Chem Undergrad

I have no desire to take your money, I am genuinely content with my financial situation, I wish you would spend your resources finding peace and happiness. You couldn't pay me enough to do what you want anyway: I spend enough time doing bureaucratic assessments not to want to do any more. Memorizing the Periodic Table is not the main focus of my course. I issue nicely color-printed tables on card stock, despite the expense, so that my students may have it and consult it and be aware of its importance. The Table is an essential resource. But my course is about using the Table, not memorizing it.

You assert that Mendeleev built his table off of divine revelation. But he didn't! He had a bunch of index cards, each one listing properties of a different element, and he basically played solitaire. He got those properties from reading the literature, actual experiments that chemists had done to characterize each element.

You assume that the knowledge of, say, the f-block elements is a plain and obvious fact revealed to the righteous but forever hidden from the condemned. I know it wasn't handed down from Heaven, I have trustworthy accounts that it wasn't. A beloved elder relative of mine did the characterization of the transuranics which led to Seaborg's 'actinide concept'. To you it is revelation but to me it is family history. You mention Genesis. I feel the same way about Genesis as I do about the Periodic Table.

There are many 'believers' who believe that the Divine grants wisdom to the righteous, not requiring hard work or intense thinking, but that is not true. Wisdom comes from hard work and real thought.

You talk of a God who is like a bad teacher. We have all had that bad teacher. A teacher who is only the teacher because they are much older than the students, and possess a copy of the book with the answers written on extra pages in the back. But a good teacher never needs to look at those answers because they know the process by which the answers may be obtained. And an excellent teacher knows how to help the students arrive at the answers on their own. If God is a teacher, than God would be an excellent teacher, not a horrible teacher.

Save your money and use it to seek your own happiness. Don't fret about where I classify helium.

/r/chemistry Thread Parent