Price: Free
To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Primo Levi’s 1975 literary-scientific memoir The Periodic Table, Ian Thomson discusses the life of the Italian writer-chemist and his legacy today.
When he was 16, Levi was inspired to become a chemist when he read ‘Concerning the Nature of Things’, by William Henry Bragg – joint winner with his son William Lawrence Bragg of the 1915 Nobel Prize for Physics. This book was based on Bragg’s 1925 Christmas Lectures at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and explains the nature of atoms, metal, gases, diamonds, ice, crystals, liquids, and other aspects of science.
Ian Thomson is an English author, best known for his biography Primo Levi (2002), and reportage, The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica (2009). He is a senior lecturer at the University of East Anglia. You can read more about him on the University of East Anglia website and on his personal website.
