November 21, 2023 • 47 mins
If you’ve ever wanted to listen to two totally untrained, non-chemists who are fully unqualified to explain how the periodic table works nervously explain how the periodic table works, then this episode is for you. Chemistry majors, be warned.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Que Josh Trumpet. But you know what that means, everybody.
We are going back on tour again. We are hitting
the road next year in January for our annual Pacific
Northwest and Northern California Swing, and we will be at
the Paramount Theater in Seattle on January twenty fourth, Revolution
Hall and Portland on the twenty fifth, and our home
(00:22):
away from home at San Francisco's Sketch Fest on January
twenty six.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Yeah, we'll be at the Sydney Goldstein Theater again. Everybody
a great place, that's right. If you want tickets and information,
you can go to linktree slash sysk and it's got
all that jam. You can go to our website stuff
youshould do dot com. It's got all that jam. And
we will see all of you guys in January with Bells.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
On Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast Josh, And there's Chuck
and Jerry's here too. And this is the We'll get
through it edition of Stuff you Should Know about the
periodic teaple.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Uh huh. I have other names for it.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Yeah, I'll bet you do. Can you say any of them.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
This is the only time I hate my job. Edition.
This is the uh. Now we can stop talking about
the sun episode maybe edition uh? And this is the
My god, why do we ever do episodes on chemistry? Edition?
I failed chemistry. It's the only thing I've ever failed
(01:37):
was chemistry.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
I don't think I even ever took chemistry. To tell
you the.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Truth, Hey, he didn't fail it, right, I fail if
you don't try.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Yeah, that's my motto. Here's what I figured out about this,
like driving myself mad trying to learn this stuff and
understand it. There is a lot of people out there
who have written articles and explainers on the stuff that
we're going to talk about, who literally don't know what
(02:06):
they're talking about, and yet they're presenting their information like
they do and it's wrong and you can't understand it,
or in cases where you can't understand it, it still
doesn't fully answer the question. There's a lot of stuff
out there like that on this especially as it gets
more and more like ourcane.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Right.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
There's a whole group of people out there, chemists, molecular chemists,
physicists who understand this, but you can put them all
together and they can't coherently explain any of it to
anybody else. They can just talk to one another like
this where we are where us and everybody listening to
this episode right now is stuck in the middle. We
know enough that we can notice when somebody is wrong
(02:50):
or not correct or doesn't know what they're talking about,
but we don't know enough to understand what the actual
scientists are saying and then come back and explain it. So,
first of all, Breton cap off to Olivia for helping
us with this one.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Boy, Olivia should get a bonus for this one, quite
frank for sure.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
And then second we might have to edit that out
lot's rack the budget. Secondly, we can we're smart enough
to get all this across. We are, but we're also
transparent enough to admit when we're like, we don't understand
this part.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Yeah, I mean there's a few parts I still don't get.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
I imagine The good news is I imagine that maybe about
twenty percent of our listenership is even hearing this right now.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
I hope more than that, because it's really interesting stuff.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Would you click on something called how the periodic table works?
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Well, we're gonna have to come up with something else.
I think we'll call this one legs, legs, legs.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
Colin tiny lettering, periodic table exactly the sex episode.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Right. Well, see, we'll trick them into listening to it.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
All right, I know I can get some of this
at the beginning, So if you'll allow me to talk
about one of the only parts I understand, sure, all right, great,
I'll kick it off because we have to set the
stage sort of for pre periodic table construction, which is
to say that early I'm sorry, late in the eighteenth century,
we were working from sciences, working from the arist Totolian Aristotelian. Yeah,
(04:30):
that's to say Aristotle system, which is which we've talked
about some recently, which is, hey, we got four elements fire, earth, water,
and air. And then after that science became a little
more nuanced, and they're like, hey, actually we think there
are more things out there, more building blocks. Yeah, and
maybe we can distinguish them from one another and categorize them,
(04:53):
maybe based on their mass. And this was sort of
the scene when in eighteen oh four a oddly English
school teacher who was also a researcher named John Dalton said,
all right, things are made up of smaller things maybe these,
which is not new like for you know, ancient cultures.
(05:13):
We're even talking about things being up of smaller things.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
Yeah, we talked about democritis in that episode, about things
we believe before the scientific method.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
Totally. That's exactly where it was. He said things are
made up maybe of like these little tiny, indestructible, indivisible atoms.
He got a lot of that wrong, but one thing
he got right was the idea that no, two elements
that we know about so far, which were not very
many at all at that point, can have an identical
(05:41):
mass and all the atoms of that element have the
same mass, which also wasn't quite right, but at the
time it was right.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
Yeah, because you got to give it up to these guys.
When we're like analyzing elements and atoms and stuff today
we're using like spectrometry and particle accelerators and doing all
sorts of amazing stuff. These guys are like burning things,
this is eighteen o four, boiling them in acid. Yeah,
Like they were doing all the stuff that a high
school chemistry teacher does to demonstrate chemistry. That's what they
(06:13):
were doing to actually isolate elements and like weigh them.
They were weighing things like oxygen. Like they figured out
that if you take a leader of oxygen, you will
find that it weighs one point five grams. No matter
where in the world you weigh it, it's going to
weigh one point five grams. Like that's what these people
were doing. Can you capture a leader of oxygen? I
(06:34):
can't know. I mean, like what they were doing was
the hardcore like bloody up, like roll up your sleeves
kind of chemistry. Like apparently it was like one of
the biggest scientific pushes of the nineteenth century was identifying elements,
and John Dalton was the first to say, Hey, some
(06:55):
of these I think we can kind of like try
to organize them a little bit. And Dalton didn't discover
any elements, from what I understand, he was just the
first one to come up with atomic theory in the
modern age and try to start ordering them based on
atomic weight.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
Yeah, exactly. It wasn't quite the periodic table yet, but
it was a precursor foresure. And his very first version
in eighteen oh three only had the five elements that
we knew about at the time hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon,
and sulfur, nitrogen, was known as I think we said
this in another episode the Azote or is it a zote?
(07:33):
I guess okay Azot. His second list, just five years later,
was up to twenty elements, and then twenty four years later,
by eighteen twenty seven, that list was up to thirty six.
And as science was progressing, they started noticing patterns, and
they started noticing sort of intervals where things would repeat themselves,
(07:56):
such that all of a sudden, A German chemist named
Ahn Wolfgong in eighteen twenty nine said, well, wait a minute,
we're noticing these patterns, and some of these things are
the same, Like if you look at lithium, sodium, potassium,
they have very similar properties and we might can group
those together, and those three in the modern periodic table
(08:17):
are grouped together in the same column. So he was
right on the money as far as that idea.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
Yeah, And I mean, we as humans are obsessed with
finding patterns and things, and like discovering a latent pattern
in nature. I mean, there's few things more exciting than that.
So these guys were looking for patterns even in places
where they didn't necessarily exist, maybe maneuvering things where they
should or shouldn't be. Some people took some cracks at
(08:43):
it to try to to try to kind of organize
these elements by pattern, but they ran into some problems.
One was the chemistry wasn't as exact as it needed
to be to really organize stuff. There were elements that
hadn't been discovered yet, so there are big missing chunks,
but they didn't necessarily know they're big missing chunks. But
they were on the right track that you could order
(09:06):
these things one way or another, and when you did,
they would start showing patterns periodicity. Periodic table means that
there are periods or patterns that repeat themselves depending on
how you organize these elements.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
Yeah, and the modern periodic table that we know and loathe, Sorry,
I loath that thing that they pull down in science class,
that you know teenagers just blankly stare at, not knowing
what the heck they're looking at. But it's pretty sure
(09:41):
if you say so. We owe that to a Russian
chemist named Dmitri Mendelev. And Mendelev in eighteen sixty nine
was working on the very first Russian language organic chemistry
textbook in eighteen sixty nine and said, you know what
we have sixty three three elements. At this point, I
(10:01):
think we can organize these, and he did so he
arranged things in columns. He had to reorder some things
from the previous order. So he's like, maybe we shouldn't
organize just by atomic mass, maybe we should order them
into these similarities and how they behave. And the big,
(10:22):
big thing that Mendelev landed on was leaving gaps where
he saw gaps and instead of just you know, buttoning
it up and making it look a certain way, he said,
I'm going to leave a gap here. And this is
actually what kind of proved his worth in the fact
that he was really on the right track, because in
the fifteen years following him leaving those gaps, three elements
(10:45):
were discovered that fit those very gaps that he had
left perfectly, like a little puzzle piece.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
It's like the molecular chemistry version of Babe Ruth calling
a shot. Yeah, basically essentially, So like when it turned
out in the next fifteen years, they found those elements
that did not only fill those spots, but they had
properties that Mendeleev predicted they would like. He was like,
they were like, you did, really good guy. He also
(11:11):
predicted some other ones that didn't come true, but everybody
was just like, whatever, it's fine. So that was like
the model that everybody used from that point on, and
it's the classic model that we see today, where it's
kind of like a castle with turrets on either side,
and you know the brick in the middle, and then
there's like a couple of rows below that are a
mote if you squint hard enough. Yeah, that's Mendeleev who
(11:35):
came up with that whole thing. And the way that
they're arranged is not by atomic mass but by atomic number.
