Chemistry Periodic Table Quotes

This isn't just chemistry. It's the whole periodic table." ~Cain

...better not to do than to do, better to meditate than to act, better his astrophysics, the threshold of the Unknowable, than my chemistry, a mess compounded of stenches, explosions and small futile mysteries. I thought of another moral, more down to earth and concrete, and I believe that every militant chemist can confirm it: that one must distrust the almost-the-same (sodium is almost the same as potassium, but with sodium nothing would have happened_, the practically identical, the approximate, the or-even, all surrogates, and all patchwork. the difference can be small, but they can lead to radically different consequences, like a railroad's switch points; the chemist's trade consists in good part in being aware of these differences, knowing them close up, and foreseeing their effects. And not only the chemist's trade.

Let's get you into a room and conduct our own chemistry experiment," he said against my lips. "Or maybe we'll just find a table to bend you over, since chemists do it on a table... periodically." "Mmm. I love it when you talk nerdy to me.

That the nobility of Man, acquired in a hundred centuries of trial and error, lay in making himself the conquerer of matter, and that I had enrolled in chemistry because I wanted to maintain faithful to that nobility. That conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves: and that therefore Mendeleev’s Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were laboriously learning to unravel, was poetry, loftier and more solemn than all the poetry we had swallowed doen in liceo; and come to think of it, it even rhymed! … [T]he chemistry and physics on which we fed, besides being in themselves nourishments vital in themselves, were the antidotes to Fascism … because they were clear and distinct and verifiable at every step, and not a tissue of lies and emptiness like the radio and newspapers.

For the first time I saw a medley of haphazard facts fall into line and order. All the jumbles and recipes and hotchpotch of the inorganic chemistry of my boyhood seemed to fit into the scheme before my eyes—as though one were standing beside a jungle and it suddenly transformed itself into a Dutch garden. [Upon hearing the Periodic Table explained in a first-tern university lecture.]

Cathedrals of Science: The Personalities and Rivalries That Made Modern Chemistry

it is urgent that my chemical alter ego, so in love with digressions, get back on the rails, which is that of fornicating with matter in order to support myself

I saw you the morning after you met him. You were oozing with so much chemistry you could have recited the periodic table of elements backward.

Here she was at eight, with the chemistry set she’d begged for at Christmas. Her father was beside her in this one, showing her a picture of the periodic table, explaining how everything on earth, everything in the universe, even—people, starfish, cement, bicycles, and far-off planets—was made up of a combination of these elements. “Isn’t it amazing to think of, Ruthie?” he’d asked. Ruthie had found the idea that we were only a series of neatly constructed puzzle pieces or building blocks vaguely unsettling—even at eight, she wanted there to be more to it than that.

Only three of the naturally occurring elements were manufactured in the big bang. The rest were forged in the high-temperature hearts and explosive remains of dying stars, enabling subsequent generations of star systems to incorporate this enrichment, forming planets and, in our case, people. For many, the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements is a forgotten oddity—a chart of boxes filled with mysterious, cryptic letters last encountered on the wall of high school chemistry class. As the organizing principle for the chemical behavior of all known and yet-to-be-discovered elements in the universe, the table instead ought to be a cultural icon, a testimony to the enterprise of science as an international human adventure conducted in laboratories, particle accelerators, and on the frontier of the cosmos itself.

Is there something to the notion "Let me sleep on it."? Mountains of data says there is. For example, Mendeleyev - the creator of the Periodic Table of Elements - says that he came up with this idea in his sleep. Contemplating the nature of the universe while playing Solitaire one evening, he nodded off. When he awoke, he knew how all the atoms in the universe were organised, and he promptly created his famous table. Interestingly, he organised the atoms in repeating groups of seven, just the way you play Solitaire.

