inert gases, xenon, might be seduced into combination by the most active element of all, which was fluorine.

[Robert Krulwich]

This lonely, lonely gas might find a partner somehow.

[Oliver Sacks]

Yeah.

[Robert Krulwich]

Did they ever get together?

[Oliver Sacks]

In fact, it came to me with great joy when I found out in the 1960s that actually a Canadian chemist had in fact made a fluoride of xenon. Ah.

[Robert Krulwich]

Ah, yes. Elemental love. And speaking of love, he then took us, I think.

[Oliver Sacks]

Let's come here one sec.

[Robert Krulwich]

Where are we going? To the living room. And he showed us a small painting. In the painting, there was this dramatic figure of a bearded, scowling character on the side of a mountain holding two stone tablets over his head. And the sky was filled with lightning. And who was it? It was Dmitri Mendeleev.

[Oliver Sacks]

When I heard of how Mendeleev had discovered the periodic table, I imagined Mendeleev as a sort of Moses going up to a chemical Sinai and coming down with the tablets of the periodic law. And when I mentioned this fantasy to Peter Selgin, my friend, an artist, he did this imaginative picture of the young Mendeleev, the peaks of a chemical cyanide, behind him, holding aloft the tablets of the Periodic table.

[Robert Krulwich]

Which raises maybe the deepest question of all, did Mendeleev think this up and impose it upon the world, or was this pattern always there? In which case Mendeleev just removed the veil and said, oh, there you are.

[Oliver Sacks]

Is the periodic table a discovery or an invention? Is it a human construct, or is it a revelation of the cosmic or divine order? Is it, so to speak, God's abacus?

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay, so that was our visit with. Wow, did I just get carried away with the sound?

[Robert Krulwich]

Yes, it is a little bit closet cluttered, but it was a long time ago.

[Jad Abumrad]

It was a long time ago. Anyhow, that was our visit to Oliver Sacks. And also a preview to an upcoming episode that we're making right now about Elements, which we're really excited about.

[Robert Krulwich]

I hope you'll be back for that. In the meantime, I'm Robert Krulwich. I'm Jad Abumrad and this is Radiolab.

[Jad Abumrad]

Thanks for listening.

[Caller]

Hi, this is Jumana calling from Khubar, Saudi Arabia. Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad. Our staff includes Brenna Farrell, Ellen Horn, David Gable, Dylan Keefe, Matt Kielty, Andy Mills, Lateef Nasser, Kelsey Patchett, Ariane Wack, Molly Webster, Cyrin Wheeler and Jamie York, with help from Damiano Marchetti, Molly McBride Jacobson, Alexandra Lee Young, Kathy Tu and Simon Adler. Our fact checkers are Eva Dasher and Michelle Harris.