[Music] hi it's Mr Anderson and today I'm going to take you on a tour of the periodic table um a book that I've been reading I'm not quite done but it's really fascinating is called The Disappearing spoon it's written by this guy over here his name is Sam Keen um if you want more information you can go to Sam keen.com it's neat it's got a lot of trivia on on the periodic table um but it's essentially about the history of the periodic table in other words it's not the science which I'm going to talk about today it's more about uh the people who discovered the elements it goes all the way from the Manhattan Project to Mr bunson the inventor of the bunson burner and Mr Lewis famous for lewis. diagram so it's fascinating read um and it's getting at the history behind this which is the periodic table uh periodic table we're going to come back to this in just a second um and we'll review some of the things from this podcast um the thing you may be puzzled about is what's up with the name of the title The Disappearing spoon uh disappearing spoon is actually written about this element it's called gallium it's a poor metal and the neat thing about gallium is that it has a really low melting point and so if you mix your tea with the spoon made of gallium so let's take a look at this video over here on the side the minute it goes in the tea you can see that it starts to turn into a liquid and then kind of uh Melt Away thus the disappearing spoon um the problem with this I was like you are saying well let me Google it let me buy one of these spoons it seems cool um it's also uh highly radioactive and so it may not only be a disappearing spoon but it may be a disappearing hand if you deal with gallium too much so let's get to the uh periodic table so here's our periodic table periodic table first of all the vertical columns are going to be called groups and so this would be one and two and three and it goes all the way over here to number 18 which is on the side and the periods are going to go down the side so this would be 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 and so we're going to see uh these periodic um properties in other words as we go and look period to period to period to period you'll find that there are similar characteristics um let's go through it then and I'm going to try to use different colors and highlight each of the different areas so let's start with the first one first one are going to be these Metals these metals are called the alkal metals and it goes all the way from lithium at the top um to cesium at the bottom so these are called alkal Metals uh alkaline metals all have one veence electron that means that they're highly reactive and so in this picture down here we've got lithium sodium all the way through cesium if you want to have fun on YouTube just look at alkal metals and you'll see people thrown into water and you get these huge explosions and that's because of their veence electrons next to them are called the alkaline earth Metals so let me advance our picture so these are the alkaline earth metals it goes all the way at the top with burum all the way down to the bottom at radium so this is alkaline these all have two veence electrons and so they're reactive as well they tend to form oxides with oxygen um magnesium calcium all these are important in living things um and they tend to be fairly stable in other words we can we can find them on our planet uh in a raw form next up uh we've got the halogens halogens are going to be over here on this side so this would be a hallogen right here Florine chlorine bromine iodine atine these all have seven veence electrons so that means they would love to get one more electron so they're not super stable chlorine pictured here in this block is in a liquid form it normally occurs as a gaseous form it's a nasty gas was used as uh a poison during World War I um and these are the halogens right here highly reactive right next to them however are the most unreactive of the elements that we have and these are going to be called the noble gases so helium neon argon Krypton Xenon and radon all of these have eight veence electrons and these are going to be called the noble gases um really stable um they've got complete outer energy levels or veence shells and so they're really really happy um unlike their hallogen neighbors which are right next to them okay cool thing about them if you look down here at this picture um you put any of the noble gases in a tube run electricity through it they're going to floures um as electrons kind of move to higher energy levels and then fall back down so if you look at neon lights or lasers are all made up of these noble gases and if you ever have uh heard of inert gases inert gases are gases that don't react with anything we use those in like MIG welding uh an application of that okay next are the schops schops are um a way that I like to remember the non-metals and so I'm going to circle these so here's carbon then I'm going to go way over here and circle hydrogen and then we're going to do nitrogen and oxygen and phosphorus and sulfur and selenium so these are all called the nonmetals the reason I wrote down schnaps is that these are all things that are vital inside living material so carbon is what we're made up of nitrogen makes our amino acids oxygen is used to get energy out of our food we use phosphorus in our DNA sulfur in our proteins and even selenium which is not part of schnaps uh we need microamounts of that and it's been linked to deficiencies in selenium can actually um perhaps cause cancer okay next one then are going to be the transition metals and so if we were to Circle those on here transition metals are going to be all these down here these are the transition metals transition metals have weird numbers of electrons in other words the ones that they're showing outside are are are variable and so they all look the same but they all have different characteristics and so these are called the transition metals example would be gold and so gold is going to be right here as a transition metal and here's a block this is the largest block ever uh of of gold I think it's 250 kg so like 00 lb bar of gold neat things again that verticality silver is right above that copper is right above that they have similar veence electrons and so these are all going to be similar um next group then on the periodic table is going to be the poe metals and so if we go to where those Poe metals are um poor Metals let me find a good color poor metals are going to be let's go right here and here and here these are going to be the poor Metals in here and so metals are going to be over in this group um this is gallium right here this is a picture of gallium that was that disappearing spoon remember uh that melted away right at the beginning um these are going to be somewhat um good conductors but not as good as the true metals that we find over here and the transition metals next group then are going to be the metalloids and so a good color might be red if I could find that there we go so the metalloids are going to be here so that's Boron silicon geranium arsenic antimony tarium and polonium uh these are all going to be the metalloids and these are all semiconductors and what that means is that they conduct electricity but they don't fully conduct electricity uh I've got a block of one of them this is actually a uh a l or a large amount of silicon and so this is a silicon uh Crystal um what they do is they grow it into these great cylinders and then they slice it off and then they can stamp silicon chips out of it um so it feels a little bit lighter than it would if this was just a true metal like iron for example uh and if we run electricity through it we can kind of control the amount of electricity that we run um through that because it's a metaloid or a semiconductor and the last thing I put on here was uranium uh there's a more a general Trend that as we go uh farther and farther and farther down the periodic table um our our size is going to get larger and larger and larger so when we get down to things like uranium these are actually uranium cubes that were used in the Manhattan Project uh atoms are going to get larger and larger and larger so when we go down to the bottom this is uranium most uranium is in the form of uranium 238 that means it has 92 protons and tons and tons of neutrons and so the farther we go down the periodic table things tend to get Radioactive in other words parts of them tend to Decay or to fall apart um one other interesting part here this is the lanthanides and the actinides the way a periodic table really should be organized is that these two rows here at the bottom should actually be inserted here and the reason that most periodic tables don't show it that way is it would make our periodic table incredibly long and so it really wouldn't display well uh on a poster