Chemistry, for me, had stopped being such a source. It led to the heart of Matter, and Matter was our ally precisely because the Spirit, dear to Fascism, was our enemy; but, having reached the fourth year of Pure Chemistry, I could no longer ignore the fact that chemistry itself, or at least that which we were being administered, did not answer my questions. To prepare phenyl bromide according to Gatterman was amusing, even exhilarating, but not very different from following Artusi's recipes. Why in that particular way and not in another? After having been force fed in liceo the truths revealed by Fascist Doctrine, all revealed, unproven truths either bored me stiff or aroused my suspicion. Did chemistry theorems exist? No; therefore you had to go further, not be satisfied with the quia go back to the origins, to mathematics and physics. The origins of chemistry were ignoble, or at least equivocal: the dens of the alchemists, their abominable hodgepodge of ideas and language, their confessed interest in gold, their Levantine swindles typical of charlatans or magicians; instead, at the origin of physics lay the strenuous clarity of the West – Archimedes and Euclid.

English philosopher Bertrand Russell, another prominent twentieth-century pacifist, once used those medicinal facts about iodine to build a case against the existence of immortal souls. “The energy used in thinking seems to have a chemical origin…,” he wrote. “For instance, a deficiency of iodine will turn a clever man into an idiot. Mental phenomena seem to be bound up with material structure.” In other words, iodine made Russell realize that reason and emotions and memories depend on material conditions in the brain. He saw no way to separate the “soul” from the body, and concluded that the rich mental life of human beings, the source of all their glory and much of their woe, is chemistry through and through.

the strangely elusive and counterintuitive character of the quantum world has encouraged some to suggest that the idea of entities like electrons which can be in unpicturable states such as superpositions of being ‘here’ and being ‘there’ is no more than a convenient manner of speaking which facilitates calculations, and that electrons themselves are not to be taken with ontological seriousness. The counterattack of the scientific realist appeals to intelligibility as the key to reality. It is precisely because the assumption of the existence of electrons allows us to understand a vast range of directly accessible phenomena—such as the periodic table in chemistry, the phenomenon of superconductivity at low temperatures and the behaviour of devices such as the laser—that we take their existence seriously.

[The] structural theory is of extreme simplicity. It assumes that the molecule is held together by links between one atom and the next: that every kind of atom can form a definite small number of such links: that these can be single, double or triple: that the groups may take up any position possible by rotation round the line of a single but not round that of a double link: finally that with all the elements of the first short period [of the periodic table], and with many others as well, the angles between the valencies are approximately those formed by joining the centre of a regular tetrahedron to its angular points. No assumption whatever is made as to the mechanism of the linkage. Through the whole development of organic chemistry this theory has always proved capable of providing a different structure for every different compound that can be isolated. Among the hundreds of thousands of known substances, there are never more isomeric forms than the theory permits.

It is a pretty structure, isn’t it? It makes you think of something solid, stable, well linked. In fact it happens in chemistry as in architecture that ‘beautiful’ edifices, that is symmetrical and simple, are also the most sturdy: in short, the same thing happens with molecules as with the cupolas of cathedrals of the arches of bridges. And it is also possible that the explanation is neither remote nor metaphysical: to say ‘beautiful’ is to say ‘desirable’, and ever since man has built he has wanted to build at the smallest expense and in the most durable fashion, and the aesthetic enjoyment he experiences when contemplating his work comes afterward. Certainly, it has not always been this way: there have been centuries in which ‘beauty’ was identified with adornment, the superimposed, the frills; but it is probable that they were deviant epochs and that the true beauty, in which every century recognises itself, is found in upright stones, ships’ hulls, the blade of an axe, the wing of a plane.

... and finally there came the customer we'd always dreamed of, who wanted us as consultants. To be a consultant is the ideal work, the sort from which you derive prestige and money without dirtying your hands, or breaking your backbone, or running the risk of ending up roasted or poisoned: all you have to do is take off your smock, put on your tie, listen in attentive silence to the problem, and then you'll feel like the Delphic oracle. You must then weigh your reply very carefully and formulate it in convoluted, vague language so that the customer also considers you an oracle, worthy of his faith and the rates set by the Chemists' Society.

Her muscles clearly were not just for show. She pulled him into an empty chemistry classroom and closed the door. There were workstations and beakers and sinks with high faucets. A giant chart of the periodic table of elements, both a staple of every science classroom and a cliché, dominated the far wall. “Where is she?” Kristin asked. Adam wasn’t sure how to play it, so he went with honesty. “I don’t know.” “How can you not know?” “We were supposed to meet for dinner last night. She never showed.” “She just didn’t . . . ?” Kristin shook her head in confusion. “Did you call the police?” “What? No.” “Why not?” “I don’t know. She sent a text. She said she needed some time away.” “From what?” Adam just looked at her. Kristin said, “You?” “Seems so.” “Oh. Sorry.” Kristin stepped back, chastened. “So why are you here?” “Because I want to make sure she’s okay. I figured she’d be at work. She never calls in sick.” “Never,

Metal atoms are bound together by metallic bonding. That is not just a tautology. The clue to its nature is the fact that all the metals lie towards the left-hand side of the Periodic Table where, as we have seen, the atoms of the elements have only a few electrons in their outermost cloud layers and which are readily lost. To envisage metallic bonding, think of all these outermost electrons as slipping off the parent atom and congregating in a sea that pervades the whole slab of atoms. The cations that are left behind lie in this sea and interact favourably with it. As a result, all the cations are bound together in a solid mass. That mass is malleable because, like an actual sea, it can respond readily to a shift in the positions of the cations in the mass when they are struck by a hammer. The electrons also allow the metal to be drawn out into a wire, by responding immediately to the relocation of the cations. As the electrons in the sea are not pinned down to particular atoms, they are mobile and can migrate through the solid in response to an electric field. Metals are lustrous because the electrons of the sea can respond to the shaking caused by the electric field of an incident ray of light, and that oscillation of the sea in turn generates light that we perceive as reflection. When we gaze into the metal coating of a mirror, we are watching the waves in the metal’s electron sea.

And I often dream of chemistry at night, dreams that conflate the past and the present, the grid of the periodic table transformed to the grid of Manhattan. […] Sometimes, too, I dream of the indecipherable language of tin (a confused memory, perhaps, of its plaintive “cry”). But my favorite dream is of going to the opera (I am Hafnium), sharing a box at the Met with the other heavy transition metals—my old and valued friends—Tantalum, Rhenium, Osmium, Iridium, Platinum, Gold, and Tungsten.

I’m smart, right? I should be able to come up with a solid plan as to how I can get back to the twenty-first century. The trouble is I’m lost without Wikipedia and Google. I know all sorts of things, of course, but none of it is useful: the periodic table of elements, how to factor a math equation with four different variables, the symbiotic relationship between the great white shark and the remora fish. Completely useless, random information. Even a year of advanced chemistry isn’t going to do me any good; it’s not like there’s a chapter in there about time travel. I get up off the bed and creep to the door and peek out. No one is around. I’ll just explore the house. Maybe there really is a phone hidden somewhere that will prove Emily is lying about 1815. Or maybe I’ll find a servant in some Old Navy jeans.

Why are precisely these elements listed there, and why does the periodic table have this particular structure, with these periods, and with the elements having these specific properties? The answer is that each element corresponds to one solution of the main equation of quantum mechanics. The whole of chemistry emerges from a single equation.

Le differenze possono essere piccole, ma portare a conseguenze radicalmente diverse, come gli aghi degli scambi; il mestiere del chimico consiste in buona parte nel guardarsi da queste differenze, nel conoscerle da vicino, nel prevederne gli effetti. Non solo il mestiere del chimico.

In chemistry, Muslim scientists carried out perfume distillation, glass making, minting of coins and grouping chemicals based on chemical characteristics, which later on led to the modern periodic tables. In 780, Jabir ibn Hayyan, a Muslim chemist who is considered by many to be the father of chemistry, introduced the experimental scientific method for chemistry, as well as laboratory apparatus such as the alembic, still and retort, and chemical processes such as sublimation, distillation, liquefaction, crystallisation, and filtration. Ibn Hayyan also identified many substances including sulphuric and nitric acids. Al-Jazari developed mechanical devices like watermills and water wheels to ease water management.

