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3.091SC Introduction to Solid State Chemistry, Fall 2010
Transcript – Session 3
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PROFESSOR: Time to learn. Time to get back to business here in 3.091. So let's do the announcements first. Tomorrow quiz one, based on homework one. Ten minutes. Bring your Periodic Table, your table of constants, something to write with and a calculator. There's about a dozen or so copies of the text on reserve at the Hayden Library. I want you to be aware of that.
Now some of you approached me last day and said is it true that we have to memorize the Periodic Table? Yes. But not the whole Periodic Table. I know some of you are going to say, well that's so 19th century, rote learning and so on. To which I say, you're wrong. Every educated person should know that potassium lies under sodium, which lies under lithium. And you are going to be educated whether you like it or not.
But this is a lot to learn and so we're just going to look at the main block. We're not going to ask you to memorize the lanthanides, actinides and the super heavies. We'll leave that out. So it's quite straightforward. We've been doing this for many years. This is from 2004. And it's not that hard. I give you the blank here. And I even put the numbers on for you. And all you have to do is add the two-letter or one-letter symbol. You don't have to give me the full name of the element. You don't have to get me its density or its electron affinity. You've just got to put argon, in there. Ar. That's all you've got to put in there. OK? And every year people grouse when I announce this. But you'll find out that you'll breeze through it. You'll have 10 minutes. This will be on September 24.
So next week there will be two minor celebrations. One on Tuesday and one on Thursday. So it's going to be a very festive week. And people blast through it. It's one mark off for every error down to zero. We don't give negative scores. And people just go right through it. And then they urge me to make sure that in future years I victimi-- I mean I ask students to continue this. People are very proud of the fact they know the S, P, and D blocks of the Periodic Table by memory.
But I don't want to neglect, disrespect the lanthanides and actinides. So we're going to have two contests. Mnemonics to help remember the names of the lanthanides and actinides. That's tricky to remember. So these are mnemonics contests. So here are some examples. Here's one, see lanthanum, cerium, praseodymium, neodymium and so on, all right? Obviously this one came from industry because of the slur against the Academy. Obviously, somebody in industry has no idea how hard we work here. And plus, look at this: "to dramatically help". This gigantic split infinitive. Clearly, clearly someone from industry.