A T-shirt and Science Teaching
- Published
- in Serendipity
My favourite T-shirt has four words on it – the elements Fluorine, Uranium, Carbon and Potassium. When I first saw it, I loved the joke and bought it. Since then, I’ve worn it frequently, including at many technical events and conferences around the world. Yet I’ve only found around a dozen people who have got it. Even when amongst fellow engineers, I’m more likely to be asked what it means. So, I’ve made up a story about it. Which goes like this:
“Fluorine, Uranium, Carbon and Potassium are my favourite elements. Starting with Fluorine, it’s such a busy element. It’s a gas and one of the most reactive elements in the periodic table, reacting with every other element except the lighter noble gases. When combined with Hydrogen, you get hydrofluoric acid, which is one of the few acids which can eat its way through a glass bottle. That’s so cool it could have come out of Harry Potter.
Next comes Uranium, moving from one of the lightest elements to one of the heaviest. A tennis ball sized lump of uranium would weigh around 3 kg, as it’s 60% heavier than lead. Unlike lead, it’s a lot more interesting, as it’s radioactive, which means you can use it for nuclear reactors. However, for that to work. You need to enrich the uranium, as the stuff you dig up only contains around 0.8% of the fissionable isotope U-238. To enrich it you need to react it with my first favourite – Fluorine, to make the gas Uranium Hexafluoride, then use centrifuges to separate the slightly heavier isotopes, before converting it back to the enriched metal. (Note to kids – this is not something to attempt at home.)
Then we have Carbon. Without it, we wouldn’t be here. Its ability to make complex molecules is the basis of life as we know it. If we didn’t have Carbon we wouldn’t have vegetables, meat, the charcoal to cook them, or us to eat them. So, three cheers for Carbon.
Finally, who doesn’t love Potassium? If you ever had a klutzy chemistry teacher who accidentally dopped a chunk of potassium into a sink full of water, scarring the ceiling of the lab for generations to come, you’d have taken it to heart. Not least for its refusal to conform, spurning “P” as it chemical symbol. Potassium was discovered sixty two years before the usurping Phosphorus by an eminent British scientist, but his German rival Ludwig Gilbert renamed it Kalium a few years later, letting Phosphorous’s fans steal the capital letter and confusing multiple generations of school children.”
That’s the story I tell. Although everything in it is true, it’s also a total lie. It’s not why I bought the T-shirt. I bought it because of what it spells. The first three chemical symbols are obvious – F, U and C. Every child who is taught chemistry should know that the symbol for Potassium is K. Hence the joke. But hardly anyone ever gets it. And because of that, nobody is offended by it.
Every so often, I’m delighted when someone recognises it, but they’re few and far between. A neighbour turned round from painting his front windows and complimented my “sweary” T-shirt. A waitress serving at a pavement café looked up, laughed and asked where I got it from. And a stand-up comic at the Edinburgh Fringe saw it and thought was better than any of his jokes, before explaining that he had a chemistry degree. But although I’ve worn it around the world, almost nobody notices it.
I do find the fact that nobody is offended quite offensive. The sad conclusion is that science teaching is failing all around the world. Either that, or we have so little interest in teaching creativity and serendipity that nobody joins the dots between the chemical symbols and the word they produce. Which are both totally depressing observations. But I will continue wearing it. There’s a great joy in meeting the few who do get it, which makes it all worthwhile. There’s also comfort in knowing that those I explain it to will never forget that the chemical symbol for Potassium is “K”, which means I’m doing a much better job than their chemistry teacher did. But it doesn’t augur well for the coming generations of STEM students.
Incidentally, you can’t make STEM out of chemical element names. S would give you smelly Sulphur. Alternatively, you could start with St, which is canny Tin. But after that, there is no E, EM or M. Which could be why STEM is such a failed acronym.