That's why if you look, and we should probably say,
the way you read the periodic table is from left
to right and top to bottom right. So the whole
thing starts in the top left with number one hydrogen.
And the reason it's number one is because it has
one that's right, it has one proton, chuck, and because
(11:59):
there's one proton in its stable format, has one electron
and all that's going to be important in a minute.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
That's right, I mean, sure, we go ahead and take
a break. I feel like that was kind of good
setup material. Sure, all right, we'll take a break and
we'll be right back with more things to enlighten you
and numb you. All right, So the modern periodic table,
(12:44):
I think where was mendelev He had sixty three on
his first Yeah, sixty three known elements at the time
on his first stab. The modern periodic table right now
stands at one hundred and eighteen, and I think they've
already said they think possibly may be one day it
may top out at one seventy three. We'll see, we'll see.
(13:06):
But that's sort of you know, the thinking, the logic.
But right now we're at one hundred and eighteen elements
that we know about. It includes on the chart the
name of the element. They're usually a one or two
letter symbol, which is almost always short for the name.
But in a case of gold, like when you see
(13:27):
au for gold and you're like, what the heck is
that all about? That just means it's based on the
original Latin for gold rum. And they are placed, like
you said before, the break, in order of their atomic number,
which represents the protons in each atom, and that is
what makes that each element unique. Over those seven rows
(13:49):
aka periods, and eighteen numbered columns aka groups.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Yeah, so the rows across horizontally, those are the periods
and Like you said, it's really important to remember. If
you take a proton and add it to an element,
you don't have like a variation on the element. You
have an entirely new element. Everything else you can mess
around with fudge, mess with the neutrons, mess with the electrons.
If you add a proton or take away proton, you
(14:14):
got a totally different element, which is why you can
order them by their atomic number number one with hydrogen
number two, helium which has two protons, and so on
and so forth. When you see that little number in
the top left of the square for that element, that's
how many protons it has. But again, as we'll see,
(14:34):
if we're talking about on the periodic table, stable atoms,
that means that they don't have an electric charge. They're neutral,
and that means that they have an even number of
protons and electrons. Protons are positively charged, electrons are negatively charged,
and if you have one in one, they cancel each
other off, two and two they cancel each other off,
(14:56):
or at the very least they make the electric charge neutral.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
All right, So if you're looking, if you've brought up
a picture by now of the periodic table, because you
really want to follow along.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
Yeah, that's a good evolve.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
God bless you for doing such a thing. And secondly
you might say, well, wait a minute, chuck, what are
those what's that thing underneath everything? We will get to
this in a minute. But those fourteen short columns underneath
is called the F block, and those are the seventh
and eighth periods aka rows that are detached and those
are unnumbered rows, whereas the other rows are numbered through eighteen.
(15:33):
So put a pin in the F block all elements
within a period, and again that is the row. If
you're looking horizontal, all the elements on each row have
the same number of electron shells. And when you think
about that in your mind's eye, you're probably picturing how
we think of that in our mind's eye because of
chemistry class and science class, which is, you know, a
(15:55):
circle around in atom's nucleus that holds electrons.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
Right like in orbit. That's Neil's Boor's contribution, although he
made plenty of contributions, but the whole idea that we
have of the atom being consisting of like a nucleus
that's kind of like the sun and electrons orbit orbiting
around it like planets. That's thanks to Neil's bore and
the actual orbit. Let's say you have just one circle
(16:23):
around the nucleus. That's a shell. It's one shell, at
another one that's the second shell, at another one that's
the third shell, and they actually fill up in order.
So when you follow along across the rows, the horizontal
rows called periods on the periodic table, all of those
in that row have the same number of shells one shell,
(16:45):
and the second shell, and the third shell and the
fourth shell. And as you go down, each row has
the all the shells that the ones above it had,
and now they've added another shell because their other shells
are full of electrons.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
Right, So if you look at periodic table, get out
your little picture and you look at that first row
or period, that means it just has one shell capable
of holding up to two electrons, and so that's why
there are only two elements there. Hydrogen usually has one
electron and helium, which normally has two. And then you
(17:21):
go down from there, the second and third shells can
hold up to eight electrons. So those second and third
rows are each going to have eight elements, and so on.
For the fourth and fifth it's eighteen. The sixth and
seventh hold thirty two, and so there are thirty two
elements on the six and seventh rows.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
Just to demonstrate a little further, so helium has two
electrons in that one shell. Helium's full. The first element
on the next row that has a second shell, that's lithium.
Lithium has two electrons in its first shell that's full,
but it has an extra electron. So now it's added
another shell the second shelf to how's that first electron?
(18:00):
And you go all the way down to the very
end of that row that lithium starts, and you find neon.
Neon has ten. Its first shell of two is full
of electrons. It's second shell they can hold up to
eight is full, so it has ten total electrons. This
is what the periods are showing us the number of shells,
and then eventually in a second will know the number
(18:21):
of electrons that can fill those shells.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
That's right, And the periods of the rose. We're going
to say that a thousand times. Groups are columns, periods
are rows. Because if there's one takeaway from this whole thing,
you can at least look smart. And when you walk
into a room with a periodic table chart and say
and someone says, what are those rows and columns? And
you can say, do you mean groups and periods?
Speaker 2 (18:42):
Yeah? And then really quickly after that, look at you're
watching and be like, look at the time. I'm late,
and run out of the room so that there's no
follow up questions.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
Yeah, and make a U shaped hole in the wall,
not the letter you, but a YOU shaped Yeah. Nice,
did that come through?
Speaker 2 (18:56):
Sure it did once you spell it.
Speaker 1 (18:59):
The groups are what we're going to talk about next,
and those are the columns. And this is where Mendelev
realized these patterns were coming into play. And once you know,
sub atomic theory came about and we started being able
to drill down further and further, we started to be
able to get way more specific. Yeah. So these patterns
(19:19):
in these rhythms on the columns are based on the
number of valence electrons for each element, which means how
many electrons you would normally find in that outermost shell.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
Yeah. And the outermost shell is important, Chuck, because that's
where all the action happens. That's when atoms bond together
to make new molecules. That's where the attraction or repulsion
happens like that is the that's the active shell. All
the other shells are full. And when a shell is full,
it's basically content. It just wants to sit there. It
(19:51):
wants to be left alone. But if that outermost shell
isn't full, then it's ready for some action. It's got
its leather jacket on, it's got its dice in its pocket,
may be a switchblade, and it's looking for trouble. Yeah,
so more than more than I think even rows, Like
all of the elements that are in a row, remember
horizontal across a period. They're related because they all have
(20:14):
the same shell, the same number of shells one, two, three, four,
and so on the groups up and down the columns.
They're more related really because they have the same number
of electrons in the outermost shell. They can have a
bunch of different numbers of shells, like for example, I
think floorine can have five shells but only one electron
(20:36):
in that that outermost shell, and or it could have
one shell and just have one electron in that outermost shell,
like a hydrogen. And they're more related because they'll they'll
react to other things more than they would if they
had different numbers of electrons.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
Yeah, we can add something to something you should remember
because this will make you look even one step smarter
before you run out of the room through the wall,
just say, oh, yeah, you know, it's organized into periods
and groups, and the periods of the rows and the
groups of the columns in if you ask me the
columns aka groups, that's really where it's at.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
They're more related, they're.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
More related, and then you run through the wall.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
Right, So let me give you an example here.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
Okay, all right, this is if you want to really,
really really be smart, you remember.
Speaker 2 (21:24):
This, right, if you have your periodic table out really honestly,
it will make this whole thing so much easier. But
if you look all the way down to the second
group from the right that starts with florine. Yeah, if
you look at floorine that has I think nine electrons
and it's in period two, so we know that it
has two shells. So we know that it has two
(21:47):
electrons in its first shell, so it must have seven
electrons in its extra shell or a second shell. And
since we know that the second shell can hold eight,
there's one little irritating gap and it wants to fill it.
So fluorine is super duper reactive. On the other hand,
you've got things like potassium. It has only one electron
(22:08):
and it's our most shell, and it wants to actually
get rid of that electron because I think I said earlier,
when a shell is full, the atom is content and happy.
It doesn't want to do anything with anybody. If it
just has one left over, like one hole or one electron,
it either wants to get rid of that one electron
so that it can lose that shell and go down
(22:29):
to the next shell which is full, or it can
fill its shell like fluorine wants to with an extra electron.
Either way, they're super reactive, and it all happens in
the outermost shell, the valance shell, and that's why that's
where all that action happens.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
Yeah, and you know what something we haven't even said
that I think is important that dawned on me. What
is the periodic table. Isn't just a like, let's just
do this thing so we can group them together a
periodic table. The periodic table is made organize this way
so chemist and people that really know what they're doing
(23:04):
can look at a poster on a wall at any
of those squares and know Because of where it is
on the row, where it is on the column, what
color it is, and what block it is, and we'll
get to those things in a minute. And they can
know a lot of very specific things just because of
where it sits and what it looks like and what
(23:25):
color it is.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
Yeah, they can tell you whether it's going to blow
up in water, like exactly like I guess apparently sodium
pure sodium does. They can tell you if it's shiny.
