Who Says Chemistry is Boring?

Halo,

Have you heard of anyone who said Chemistry are boring subjects? You should not be one of them if you are seeing this post. I certainly disagree with that statement and have been relating to others between Chemistry Theories with Real Life examples and applications in order to convince them – the Chemistry is so fun. Even with all these being done, i still have people coming to me and tell me that Chemistry is boring since there is no movies or songs that revolves around them.

Did we say Songs? Yes. I was searching for material in the internet and came across a song that is related to Chemistry and it has been around for several decades. This is going to be fun for those that study Chemistry and an eye opener to those that claim we Chemists (Defn: People that study Chemistry) are boring.

We are talking about “The Element Song” by Tom Lehrer who is an American singer-songwriter, pianist and mathematician. He also lectured on Mathematics and music theater. Lehrer is best known for the pithy, humorous songs he recorded in the 1950s and 60s. His work often parodied popular forms, notably in “The Elements”, where he sets the names of the chemcial elements to a tune from Gilbert and Sullivan.

Before we start, here is the Lyrics that you might want to sing along with:

There’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,
And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium
And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium,
And iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium, Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium
And lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium
And gold, protactinium and indium and gallium
And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium.

There’s yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium
And boron, gadolinium, niobium, iridium
And strontium and silicon and silver and samarium,
And bismuth, bromine, lithium, beryllium and barium.

There’s holmium and helium and hafnium and erbium
And phosphorous and francium and fluorine and terbium
And manganese and mercury, molybdinum, magnesium,
Dysprosium and scandium and cerium and cesium.
And lead, praseodymium, platinum, plutonium,
Palladium, promethium, potassium, polonium,
Tantalum, technetium, titanium, tellurium,
And cadmium and calcium and chromium and curium.

There’s sulfur, californium and fermium, berkelium
And also mendelevium, einsteinium and nobelium
And argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc and rhodium
And chlorine, cobalt, carbon, copper,
Tungsten, tin and sodium.

These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard,
And there may be many others but they haven’t been discovered.

How about looking at the position of each elements in the periodic table and see if Tom really covered all the known elements at that time in his The Element Song: