Relearning Chemistry

An evening ritual is to inquire what homework requires assistance, and at the beginning of the year it was a science worksheet as part of an introduction to chemistry.  That, and a later project, have exposed how much rust my knowledge of chemistry has accumulated, but also have led me down the path of repairing forgotten bits and certainly learning some new stuff
That first assignment gave TNG the pleasure of watching his father fulminate about terrible worksheets. This definition wrong! That definition wrong!  This is nonsensical.  After all, I intersect with chemistry every day in my professional life, and I did actually get a minor in it.  So certainly I knew the material.

Well, upon further reflection it was clear that while the definition of isotope had gone through a game of telephone, the rest wasn't too far off.  I haven't thought about these for a while, and certainly hadn't needed to stick to strict definitions.  After all, if ozone has a CAS compound number, it must be a compound, right? I'd forgotten my orbitals and many details of the periodic table.

Just before the winter break, a major assignment was to build a cube with each side containing specific information about a selected element.  My offspring picked tungsten, so off to the library to find anything on tungsten.  Which rather naturally led me to Oliver Sacks' memoir Uncle Tungsten.  Among the mountain of books we brought home were also The Disappearing Spoon and The Ingredients by Phillip Ball.  Reading through these three, and leafing through the wonderful photos in Theodore Gray's The Elements have done me a world of good (The Boy might have picked up a thing or two also!).  Before my momentum runs out, I really should re-read The Making of the Atomic Bomb and dive for the first time into Primo Levi's The Elements.

For one thing, while one of the better parts of eleventh grade chemistry was a bit of history of the development of quantum theory (and Making of the Atomic Bomb is good here too), my memory of it is a bit of Whig history; an essentially steady march towards the modern state of knowledge.  These other books helped fill me in on some of the side detours and missed opportunities -- Fermi and the Joliot-Curies failing to recognize fission, Ida Noddack correctly suggesting fission but not being heard.  Even just the idea that such greats as the Curies were reticent to explain radioactivity in terms of elements changing into other elements is remarkable.  Then there's Oxygen -- I was familiar with Priestley's claim for discovery but not Scheele's, nor was I aware that the individual who awarded that crown to Lavoisier was pretty much Lavoisier.  Dalton objecting to symbolizing elements with mere letters, rather than fanciful runes.  

It was also useful to just try to go back and imagine a world without some familiar concepts.  A world in which atomic weight was a mysterious quantity - why wasn't it always an integer?  A world without neutrons or isotopes?  Or to see the alchemical goal of transmuting base metals into gold as not absurd, but rather something that made sense given their rudimentary theory as to the nature of metals.

So, perhaps next time I'll try to remember this episode and exhibit some more humility.  Maybe -- the previous eruptions were over teaching the archaic five kingdom taxonomic system.  It that shows up again, I won't be able to restrain myself!