Free The Periodic Table by Primo Levi

assistant welcomed me in the tiny room on the ground floor where he himself lived, and which was bristling with a much different sort of equipment, unknown and exciting enthusiasm.
    Some molecules are carriers of an electrical dipole; they behave in short in an electrical field like minuscule compass needles: they orient themselves, some more sluggishly, others less so. Depending on conditions, they obey certain laws with greater or less respect. Well, now, these devices served to clarify those conditions and that inadequate respect. They were waiting for someone to put them to use; he was busy with other matters (astrophysics, he specified, and the information shook me to the marrow: so I had an astrophysicist right in front of me, in flesh and blood!) and besides he had no experience with certain manipulations which were considered necessary to purify the products that had to be measured; for this a chemist was necessary, and I was the welcomed chemist. He willingly handed over the field to me and the instruments. The field was two square meters of a table and desk; the instruments, a small family, but the most important were the Westphal balance and the heterodyne. The first I already knew; with the second I soon established a friendship. In substance it was a radio-receiving apparatus, built to reveal the slightest differences in frequency; and in fact, it went howlingly out of tune and barked like a watchdog simply if the operator shifted in his chair or moved a hand, or if someone just came into the room. Besides, at certain hours of the day, it revealed a whole intricate universe of mysterious messages, Morse tickings, modulated hisses, and deformed, mangled human voices, which pronounced sentences in incomprehensible languages, or others in Italian, but they were senseless sentences, in code. It was the radiophonic Babel of the war, messages of death transmitted by ships or planes from God knows who to God knows whom, beyond the mountains and the sea.
    Beyond the mountains and the sea, the assistant explained to me, there was a scholar named Onsager, about whom he knew nothing except that he had worked out an equation that claimed to describe the behavior of polar molecules under all conditions, provided that they were in a liquid state. The equation functioned well for diluted solutions; it did not appear that anyone had bothered to verify it for concentrated solutions, pure polar liquids, and mixtures of the latter. This was the work that he proposed I do, to prepare a series of complex liquids and check if they obeyed Onsager’s equation, which I accepted with indiscriminate enthusiasm. As a first step, I would have to do something he did not know how to do: at that time it was not easy to find pure products for analysis, and I was supposed to devote myself for a few weeks to purifying benzene, chlorobenzene, chlorophenols, aminophenols, toluidines, and more.
    A few hours of contact were sufficient for the assistant’s personality to become clearly defined. He was thirty, was recently married, came from Trieste but was of Greek origin, knew four languages, loved music, Huxley, Ibsen, Conrad, and Thomas Mann, the last so dear to me. He also loved physics, but he was suspicious of every activity that set itself a goal: therefore, he was nobly lazy and, naturally, detested Fascism.
    His relationship to physics perplexed me. He did not hesitate to harpoon my last hippogriff, confirming quite explicitly that message about “marginal futility” which we had read in his eyes in the lab. Not only those humble exercises of ours but physics as a whole was marginal, by its nature, by vocation, insofar as it set itself the task of regulating the universe of appearances, whereas the truth, the reality, the intimate essence of things and man exist elsewhere, hidden behind a veil, or seven veils (I don’t remember exactly). He was a physicist, more precisely an astrophysicist, diligent and eager but without illusions: the