There's all of this has to do just almost entirely
with the number of electrons it has in its outermost shell.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
All that stuff.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
That's the evolution of the periodic table. People notice properties,
physical properties, They noticed appearance, stuff like that, and then
as they learned more and more about the atom, they
figured out why in the atom those properties existed. They
were able to classify those things together in the periodic table. So,
like you said, a chemist today can look at that
(24:05):
and be like, oh, that's going to be a shiny
metal that will explode in your hand if you look
at it wrong, because it's in this group of elements, right,
And I saw it described by a chemist really well,
if you like, to a chemist, a periodic table looks
like a map to us. Like if you look at
a map of the United States, you know that if
(24:25):
you are looking at someplace in the north, it's going
to be colder there than somewhere in the south. You
don't know exactly what the temperature is or anything like
that necessarily, but you know, generally based on this map,
it's a map to the elements.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
Yeah, and it also might you know, you might think
if you're looking at a map of the South, like
that's where people are more like this and in the
Midwest people maybe you know, it tells you. A map
tells you a lot more than just like what the
weather's like. Yeah, just like a periodic table. So if
a scientist, if a chemist looks at silicon, I look
(25:00):
at it and I see a capital S lowercase I,
the word silicon, the number fourteen in the left hand corner,
and that it's yellow. A chemist looks at it and says, well,
I see it's in between on the row aluminum and phosphorus,
and in the column it's below carbon and above germanium.
And I see it's numbers fourteen and it's yellow, which
(25:23):
means it's a metaloid. So I can tell you like
these twelve things about silicon just because of where it
sits on that map. Yes, it's pretty amazing. I just
I don't get it, but it's amazing, right.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
I was just going to say, we're not going to
explain what those fourteen things are because now there are
the kind of things you have to go to graduate
school in chemistry to truly understand. It's okay that we
don't understand it. All you have to take away from
this and all we're trying to get across, is that
trained chemists can look at the periodic table and realize
a lot about whatever element they're looking at and figure
(25:56):
out how to mix it with other elements to do
amazing things. Or if you put together these two things,
this is probably the reaction that you're going to have.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
Yeah, and it's also for someone like us. It can
get really confusing because when you look at different periodic tables,
one thing you'll notice is that the colors may be different,
like that there is no unless I'm wrong, there isn't
one completely settled. This is the only way to do it.
Periodic table. Oh no, as far as a lot of
it goes. But like you know, depending on who you
(26:29):
are and how you want to organize a periodic table
that you use. Those colors may mean different things, so
it can get really really confusing. Oh yeah when it
comes to that stuff.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
For sure. And usually there is like a key or
a legend on the periodic table that says, this is
what these colors mean. But if you take away the colors,
the layout of them across and down, if you look
at a periodic table, that's generally going to be the
same for any periodic table that looks even roughly like
what you're looking at. It's the colors that really kind
(26:59):
of change things up. But more and more, as we've
learned more about the atom, starting in the early twentieth
century onward, and quantum mechanics kind of became a thing
that got incorporated into the periodic table as well, And
that is where we get to essentially the third way
that the whole thing's organized, which is by blocks, subshells, S, P, D,
(27:24):
and F and so the number the number of shells
that an element has that's its period across, the number
of electrons in its outermost shell that's its group. The
blocks describe where the outer most electron is, and if
(27:48):
you'll allow me for a second to just kind of
take a little divergence here. It helps under it helps
you understand it.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
I think, please, can we talk about baseball?
Speaker 2 (27:57):
No, not that kind of divergence, like deeper into chemistry
kind of divergence.
Speaker 1 (28:02):
Okay, I'm gonna go out and think about baseball.
Speaker 2 (28:04):
Okay. So, so that whole model that Nils Bor gave
us of, like the planetoid nucleus and or the sun
like nucleus and the planetoid electron orbiting it, that is
really off. That's not at all what they're like. It's
good for people who don't really care about this kind
of thing to walk around thinking, but when you actually
(28:27):
start to try to understand the periodic table, it really
gets in the way. So if you can kind of
throw that out and instead think of electrons as not
particles like planetoids, they're actually waves of energy, right, and
they like to orbit atoms because their negative electrical charge
(28:47):
is attracted to the positive electrical charge of the protons.
That's why they're orbiting or flying around that nucleus. But
they don't do it in like these tight little orbits
like a planet does around like the Sun. Instead, they
inhabit three dimensional areas that follow predictable shapes. Depending on
(29:08):
the energy level of that electron. You can say what
shape it's going to follow around that nucleus, but you
can't say where it is at any given point in time,
thanks to our friend Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Heisenberg said, you
can know the velocity of an object, or you can
(29:30):
know the location of a quantum object. You can't know both.
And because we know the energy of an object, we
can figure out its velocity at speed like an electron,
which means we can't know where it is. So these
orbits actually are where they may be ninety percent of
the time. That's what an actual electron orbit is. And
(29:52):
again it follows is weird, cool looking little three dimensional
four leaf clover shapes just really neat and depending on
on the energy of the electron, it's going to inhabit
a specific place ninety percent of the time around the
nucleus of that atom, either close to the atom further
out further out, depending on the shell that it's associated with.
(30:15):
And the block is where the highest energy the outermost
electron is in that position. And again it's denoted by
SPD and F and it gets way more arcane than that.
But all you have to remember is that when you're
looking at blocks, they're talking about the specific location of
(30:35):
the most energetic electron. And again, since the outermost electrons
are where all the action happens, the most energetic of
the outermost electrons are really where the action happens. And
that's why it's become a little more sophisticated, a little
more refined over time, thanks to the addition of quantum
(30:56):
mechanics in our understanding of the atom. Are you there, Chuck?
Did you outside?
Speaker 1 (31:03):
Sorry, I just came back in. I didn't actually think
about baseball. I was just kidding. I watched an entire
baseball game.
Speaker 2 (31:08):
Oh, who won?
Speaker 1 (31:11):
I have no joke. My brain is too mushy for
a joke right now. No, I actually listened to that
and I learned from you.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
So oh. I appreciate that. Thank you, because I felt
like I was hanging from a trapeze by my fingernails.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
Well, I was underneath you with a net. That's all
I'm good for.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
It, Thanks, buddy, I appreciate it. And by the way,
I didn't want to just walk past. That's all you're
good for. I just couldn't even bring myself to recognize
such a dumb thing that was said.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
I appreciate that. So the final thing we got to
talk about is kind of brings it back to the
beginning of how they originally just started to think about
grouping things, which was by their atomic mass. That the
sort of very basic thing that they first thought they
could use as a grouping device. And they still will
indicate the atomic mass on most periodic tables, but the
(32:00):
atomic mass is actually a weighted average of the amount
of protons plus neutrons, But it depends on how abundant
different isotopes in that element are out in nature, and
it's not always the same. So carbon is a great
example that Livia used. It always has six protons, usually
has six neutrons, but sometimes can have seven or eight.
(32:23):
So instead of having an atomic mass of just twelve
six plus six, they take a weighted average and it
weighs out to twelve point zero one point one. So
if you see those numbers with a decimal point, you
can understand that that's because it's a weighted average and
not just a locked in number.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
Yeah, and it doesn't necessarily have much to do with
the periodic table. But you've mentioned isotopes, and all those
are as an element with more or less electrons than
it has when it's stable in a neutral charge. If
you take away an electron, it has more positively charged
protons and electrons, so that's a positive iyon. If you
add an electron, like say fluorine wants to do, it
(33:02):
becomes a it has more electrons than protons, so it
becomes a negatively charged isotope. So those are possible too.
But just bear in mind you're not changing the number
of protons, because if you do that you have a
new element. You're just changing the number of electrons, either
adding or taking away. And one of the other things
about the periodic table is you can point to different
(33:24):
different sections and be like, those are the ones that
form positive ions because they give away their extra electron.
Those are the ones that form negative ions because they
attract extra electrons that they normally have in their neutrally
charged state. That's another thing that you can just point
to at the periodic table.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
Pretty amazing, it is.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
I mean, the fact that people have figured this out
is just hats off to all of the scientificals that
were involved in this. Over the years.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
Yeah, I say, we take a break, sure, and when
we come back, we're going to tell you about how
things got very interesting in terms of the periodic table.
And then I jeen thirties right after this.
Speaker 2 (34:26):
Chuck, I feel like we made it through the hardest part.
We're out of the out of the woods.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
As I'm shaking a little less, I am too, but
I won't fully relax for another fifteen.
Speaker 2 (34:38):
Just hang in, hang in there, We'll get it all right.
Speaker 1 (34:41):
So what happened in the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 2 (34:44):
Oh, well, a guy named doctor Lawrence I can't remember,
but he the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories named after him, in
part invented particle accelerators, where you use incredible amounts of
energy to throw trillions of particles of different weights or
specific weights at a target atom. Tell them what Einstein how?
(35:05):
Einstein described this process.
Speaker 1 (35:08):
Like shooting birds in the dark in a country where
there are only a few birds.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
Right, Like, the chances of you actually having a collision
are so remote that you like, they're almost indescribable mathematically.
But if you shoot trillions of particles, you really increase
your chances of there being some kind of collision and
when you collide a one particle one atom with another
atom with enough energy, they can combine. And when you
(35:34):
add proton to proton, remember, you get a new element.
