Literary Allusions
In his 1891 novel The Doings of Raffles Haw, Arthur Conan Doyle talks about turning elements into other elements of decreasing atomic number, until a gray matter is reached.
In his 1959 novel Life and Fate, Vassily Grossman's principal character, the physicist Viktor Shtrum, reflects on Prout's hypothesis about hydrogen being the origin of other elements (and the felicitous fact that Prout's incorrect data led to an essentially correct conclusion), as he worries about his inability to formulate his own thesis.
Read more about this topic: Prout's Hypothesis
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“Much of the wisdom of the world is not wisdom, and the most illuminated class of men are no doubt superior to literary fame, and are not writers.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)