Chemical Elements

One of the most widespread and underappreciated set of symbols around us are the chemical elements.   It was a major milestone in human thought and ingenuity that uncovered all the elements and classified them, and in the top labs of the world there are still efforts to produce newer, heavier elements never seen before and figure out their properties.  Here is an odd shot of a periodic table:

From simple hydrogen (H) to gold (Au) and beyond, these symbols unlock a wealth of knowledge about the world and what everything is made of, and how substances will behave and combine.  Everyone should take some time to learn more about chemistry -- the basics are easy to grasp, and it gives so much insight on the technology around you, and so many news stories will make more sense.

Why are the USA and China and other high-tech countries scrambling to control supplies of "rare earth elements" like europium?  Because this element is key to making cell phones.

Why waste money creating tiny amounts of radioactive technetium?  That's an element that doesn't even exist in nature.  But it's used for imaging the blood vessels around the heart during cardiac stress tests -- I know, I have had one.

Each element is unique, down to the exact wavelengths of light they absorb or give off, the way they combine with other elements, their material strength, where we find them and extract them, and their uses in engineering.

Almost half the elements on that table are facing a shortage of some kind.  There are millions of people employed in trying to secure new sources and studying new uses.  There are huge economic impacts and trade wars involved.

Another astonishing feat of research has been the standardization of names for chemical compounds.  There are an essentially infinite variety of molecules, especially carbon-based (organic) molecules.  But there is an international system to name every tiny variation in a way that the structure can be conveyed across language boundaries.  From the simple chains of carbons saturated with hydrogen (the alkanes) methane (CH4), ethane (CH2-CH3), propane (CH3-CH2-CH3), up to chains of 100 or more.  And every possibly way that atoms can be substituted.  After all, 1,1-dichloroethane (CHCl2-CH3) is different from 1,2-dichloroethane (CH2Cl-CH2Cl) even though they are made of the exact same number of the same atoms (they are isomers).  It's fascinating and endless with thousands of pages of new research published every week on how to optimize electronics or lasers or how to recycle materials more effectively.

How did we develop materials to use as heat shields to protect spacecraft coming back into Earth's atmosphere?  Decades of research to find alloys and composites that can withstand 2500 degrees without vaporizing or crumbling.

How we we know what distant stars and nebulae are made of?  We can study the spectrum of the light they give off, far beyond what we can see with our human eyes, and every little line in that spectrum comes from a specific element in a specific energy state.

What happens to matter at the highest temperatures, or the lowest temeratures?  Chemical research continues on every front.

Never stop learning.  You don't need special classes or a degree to add to your knowledge of the world.  Just be curious, and look into it.

Funny note about that shower curtain:

When I moved from a one bedroom to two bedroom apartment years ago, I just knew I had to have this as a shower curtain.  What I didn't expect was to sit down and start seeing typos.  Seriously, the symbol for lead is Pb (for plumbum, the Latin word) not Rb (Rb is rubidium).  And Thallium has two l's.  They got zinc wrong (it's not "zink") but got Ununqudium right?

The curtain is also a good illustration of how symbols can be invented to pack tons of information into a limited space.  There are symbols for the stability of the elements, whether they are solid, liquid or gas as room temprature, the exact configuration of electrons, the atomic size, and more.