And so with particle accelerators they were able to start
creating elements that you can't find in nature. And then
you started doing this all the way back in the
nineteen thirties, and this research is what actually directly led
to nuclear bomb. Apparently, when Einstein heard that Lawrence had
(35:55):
created this particle accelerator, he advised FDR to start working
on a bomb because it was now a thing, like
the world had just been prepared scientifically for a bomb
to exist soon.
Speaker 1 (36:08):
Yeah, so lab created elements, like you said, started being
a thing in nineteen thirty seven. Anything past uranium on
the chart you cannot find in nature because it decays
much too fast to even be around and know it's
a thing and study. But so anything past uranium as
LAB created. And in nineteen thirty seven, technetium was the
(36:33):
very first blank spot to be filled in with a
LAB created element as number forty three nuclear bombs that
you mentioned when they started doing the nuclear tests out
on the Marshall Islands in the fifties, they would send
planes out into these explosions with filters on them to
(36:53):
scoop up unusual atoms and discover potentially elements. That is
how we got element ninety nine named Einsteinium. And I
guess we should talk a little bit about the naming
because the IUPAC actually has rules around this. It says
new elements have to be named, and this is very interesting.
(37:14):
A mineral, a place or a country, a property, or
a scientist or a mythological concept, which is fascinating. So
we have some of the latest elements. I believe in
twenty sixteen is when we got one thirteen through eighteen.
We got the element tennessine because it was there were
(37:35):
institutions in Tennessee that led to the discovery of this
super heavy element, and so they named it Tennessee and
most of them sort of follow that naming convention.
Speaker 2 (37:44):
Yeah, Nihonium is named after Nihan, which is the Japanese
name for Japan. A Muscovian is named after Moscow where
a lab where that was created in a Ghanissan Oganissan
Organisan aganison, that's what it is. It's named after a
guy named Yuri Oganessian who is a Russian essentially element hunter.
(38:08):
Now he has got tons of funding behind him, has
set up new particle accelerators with more and more energy,
and is bashing things together in the search for entirely
new elements that not only don't exist on Earth, they
may not exist anywhere else in the universe. They may
only exist theoretically until Aganessian manages to smash the right
(38:33):
atoms together to create those elements for a pico second.
Like they're so unstable that they last almost no time
at all, which makes them totally useless to us.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
Yeah, as of now.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
The fact that, like you said, they predicted I think
it's going to go up to one hundred and seventy three.
Speaker 1 (38:51):
Yeah, and we're at one hundred and what eighteen.
Speaker 2 (38:55):
Makes people like Agnessian just crazy, like they want to
find them all. Actually found a couple of those most
recent ones that were inducted, I guess in the periodic
table in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
Yeah, and this is kind of cool too. Oganessian apparently
wanted to name that element stardust in honor of David Bowie,
but it didn't fit the naming criteria.
Speaker 2 (39:20):
Oh yeah, yeah, too bad, so sad, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
Too bad. So as far as the sort of the
coda on this, Livia is keen to point out that
there are gaps in the framework. Still, there are issues.
When you look at the periodic table, you needn't only
look at the very first one hydrogen at the far
left of the table. It's there because it has that
(39:45):
one electron, but it is not like any of the
rest of its group, because the rest of them are
all alkali metals. It's actually more similar to something like chlorine,
which is in the second column from the right. But
you know, there's still debate on like it's not settled
on where things should be placed on these various and
(40:06):
there have been you know, there are alternative tables that
people have put out over the years with different tweaks,
some small, some large, and it's pretty interesting, I think.
Speaker 2 (40:14):
And there's also that two period section that's always removed
from the rest of the periodic table. It's put down
below it. Those two sections actually go in that's the
f block, right, yeah, the bottom two rows, so they
come after I think, bury them and just go all
(40:35):
the way over to oh, I can't remember the other one,
but imagine that the periodic table was looked like it did,
but then the bottom two rows were about twice as
long as they are now. It looked weird, and it's
because you would take that lower F block and put
it into its proper place if you're arranging these things
(40:55):
by atomic number. But the reason why the F block
is pulled out is because those two rows of elements,
the actin needs and lath the needs. I think they
might like follow an atomic number in that way, but
their properties are totally different from their periods or their groups.
And the reason why is because they're the only two
(41:18):
groups that have the F position subshell filled by an electron,
which completely alters their everything. It's just different than all
of the other ones. And it's different enough that they
just basically removed it until they can figure out where
it should sit, because depending on how you interpret where
(41:38):
like how the periodic table should be laid out, they
should go here, they should go there, or they should
just stay out like they are now.
Speaker 1 (41:46):
Yeah, there are some and it's kind of fun to
look some of these up if you want to see
some kind of cool at the very least just esthetic examples.
And then they're not just like, oh, this looks cooler.
It makes sense to the person who has put out
this whatever alternative or alternate periodic table, Like in nineteen
forty nine, Lvia found one from Life magazine that is
(42:09):
a spiral, And there are quite a few different spiral
or spirillic designs where you have hydrogen at the center
and it's sort of like racetrack shape. If you look
at any just look up spiral based periodic chart, and
they're very nice to look at, I imagine they are
much much harder to sort of make sense of and
(42:30):
read unless you're the person who made it or a chemist. Yeah,
chemists would still probably be like, well, why are you
doing it that way?
Speaker 2 (42:40):
I liked it the other way.
Speaker 1 (42:42):
Or that three D one that Timothy Stowe came up
with that I think physicists are pretty keen on that
has three axes of different colors that represent quantum numbers
that describe the electrons. But it's you know, if you
look at a three D version, that's kind of cool too.
But if you find the one, the traditional one confusing
(43:02):
as a non chemist, just try looking at any of
these other ones. It's really confusing.
Speaker 2 (43:06):
Yeah, And it's all it is is it's saying, well, actually, no,
I think we should arrange them so that they're connected
more by this property like electro negativity, or they're shiny
where they're pretty. I like this these elements, and so
we're going to put them together. These are my favorite elements.
It's just kind of like that, and so you can
bend them in all sorts of weird shapes.
Speaker 1 (43:26):
Yeah. I have my own periodic table I've designed. Oh yeah,
and it is just a big black block and then
times new roman and yellow lettering in the middle. It says,
who gives a right?
Speaker 2 (43:40):
I would have imagined it was a traditional periodic table,
but scratched out with a pen rights violently.
Speaker 1 (43:46):
No, that's good. I like that better. I'm gonna change mine.
Speaker 2 (43:48):
I've got one other thing that doesn't. It has a
lot to do with everything, but not anything we're going
to go into. But there are some especially those elements
that don't occur in nature and they have to to
create in particle accelerators, but also some that occur in nature,
like gold and mercury are two good examples. They have
electrons that spin so fast, that are moving at such
(44:13):
incredible energies that they actually are like a significant fraction
of the speed of light. That's how fast they're going.
And it doesn't matter whether you're talking about like a
photon or a planet or a black hole or an electron.
Anything that has mass and can move at anything like
(44:34):
half the speed of light is going to actually bend
time and space. And so for some kinds of elements
that have relativistic speeds, meaning they're electrons travel close to
the speed of light, they have all sorts of freaky
dicky properties. It's why gold is gold. Not going to
get into that, just trust me. It's why gold is gold.
(44:56):
But also it means that if you could go into
those atoms and just kind of exists in them as
if they were a universe, you would see that time
and space was bent compared to how time and space
exists outside of those atoms, like on our level. That's
what atomic scientists have figured out, and it's actually kind
(45:16):
of having a mind breaking effect on the periodic table
to an extent amazing. I think so too. That's it, Chuck,
we did periodic tables. It's done. You did great.
Speaker 1 (45:28):
Oh boy, we don't have to do it again.
Speaker 2 (45:30):
No, I don't think so, I hope not. Yeah, what
is this Murphy's law? Well, since I said Murphy's Law,
and Chuck laugh because he got the joke. You may
not have him. That's okay. That means it's time for
listener now.
Speaker 1 (45:46):
All right, I'm gonna call this very quick follow up
from our Halloween episode. As we record this, it is
actually Halloween, so that has just come out today, and
we have something from Owen that perhaps explained something that
we kind of wondered about. Hey, guys, once again loving
the Yearly Spectacular. Figured i'd mentioned my take on what
(46:07):
the Hermit meant. Hermit Hermit meant when he said the
man's eyes didn't match his mouth. Oh yeah, I think
it might have something to do with honesty, like the
words of encouragement were somehow disingenuine. That lined up with
the idea that the hermit has sort of seen flaws
and faults. That makes sense to me. I didn't match
his mouth.
Speaker 2 (46:26):
That's like the best explanation I've heard so far. It's
also the only explanation, but it's a good one.
Speaker 1 (46:31):
I think it's totally it. And Owen says, regardless of
whether that's the author's intent, I'm using the description in
a song i'm writing. So thanks for the inspiration and
in all honesty, the voice work is on point this year.
That is from Oen.
Speaker 2 (46:47):
Makes a Lot, Owen, Here's a here's some inspiration for
the musical part of your song.
Speaker 1 (47:00):
Oh.