In many cases, the theory in question is too difficult to apply, and so scientists tend to base their work on models and approximations. The full acceptance of this fact has produced a subdiscipline that studies the nature of scientific models.16 And yet, as I argue in this book, the periodic table of chemistry is neither a theory nor a model but more akin to an “organizing principle,” for want of a better term. This book is partly an attempt to encourage philosophers of science to study the periodic table as an example of yet another scientific entity that does a lot of useful scientific work without being a theory.17

We —I mean to say we mammals — who in general do not have problems about obtaining water, have learned to wedge it into the urea molecule, which is soluble in water, and as urea we free ourselves of it; other animals, for whom water is precious (or it was for their distant progenitors), have made the ingenious invention of packaging their nitrogen in the form of uric acid, which is insoluble in water, and of eliminating it as a solid, with no necessity of having recourse to water as a vehicle. In an analogous fashion one thinks today of eliminating urban garbage by pressing it into blocks, which can be carried to the dumps or buried inexpensively.

I dashed to the library at the first opportunity; I refer to the venerable library of the University of Turin's Chemical Institute, at that time, like Mecca, impenetrable to infidels and even hard to penetrate for such faithful as I. One had to think that the administration followed the wise principle according to which it is good to discourage the arts and sciences: only someone impelled by absolute necessity, or by an overwhelming passion, would willingly subject himself to the trials of abnegation that were demanded of him in order to consult the volumes. The library's schedule was brief and irrational, the lighting dim, the file cards in disorder; in the winter, no heat; no chairs but uncomfortable and noisy metal stools; and finally, the librarian was an incompetent, insolent boor of exceeding ugliness.

2 e- --> Cu, the Cu2

better not to do than to do, better to meditate than to act, better his astrophysics, the threshold of the Unknowable, than my chemistry, a mess compounded of stenches, explosions, and small futile mysteries

There’s a reason for yttrium on this planet. We don’t need much, but we probably need some.

physical change

Lavoisier did not begin as a chemist, however. He first studied to be a lawyer, just like his father. But someone persuaded him to sit in on a very popular chemistry course, and young Lavoisier never thought of being a lawyer again.

T-shirt that showed Chuck Norris destroying the periodic table. It read, The only element I believe in is the element of surprise.

Alchemy, however, began in the first century BC, most probably in Egypt. Indeed, scholars believe that the “chem” in alchemy (and hence in chemistry) is from a Coptic word “khem” which means the Black Land, that is, Egypt, for after the Nile River rises and floods the land each year, it looks black. That alchemy probably began in Egypt makes sense. The Egyptians were some of the best metal workers of the ancient world. From

The notion that electromagnetic energy exists as discrete packets of energy rather than a continuous stream became the foundation on which physicists erected what is inarguably the most successful (and strangest) theory in the history of science. The laws of quantum physics not only replicate all the successes of the classical theory they supplanted (that is, a quantum calculation produces an answer at least as accurate as a classical one in problems ranging from the fall of an apple to the flight of a spaceship). They also succeed where the laws of classical physics fail. It is quantum physics, not classical physics, that explains the burning of stars, accounts for the structure of elementary particles, predicts the order of elements in the periodic table, and describes the physics of the newborn universe. Although devised to explain atomic and electromagnetic phenomena, quantum physics has “yielded a deep understanding of chemistry and the solid state,” noted the physicist Daniel Greenberger, a leading quantum theorist: quantum physics spawned quantum technologies, including transistors, lasers, semiconductors, light-emitting diodes, scans, PET scans, and MRI machines.

Well, take the equation of quantum mechanics that determines the form of the orbitals of an electron. This equation has a certain number of solutions, and these solutions correspond exactly to: hydrogen, helium, oxygen...and the other elements! Mendeleev's periodic table is structured exactly like the set of these solutions. The properties of the elements, with everything else, follows from the solution of this equation. Quantum mechanics deciphers perfectly the secret of the structure of the periodic table of elements. Pythagoras and Plato's ancient dream is realized: to describe all of the world's substances with a single formula. The infinite complexity of chemistry, captured by the solutions of a single equation! And this is just one of the applications of quantum mechanics.

One fun thing I began to incorporate as the children hit middle and high school was the mini-indoor trampoline.  I think we wore out a few of them as we learned difficult concepts in biology, chemistry, and algebra.  Taking a moment to bounce out our frustration, or help memorize 150 prepositions, the Periodic table of the Elements, or just jumping out the wiggles is something that was invaluable for us!