FWIW, I don’t bother keeping up with any of the transuranium elements, and I’m a chemist. If you can’t produce more than a couple of dozen atoms of an element, I say the hell with it.

Interesting that they decided on the new system of naming future elements with three letters, after the number (effectively, element 108 is literally “108-ium”!).

Thanks for a trip down memory lane.

In an abstract way, a similar problem arises in some historical accounts of WWII in the Pacific. Why did we invade Guadalcanal, of all the God forsaken places on earth? At first glance, it looks like a peculiar choice, if one doesn’t know the threat the Japanese advance posed to the supply lines to Australia. THEN it makes perfect sense.

You asked: “…molecular orbital theory (where’s Charlie, anyway?). ”

Answer: earlier this evening have just come back for three weeks in Cundys Harbor, Maine. Ten feet from the tidal Atlantic Ocean enjoying two pound fresh-from-the-trap “Lobstah” at $3.75 per pound, two pound minimums.

The above paragraph puts the world in perspective.

The Variation Principle and linear properties of The Wave Function are what you are groping for. Remember LCAO is Linear Combination of Atomic Orbitals…plus some neat calculus to ensure you have a energy minimum/maximum on your hands.

Pass the Butter, Beer, and Beast, Grand-daughter.

I practiced my first lecture in freshman chem (before my pedagogical epiphany described above) before a colleague, and covered periodicity, exclusion principle, Aufbau principle, and shielding. What did he think?, I asked. He said it was great, but you just covered the first semester’s work in one hour.

Even in graduate level courses, it’s easy to blow people away inadvertently. Bottom line: if you’re bored by the subject material, you’re aiming too high. The trick is not to let your boredom show, but to feign the excitement you felt when you first grasped the topic.

Curiously, I quite like math now, but have lost interest in chemistry.

This is a pet peeve of mine in chemistry (and especially) math education. Chemistry classes invariably start with the Schroedinger equation, which is not chemistry and was only devised long after lot of chemistry was already known. It is, in a sense, an after the fact rationalization of centuries of observations. It’s elegant, but teaching it first does not reflect the historical intellectual development of the subject. My question at the time was what in God’s green earth motivated Schroedinger to write the damned equation in the first place?

Similar considerations obtain for molecular orbital theory (where’s Charlie, anyway?). One day Mulliken just decided to make linear combinations of atomic orbitals? Why? Had he eaten a bad burrito and had visions or something?

I prefer a more phenomenological introduction to chemistry. Here are the observations, how can we understand them, and predict future ones? MO theory came from the observation that the number of conjugated double bonds in dyes correlated with their color. The dye industry wanted to know why, and how to use that information.

Some transition metal complexes are colored, some colorless, some are pulled into magnetic fields, some are pushed out, some exchange ligands quickly, others slowly. Why? Bethe’s crystal field theory neatly explained all of those observations, converting a patchwork of bewildering data into a coherent whole.

Students find that approach much more interesting because it gets into real chemistry – which is interesting to everyone, as evidenced by any bangs and booms lecture – first, and hooking them on the subject, seques into the theory that explains what they’ve just seen.