Speaker 2 (47:01):
If you want to be like Owen and write in
to explain something to us, we love that kind of thing.
You can put it in an email and send it
off to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (47:14):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Que Josh Trumpet. But you know what that means, everybody.
We are going back on tour again. We are hitting
the road next year in January for our annual Pacific
Northwest and Northern California Swing, and we will be at
the Paramount Theater in Seattle on January twenty fourth, Revolution
Hall and Portland on the twenty fifth, and our home
(00:22):
away from home at San Francisco's Sketch Fest on January
twenty six.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Yeah, we'll be at the Sydney Goldstein Theater again. Everybody
a great place, that's right. If you want tickets and information,
you can go to linktree slash sysk and it's got
all that jam. You can go to our website stuff
youshould do dot com. It's got all that jam. And
we will see all of you guys in January with Bells.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
On Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast Josh, And there's Chuck
and Jerry's here too. And this is the We'll get
through it edition of Stuff you Should Know about the
periodic teaple.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Uh huh. I have other names for it.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Yeah, I'll bet you do. Can you say any of them.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
This is the only time I hate my job. Edition.
This is the uh. Now we can stop talking about
the sun episode maybe edition uh? And this is the
My god, why do we ever do episodes on chemistry? Edition?
I failed chemistry. It's the only thing I've ever failed
(01:37):
was chemistry.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
I don't think I even ever took chemistry. To tell
you the.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Truth, Hey, he didn't fail it, right, I fail if
you don't try.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Yeah, that's my motto. Here's what I figured out about this,
like driving myself mad trying to learn this stuff and
understand it. There is a lot of people out there
who have written articles and explainers on the stuff that
we're going to talk about, who literally don't know what
(02:06):
they're talking about, and yet they're presenting their information like
they do and it's wrong and you can't understand it,
or in cases where you can't understand it, it still
doesn't fully answer the question. There's a lot of stuff
out there like that on this especially as it gets
more and more like ourcane.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Right.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
There's a whole group of people out there, chemists, molecular chemists,
physicists who understand this, but you can put them all
together and they can't coherently explain any of it to
anybody else. They can just talk to one another like
this where we are where us and everybody listening to
this episode right now is stuck in the middle. We
know enough that we can notice when somebody is wrong
(02:50):
or not correct or doesn't know what they're talking about,
but we don't know enough to understand what the actual
scientists are saying and then come back and explain it. So,
first of all, Breton cap off to Olivia for helping
us with this one.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Boy, Olivia should get a bonus for this one, quite
frank for sure.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
And then second we might have to edit that out
lot's rack the budget. Secondly, we can we're smart enough
to get all this across. We are, but we're also
transparent enough to admit when we're like, we don't understand
this part.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Yeah, I mean there's a few parts I still don't get.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
I imagine The good news is I imagine that maybe about
twenty percent of our listenership is even hearing this right now.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
I hope more than that, because it's really interesting stuff.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Would you click on something called how the periodic table works?
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Well, we're gonna have to come up with something else.
I think we'll call this one legs, legs, legs.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
Colin tiny lettering, periodic table exactly the sex episode.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Right. Well, see, we'll trick them into listening to it.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
All right, I know I can get some of this
at the beginning, So if you'll allow me to talk
about one of the only parts I understand, sure, all right, great,
I'll kick it off because we have to set the
stage sort of for pre periodic table construction, which is
to say that early I'm sorry, late in the eighteenth century,
we were working from sciences, working from the arist Totolian Aristotelian. Yeah,
(04:30):
that's to say Aristotle system, which is which we've talked
about some recently, which is, hey, we got four elements fire, earth, water,
and air. And then after that science became a little
more nuanced, and they're like, hey, actually we think there
are more things out there, more building blocks. Yeah, and
maybe we can distinguish them from one another and categorize them,
(04:53):
maybe based on their mass. And this was sort of
the scene when in eighteen oh four a oddly English
school teacher who was also a researcher named John Dalton said,
all right, things are made up of smaller things maybe these,
which is not new like for you know, ancient cultures.
(05:13):
We're even talking about things being up of smaller things.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
Yeah, we talked about democritis in that episode, about things
we believe before the scientific method.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
Totally. That's exactly where it was. He said things are
made up maybe of like these little tiny, indestructible, indivisible atoms.
He got a lot of that wrong, but one thing
he got right was the idea that no, two elements
that we know about so far, which were not very
many at all at that point, can have an identical
(05:41):
mass and all the atoms of that element have the
same mass, which also wasn't quite right, but at the
time it was right.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
Yeah, because you got to give it up to these guys.
When we're like analyzing elements and atoms and stuff today
we're using like spectrometry and particle accelerators and doing all
sorts of amazing stuff. These guys are like burning things,
this is eighteen o four, boiling them in acid. Yeah,
Like they were doing all the stuff that a high
school chemistry teacher does to demonstrate chemistry. That's what they
(06:13):
were doing to actually isolate elements and like weigh them.
They were weighing things like oxygen. Like they figured out
that if you take a leader of oxygen, you will
find that it weighs one point five grams. No matter
where in the world you weigh it, it's going to
weigh one point five grams. Like that's what these people
were doing. Can you capture a leader of oxygen? I
(06:34):
can't know. I mean, like what they were doing was
the hardcore like bloody up, like roll up your sleeves
kind of chemistry. Like apparently it was like one of
the biggest scientific pushes of the nineteenth century was identifying elements,
and John Dalton was the first to say, Hey, some
(06:55):
of these I think we can kind of like try
to organize them a little bit. And Dalton didn't discover
any elements, from what I understand, he was just the
first one to come up with atomic theory in the
modern age and try to start ordering them based on
atomic weight.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
Yeah, exactly. It wasn't quite the periodic table yet, but
it was a precursor foresure. And his very first version
in eighteen oh three only had the five elements that
we knew about at the time hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon,
and sulfur, nitrogen, was known as I think we said
this in another episode the Azote or is it a zote?
(07:33):
I guess okay Azot. His second list, just five years later,
was up to twenty elements, and then twenty four years later,
by eighteen twenty seven, that list was up to thirty six.
And as science was progressing, they started noticing patterns, and
they started noticing sort of intervals where things would repeat themselves,
(07:56):
such that all of a sudden, A German chemist named
Ahn Wolfgong in eighteen twenty nine said, well, wait a minute,
we're noticing these patterns, and some of these things are
the same, Like if you look at lithium, sodium, potassium,
they have very similar properties and we might can group
those together, and those three in the modern periodic table
(08:17):
are grouped together in the same column. So he was
right on the money as far as that idea.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
Yeah, And I mean, we as humans are obsessed with
finding patterns and things, and like discovering a latent pattern
in nature. I mean, there's few things more exciting than that.
So these guys were looking for patterns even in places
where they didn't necessarily exist, maybe maneuvering things where they
should or shouldn't be. Some people took some cracks at
(08:43):
it to try to to try to kind of organize
these elements by pattern, but they ran into some problems.
One was the chemistry wasn't as exact as it needed
to be to really organize stuff. There were elements that
hadn't been discovered yet, so there are big missing chunks,
but they didn't necessarily know they're big missing chunks. But
they were on the right track that you could order
(09:06):
these things one way or another, and when you did,
they would start showing patterns periodicity. Periodic table means that
there are periods or patterns that repeat themselves depending on
how you organize these elements.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
Yeah, and the modern periodic table that we know and loathe, Sorry,
I loath that thing that they pull down in science class,
that you know teenagers just blankly stare at, not knowing
what the heck they're looking at. But it's pretty sure
(09:41):
if you say so. We owe that to a Russian
chemist named Dmitri Mendelev. And Mendelev in eighteen sixty nine
was working on the very first Russian language organic chemistry
textbook in eighteen sixty nine and said, you know what
we have sixty three three elements. At this point, I
(10:01):
think we can organize these, and he did so he
arranged things in columns. He had to reorder some things
from the previous order. So he's like, maybe we shouldn't
organize just by atomic mass, maybe we should order them
into these similarities and how they behave. And the big,
(10:22):
big thing that Mendelev landed on was leaving gaps where
he saw gaps and instead of just you know, buttoning
it up and making it look a certain way, he said,
I'm going to leave a gap here. And this is
actually what kind of proved his worth in the fact
that he was really on the right track, because in
the fifteen years following him leaving those gaps, three elements
(10:45):
were discovered that fit those very gaps that he had
left perfectly, like a little puzzle piece.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
It's like the molecular chemistry version of Babe Ruth calling
a shot. Yeah, basically essentially, So like when it turned
out in the next fifteen years, they found those elements
that did not only fill those spots, but they had
properties that Mendeleev predicted they would like. He was like,
they were like, you did, really good guy. He also
(11:11):
predicted some other ones that didn't come true, but everybody
was just like, whatever, it's fine. So that was like
the model that everybody used from that point on, and
it's the classic model that we see today, where it's
kind of like a castle with turrets on either side,
and you know the brick in the middle, and then
there's like a couple of rows below that are a
mote if you squint hard enough. Yeah, that's Mendeleev who
(11:35):
came up with that whole thing. And the way that
they're arranged is not by atomic mass but by atomic number.
That's why if you look, and we should probably say,
the way you read the periodic table is from left
to right and top to bottom right. So the whole
thing starts in the top left with number one hydrogen.
And the reason it's number one is because it has
one that's right, it has one proton, chuck, and because
(11:59):
there's one proton in its stable format, has one electron
and all that's going to be important in a minute.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
That's right, I mean, sure, we go ahead and take
a break. I feel like that was kind of good
setup material. Sure, all right, we'll take a break and
we'll be right back with more things to enlighten you
and numb you. All right, So the modern periodic table,
(12:44):
I think where was mendelev He had sixty three on
his first Yeah, sixty three known elements at the time
on his first stab. The modern periodic table right now
stands at one hundred and eighteen, and I think they've
already said they think possibly may be one day it
may top out at one seventy three. We'll see, we'll see.
(13:06):
But that's sort of you know, the thinking, the logic.
But right now we're at one hundred and eighteen elements
that we know about. It includes on the chart the
name of the element. They're usually a one or two
letter symbol, which is almost always short for the name.
But in a case of gold, like when you see
(13:27):
au for gold and you're like, what the heck is
that all about? That just means it's based on the
original Latin for gold rum. And they are placed, like
you said before, the break, in order of their atomic number,
which represents the protons in each atom, and that is
what makes that each element unique. Over those seven rows
(13:49):
aka periods, and eighteen numbered columns aka groups.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Yeah, so the rows across horizontally, those are the periods
and Like you said, it's really important to remember. If
you take a proton and add it to an element,
you don't have like a variation on the element. You
have an entirely new element. Everything else you can mess
around with fudge, mess with the neutrons, mess with the electrons.
If you add a proton or take away proton, you
(14:14):
got a totally different element, which is why you can
order them by their atomic number number one with hydrogen
number two, helium which has two protons, and so on
and so forth. When you see that little number in
the top left of the square for that element, that's
how many protons it has. But again, as we'll see,
(14:34):
if we're talking about on the periodic table, stable atoms,
that means that they don't have an electric charge. They're neutral,
and that means that they have an even number of
protons and electrons. Protons are positively charged, electrons are negatively charged,
and if you have one in one, they cancel each
other off, two and two they cancel each other off,
(14:56):
or at the very least they make the electric charge neutral.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
All right, So if you're looking, if you've brought up
a picture by now of the periodic table, because you
really want to follow along.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
Yeah, that's a good evolve.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
God bless you for doing such a thing. And secondly
you might say, well, wait a minute, chuck, what are
those what's that thing underneath everything? We will get to
this in a minute. But those fourteen short columns underneath
is called the F block, and those are the seventh
and eighth periods aka rows that are detached and those
are unnumbered rows, whereas the other rows are numbered through eighteen.
(15:33):
So put a pin in the F block all elements
within a period, and again that is the row. If
you're looking horizontal, all the elements on each row have
the same number of electron shells. And when you think
about that in your mind's eye, you're probably picturing how
we think of that in our mind's eye because of
chemistry class and science class, which is, you know, a
(15:55):
circle around in atom's nucleus that holds electrons.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
Right like in orbit. That's Neil's Boor's contribution, although he
made plenty of contributions, but the whole idea that we
have of the atom being consisting of like a nucleus
that's kind of like the sun and electrons orbit orbiting
around it like planets. That's thanks to Neil's bore and
the actual orbit. Let's say you have just one circle
(16:23):
around the nucleus. That's a shell. It's one shell, at
another one that's the second shell, at another one that's
the third shell, and they actually fill up in order.
So when you follow along across the rows, the horizontal
rows called periods on the periodic table, all of those
in that row have the same number of shells one shell,
(16:45):
and the second shell, and the third shell and the
fourth shell. And as you go down, each row has
the all the shells that the ones above it had,
and now they've added another shell because their other shells
are full of electrons.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
Right, So if you look at periodic table, get out
your little picture and you look at that first row
or period, that means it just has one shell capable
of holding up to two electrons, and so that's why
there are only two elements there. Hydrogen usually has one
electron and helium, which normally has two. And then you
(17:21):
go down from there, the second and third shells can
hold up to eight electrons. So those second and third
rows are each going to have eight elements, and so on.
For the fourth and fifth it's eighteen. The sixth and
seventh hold thirty two, and so there are thirty two
elements on the six and seventh rows.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
Just to demonstrate a little further, so helium has two
electrons in that one shell. Helium's full. The first element
on the next row that has a second shell, that's lithium.
Lithium has two electrons in its first shell that's full,
but it has an extra electron. So now it's added
another shell the second shelf to how's that first electron?
(18:00):
And you go all the way down to the very
end of that row that lithium starts, and you find neon.
Neon has ten. Its first shell of two is full
of electrons. It's second shell they can hold up to
eight is full, so it has ten total electrons. This
is what the periods are showing us the number of shells,
and then eventually in a second will know the number
(18:21):
of electrons that can fill those shells.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
That's right, And the periods of the rose. We're going
to say that a thousand times. Groups are columns, periods
are rows. Because if there's one takeaway from this whole thing,
you can at least look smart. And when you walk
into a room with a periodic table chart and say
and someone says, what are those rows and columns? And
you can say, do you mean groups and periods?
Speaker 2 (18:42):
Yeah? And then really quickly after that, look at you're
watching and be like, look at the time. I'm late,
and run out of the room so that there's no
follow up questions.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
Yeah, and make a U shaped hole in the wall,
not the letter you, but a YOU shaped Yeah. Nice,
did that come through?
Speaker 2 (18:56):
Sure it did once you spell it.
Speaker 1 (18:59):
The groups are what we're going to talk about next,
and those are the columns. And this is where Mendelev
realized these patterns were coming into play. And once you know,
sub atomic theory came about and we started being able
to drill down further and further, we started to be
able to get way more specific. Yeah. So these patterns
(19:19):
in these rhythms on the columns are based on the
number of valence electrons for each element, which means how
many electrons you would normally find in that outermost shell.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
Yeah. And the outermost shell is important, Chuck, because that's
where all the action happens. That's when atoms bond together
to make new molecules. That's where the attraction or repulsion
happens like that is the that's the active shell. All
the other shells are full. And when a shell is full,
it's basically content. It just wants to sit there. It
(19:51):
wants to be left alone. But if that outermost shell
isn't full, then it's ready for some action. It's got
its leather jacket on, it's got its dice in its pocket,
may be a switchblade, and it's looking for trouble. Yeah,
so more than more than I think even rows, Like
all of the elements that are in a row, remember
horizontal across a period. They're related because they all have
(20:14):
the same shell, the same number of shells one, two, three, four,
and so on the groups up and down the columns.
They're more related really because they have the same number
of electrons in the outermost shell. They can have a
bunch of different numbers of shells, like for example, I
think floorine can have five shells but only one electron
(20:36):
in that that outermost shell, and or it could have
one shell and just have one electron in that outermost shell,
like a hydrogen. And they're more related because they'll they'll
react to other things more than they would if they
had different numbers of electrons.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
Yeah, we can add something to something you should remember
because this will make you look even one step smarter
before you run out of the room through the wall,
just say, oh, yeah, you know, it's organized into periods
and groups, and the periods of the rows and the
groups of the columns in if you ask me the
columns aka groups, that's really where it's at.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
They're more related, they're.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
More related, and then you run through the wall.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
Right, So let me give you an example here.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
Okay, all right, this is if you want to really,
really really be smart, you remember.
Speaker 2 (21:24):
This, right, if you have your periodic table out really honestly,
it will make this whole thing so much easier. But
if you look all the way down to the second
group from the right that starts with florine. Yeah, if
you look at floorine that has I think nine electrons
and it's in period two, so we know that it
has two shells. So we know that it has two
(21:47):
electrons in its first shell, so it must have seven
electrons in its extra shell or a second shell. And
since we know that the second shell can hold eight,
there's one little irritating gap and it wants to fill it.
So fluorine is super duper reactive. On the other hand,
you've got things like potassium. It has only one electron
(22:08):
and it's our most shell, and it wants to actually
get rid of that electron because I think I said earlier,
when a shell is full, the atom is content and happy.
It doesn't want to do anything with anybody. If it
just has one left over, like one hole or one electron,
it either wants to get rid of that one electron
so that it can lose that shell and go down
(22:29):
to the next shell which is full, or it can
fill its shell like fluorine wants to with an extra electron.
Either way, they're super reactive, and it all happens in
the outermost shell, the valance shell, and that's why that's
where all that action happens.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
Yeah, and you know what something we haven't even said
that I think is important that dawned on me. What
is the periodic table. Isn't just a like, let's just
do this thing so we can group them together a
periodic table. The periodic table is made organize this way
so chemist and people that really know what they're doing
(23:04):
can look at a poster on a wall at any
of those squares and know Because of where it is
on the row, where it is on the column, what
color it is, and what block it is, and we'll
get to those things in a minute. And they can
know a lot of very specific things just because of
where it sits and what it looks like and what
(23:25):
color it is.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
Yeah, they can tell you whether it's going to blow
up in water, like exactly like I guess apparently sodium
pure sodium does. They can tell you if it's shiny.
There's all of this has to do just almost entirely
with the number of electrons it has in its outermost shell.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
All that stuff.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
That's the evolution of the periodic table. People notice properties,
physical properties, They noticed appearance, stuff like that, and then
as they learned more and more about the atom, they
figured out why in the atom those properties existed. They
were able to classify those things together in the periodic table. So,
like you said, a chemist today can look at that
(24:05):
and be like, oh, that's going to be a shiny
metal that will explode in your hand if you look
at it wrong, because it's in this group of elements, right,
And I saw it described by a chemist really well,
if you like, to a chemist, a periodic table looks
like a map to us. Like if you look at
a map of the United States, you know that if
(24:25):
you are looking at someplace in the north, it's going
to be colder there than somewhere in the south. You
don't know exactly what the temperature is or anything like
that necessarily, but you know, generally based on this map,
it's a map to the elements.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
Yeah, and it also might you know, you might think
if you're looking at a map of the South, like
that's where people are more like this and in the
Midwest people maybe you know, it tells you. A map
tells you a lot more than just like what the
weather's like. Yeah, just like a periodic table. So if
a scientist, if a chemist looks at silicon, I look
(25:00):
at it and I see a capital S lowercase I,
the word silicon, the number fourteen in the left hand corner,
and that it's yellow. A chemist looks at it and says, well,
I see it's in between on the row aluminum and phosphorus,
and in the column it's below carbon and above germanium.
And I see it's numbers fourteen and it's yellow, which
(25:23):
means it's a metaloid. So I can tell you like
these twelve things about silicon just because of where it
sits on that map. Yes, it's pretty amazing. I just
I don't get it, but it's amazing, right.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
I was just going to say, we're not going to
explain what those fourteen things are because now there are
the kind of things you have to go to graduate
school in chemistry to truly understand. It's okay that we
don't understand it. All you have to take away from
this and all we're trying to get across, is that
trained chemists can look at the periodic table and realize
a lot about whatever element they're looking at and figure
(25:56):
out how to mix it with other elements to do
amazing things. Or if you put together these two things,
this is probably the reaction that you're going to have.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
Yeah, and it's also for someone like us. It can
get really confusing because when you look at different periodic tables,
one thing you'll notice is that the colors may be different,
like that there is no unless I'm wrong, there isn't
one completely settled. This is the only way to do it.
Periodic table. Oh no, as far as a lot of
it goes. But like you know, depending on who you
(26:29):
are and how you want to organize a periodic table
that you use. Those colors may mean different things, so
it can get really really confusing. Oh yeah when it
comes to that stuff.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
For sure. And usually there is like a key or
a legend on the periodic table that says, this is
what these colors mean. But if you take away the colors,
the layout of them across and down, if you look
at a periodic table, that's generally going to be the
same for any periodic table that looks even roughly like
what you're looking at. It's the colors that really kind
(26:59):
of change things up. But more and more, as we've
learned more about the atom, starting in the early twentieth
century onward, and quantum mechanics kind of became a thing
that got incorporated into the periodic table as well, And
that is where we get to essentially the third way
that the whole thing's organized, which is by blocks, subshells, S, P, D,
(27:24):
and F and so the number the number of shells
that an element has that's its period across, the number
of electrons in its outermost shell that's its group. The
blocks describe where the outer most electron is, and if
(27:48):
you'll allow me for a second to just kind of
take a little divergence here. It helps under it helps
you understand it.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
I think, please, can we talk about baseball?
Speaker 2 (27:57):
No, not that kind of divergence, like deeper into chemistry
kind of divergence.
Speaker 1 (28:02):
Okay, I'm gonna go out and think about baseball.
Speaker 2 (28:04):
Okay. So, so that whole model that Nils Bor gave
us of, like the planetoid nucleus and or the sun
like nucleus and the planetoid electron orbiting it, that is
really off. That's not at all what they're like. It's
good for people who don't really care about this kind
of thing to walk around thinking, but when you actually
(28:27):
start to try to understand the periodic table, it really
gets in the way. So if you can kind of
throw that out and instead think of electrons as not
particles like planetoids, they're actually waves of energy, right, and
they like to orbit atoms because their negative electrical charge
(28:47):
is attracted to the positive electrical charge of the protons.
That's why they're orbiting or flying around that nucleus. But
they don't do it in like these tight little orbits
like a planet does around like the Sun. Instead, they
inhabit three dimensional areas that follow predictable shapes. Depending on
(29:08):
the energy level of that electron. You can say what
shape it's going to follow around that nucleus, but you
can't say where it is at any given point in time,
thanks to our friend Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Heisenberg said, you
can know the velocity of an object, or you can
(29:30):
know the location of a quantum object. You can't know both.
And because we know the energy of an object, we
can figure out its velocity at speed like an electron,
which means we can't know where it is. So these
orbits actually are where they may be ninety percent of
the time. That's what an actual electron orbit is. And
(29:52):
again it follows is weird, cool looking little three dimensional
four leaf clover shapes just really neat and depending on
on the energy of the electron, it's going to inhabit
a specific place ninety percent of the time around the
nucleus of that atom, either close to the atom further
out further out, depending on the shell that it's associated with.
(30:15):
And the block is where the highest energy the outermost
electron is in that position. And again it's denoted by
SPD and F and it gets way more arcane than that.
But all you have to remember is that when you're
looking at blocks, they're talking about the specific location of
(30:35):
the most energetic electron. And again, since the outermost electrons
are where all the action happens, the most energetic of
the outermost electrons are really where the action happens. And
that's why it's become a little more sophisticated, a little
more refined over time, thanks to the addition of quantum
(30:56):
mechanics in our understanding of the atom. Are you there, Chuck?
Did you outside?
Speaker 1 (31:03):
Sorry, I just came back in. I didn't actually think
about baseball. I was just kidding. I watched an entire
baseball game.
Speaker 2 (31:08):
Oh, who won?
Speaker 1 (31:11):
I have no joke. My brain is too mushy for
a joke right now. No, I actually listened to that
and I learned from you.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
So oh. I appreciate that. Thank you, because I felt
like I was hanging from a trapeze by my fingernails.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
Well, I was underneath you with a net. That's all
I'm good for.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
It, Thanks, buddy, I appreciate it. And by the way,
I didn't want to just walk past. That's all you're
good for. I just couldn't even bring myself to recognize
such a dumb thing that was said.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
I appreciate that. So the final thing we got to
talk about is kind of brings it back to the
beginning of how they originally just started to think about
grouping things, which was by their atomic mass. That the
sort of very basic thing that they first thought they
could use as a grouping device. And they still will
indicate the atomic mass on most periodic tables, but the
(32:00):
atomic mass is actually a weighted average of the amount
of protons plus neutrons, But it depends on how abundant
different isotopes in that element are out in nature, and
it's not always the same. So carbon is a great
example that Livia used. It always has six protons, usually
has six neutrons, but sometimes can have seven or eight.
(32:23):
So instead of having an atomic mass of just twelve
six plus six, they take a weighted average and it
weighs out to twelve point zero one point one. So
if you see those numbers with a decimal point, you
can understand that that's because it's a weighted average and
not just a locked in number.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
Yeah, and it doesn't necessarily have much to do with
the periodic table. But you've mentioned isotopes, and all those
are as an element with more or less electrons than
it has when it's stable in a neutral charge. If
you take away an electron, it has more positively charged
protons and electrons, so that's a positive iyon. If you
add an electron, like say fluorine wants to do, it
(33:02):
becomes a it has more electrons than protons, so it
becomes a negatively charged isotope. So those are possible too.
But just bear in mind you're not changing the number
of protons, because if you do that you have a
new element. You're just changing the number of electrons, either
adding or taking away. And one of the other things
about the periodic table is you can point to different
(33:24):
different sections and be like, those are the ones that
form positive ions because they give away their extra electron.
Those are the ones that form negative ions because they
attract extra electrons that they normally have in their neutrally
charged state. That's another thing that you can just point
to at the periodic table.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
Pretty amazing, it is.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
I mean, the fact that people have figured this out
is just hats off to all of the scientificals that
were involved in this. Over the years.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
Yeah, I say, we take a break, sure, and when
we come back, we're going to tell you about how
things got very interesting in terms of the periodic table.
And then I jeen thirties right after this.
Speaker 2 (34:26):
Chuck, I feel like we made it through the hardest part.
We're out of the out of the woods.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
As I'm shaking a little less, I am too, but
I won't fully relax for another fifteen.
Speaker 2 (34:38):
Just hang in, hang in there, We'll get it all right.
Speaker 1 (34:41):
So what happened in the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 2 (34:44):
Oh, well, a guy named doctor Lawrence I can't remember,
but he the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories named after him, in
part invented particle accelerators, where you use incredible amounts of
energy to throw trillions of particles of different weights or
specific weights at a target atom. Tell them what Einstein how?
(35:05):
Einstein described this process.
Speaker 1 (35:08):
Like shooting birds in the dark in a country where
there are only a few birds.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
Right, Like, the chances of you actually having a collision
are so remote that you like, they're almost indescribable mathematically.
But if you shoot trillions of particles, you really increase
your chances of there being some kind of collision and
when you collide a one particle one atom with another
atom with enough energy, they can combine. And when you
(35:34):
add proton to proton, remember, you get a new element.
And so with particle accelerators they were able to start
creating elements that you can't find in nature. And then
you started doing this all the way back in the
nineteen thirties, and this research is what actually directly led
to nuclear bomb. Apparently, when Einstein heard that Lawrence had
(35:55):
created this particle accelerator, he advised FDR to start working
on a bomb because it was now a thing, like
the world had just been prepared scientifically for a bomb
to exist soon.
Speaker 1 (36:08):
Yeah, so lab created elements, like you said, started being
a thing in nineteen thirty seven. Anything past uranium on
the chart you cannot find in nature because it decays
much too fast to even be around and know it's
a thing and study. But so anything past uranium as
LAB created. And in nineteen thirty seven, technetium was the
(36:33):
very first blank spot to be filled in with a
LAB created element as number forty three nuclear bombs that
you mentioned when they started doing the nuclear tests out
on the Marshall Islands in the fifties, they would send
planes out into these explosions with filters on them to
(36:53):
scoop up unusual atoms and discover potentially elements. That is
how we got element ninety nine named Einsteinium. And I
guess we should talk a little bit about the naming
because the IUPAC actually has rules around this. It says
new elements have to be named, and this is very interesting.
(37:14):
A mineral, a place or a country, a property, or
a scientist or a mythological concept, which is fascinating. So
we have some of the latest elements. I believe in
twenty sixteen is when we got one thirteen through eighteen.
We got the element tennessine because it was there were
(37:35):
institutions in Tennessee that led to the discovery of this
super heavy element, and so they named it Tennessee and
most of them sort of follow that naming convention.
Speaker 2 (37:44):
Yeah, Nihonium is named after Nihan, which is the Japanese
name for Japan. A Muscovian is named after Moscow where
a lab where that was created in a Ghanissan Oganissan
Organisan aganison, that's what it is. It's named after a
guy named Yuri Oganessian who is a Russian essentially element hunter.
(38:08):
Now he has got tons of funding behind him, has
set up new particle accelerators with more and more energy,
and is bashing things together in the search for entirely
new elements that not only don't exist on Earth, they
may not exist anywhere else in the universe. They may
only exist theoretically until Aganessian manages to smash the right
(38:33):
atoms together to create those elements for a pico second.
Like they're so unstable that they last almost no time
at all, which makes them totally useless to us.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
Yeah, as of now.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
The fact that, like you said, they predicted I think
it's going to go up to one hundred and seventy three.
Speaker 1 (38:51):
Yeah, and we're at one hundred and what eighteen.
Speaker 2 (38:55):
Makes people like Agnessian just crazy, like they want to
find them all. Actually found a couple of those most
recent ones that were inducted, I guess in the periodic
table in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
Yeah, and this is kind of cool too. Oganessian apparently
wanted to name that element stardust in honor of David Bowie,
but it didn't fit the naming criteria.
Speaker 2 (39:20):
Oh yeah, yeah, too bad, so sad, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
Too bad. So as far as the sort of the
coda on this, Livia is keen to point out that
there are gaps in the framework. Still, there are issues.
When you look at the periodic table, you needn't only
look at the very first one hydrogen at the far
left of the table. It's there because it has that
(39:45):
one electron, but it is not like any of the
rest of its group, because the rest of them are
all alkali metals. It's actually more similar to something like chlorine,
which is in the second column from the right. But
you know, there's still debate on like it's not settled
on where things should be placed on these various and
(40:06):
there have been you know, there are alternative tables that
people have put out over the years with different tweaks,
some small, some large, and it's pretty interesting, I think.
Speaker 2 (40:14):
And there's also that two period section that's always removed
from the rest of the periodic table. It's put down
below it. Those two sections actually go in that's the
f block, right, yeah, the bottom two rows, so they
come after I think, bury them and just go all
(40:35):
the way over to oh, I can't remember the other one,
but imagine that the periodic table was looked like it did,
but then the bottom two rows were about twice as
long as they are now. It looked weird, and it's
because you would take that lower F block and put
it into its proper place if you're arranging these things
(40:55):
by atomic number. But the reason why the F block
is pulled out is because those two rows of elements,
the actin needs and lath the needs. I think they
might like follow an atomic number in that way, but
their properties are totally different from their periods or their groups.
And the reason why is because they're the only two
(41:18):
groups that have the F position subshell filled by an electron,
which completely alters their everything. It's just different than all
of the other ones. And it's different enough that they
just basically removed it until they can figure out where
it should sit, because depending on how you interpret where
(41:38):
like how the periodic table should be laid out, they
should go here, they should go there, or they should
just stay out like they are now.
Speaker 1 (41:46):
Yeah, there are some and it's kind of fun to
look some of these up if you want to see
some kind of cool at the very least just esthetic examples.
And then they're not just like, oh, this looks cooler.
It makes sense to the person who has put out
this whatever alternative or alternate periodic table, Like in nineteen
forty nine, Lvia found one from Life magazine that is
(42:09):
a spiral, And there are quite a few different spiral
or spirillic designs where you have hydrogen at the center
and it's sort of like racetrack shape. If you look
at any just look up spiral based periodic chart, and
they're very nice to look at, I imagine they are
much much harder to sort of make sense of and
(42:30):
read unless you're the person who made it or a chemist. Yeah,
chemists would still probably be like, well, why are you
doing it that way?
Speaker 2 (42:40):
I liked it the other way.
Speaker 1 (42:42):
Or that three D one that Timothy Stowe came up
with that I think physicists are pretty keen on that
has three axes of different colors that represent quantum numbers
that describe the electrons. But it's you know, if you
look at a three D version, that's kind of cool too.
But if you find the one, the traditional one confusing
(43:02):
as a non chemist, just try looking at any of
these other ones. It's really confusing.
Speaker 2 (43:06):
Yeah, And it's all it is is it's saying, well, actually, no,
I think we should arrange them so that they're connected
more by this property like electro negativity, or they're shiny
where they're pretty. I like this these elements, and so
we're going to put them together. These are my favorite elements.
It's just kind of like that, and so you can
bend them in all sorts of weird shapes.
Speaker 1 (43:26):
Yeah. I have my own periodic table I've designed. Oh yeah,
and it is just a big black block and then
times new roman and yellow lettering in the middle. It says,
who gives a right?
Speaker 2 (43:40):
I would have imagined it was a traditional periodic table,
but scratched out with a pen rights violently.
Speaker 1 (43:46):
No, that's good. I like that better. I'm gonna change mine.
Speaker 2 (43:48):
I've got one other thing that doesn't. It has a
lot to do with everything, but not anything we're going
to go into. But there are some especially those elements
that don't occur in nature and they have to to
create in particle accelerators, but also some that occur in nature,
like gold and mercury are two good examples. They have
electrons that spin so fast, that are moving at such
(44:13):
incredible energies that they actually are like a significant fraction
of the speed of light. That's how fast they're going.
And it doesn't matter whether you're talking about like a
photon or a planet or a black hole or an electron.
Anything that has mass and can move at anything like
(44:34):
half the speed of light is going to actually bend
time and space. And so for some kinds of elements
that have relativistic speeds, meaning they're electrons travel close to
the speed of light, they have all sorts of freaky
dicky properties. It's why gold is gold. Not going to
get into that, just trust me. It's why gold is gold.
(44:56):
But also it means that if you could go into
those atoms and just kind of exists in them as
if they were a universe, you would see that time
and space was bent compared to how time and space
exists outside of those atoms, like on our level. That's
what atomic scientists have figured out, and it's actually kind
(45:16):
of having a mind breaking effect on the periodic table
to an extent amazing. I think so too. That's it, Chuck,
we did periodic tables. It's done. You did great.
Speaker 1 (45:28):
Oh boy, we don't have to do it again.
Speaker 2 (45:30):
No, I don't think so, I hope not. Yeah, what
is this Murphy's law? Well, since I said Murphy's Law,
and Chuck laugh because he got the joke. You may
not have him. That's okay. That means it's time for
listener now.
Speaker 1 (45:46):
All right, I'm gonna call this very quick follow up
from our Halloween episode. As we record this, it is
actually Halloween, so that has just come out today, and
we have something from Owen that perhaps explained something that
we kind of wondered about. Hey, guys, once again loving
the Yearly Spectacular. Figured i'd mentioned my take on what
(46:07):
the Hermit meant. Hermit Hermit meant when he said the
man's eyes didn't match his mouth. Oh yeah, I think
it might have something to do with honesty, like the
words of encouragement were somehow disingenuine. That lined up with
the idea that the hermit has sort of seen flaws
and faults. That makes sense to me. I didn't match
his mouth.
Speaker 2 (46:26):
That's like the best explanation I've heard so far. It's
also the only explanation, but it's a good one.
Speaker 1 (46:31):
I think it's totally it. And Owen says, regardless of
whether that's the author's intent, I'm using the description in
a song i'm writing. So thanks for the inspiration and
in all honesty, the voice work is on point this year.
That is from Oen.
Speaker 2 (46:47):
Makes a Lot, Owen, Here's a here's some inspiration for
the musical part of your song.
Speaker 1 (47:00):
Oh.
Speaker 2 (47:01):
If you want to be like Owen and write in
to explain something to us, we love that kind of thing.
You can put it in an email and send it
off to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (47:14):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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