…to continue with the Justin Timberlake references. Here’s an interesting way to look at the periodic table of elements (via Robert Krulwich of NPR’s Radiolab): as personalities at a party. Krulwich says:

Chemistry, after all, is about making and breaking bonds. It’s about attraction and repulsion. You can think of bonds as covalent, ionic or metallic, but it is just as easy to think of atoms cuddling or being ripped apart by a hydrogen with a ponytail or smashing a repulsive atom  into a plate of jello.

Oliver Sacks, famous for his books on neuroscience like The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat (which actually happened by the way. A man actually tried to pick up his wife and put her on his head, fortunately he didn’t get too far along before he realized his mistake), apparently even identified with some elements:

“I think I identified at times with the inert gases,” he wrote in his memoir Uncle Tungsten. He imagined them “lonely, cut off, yearning to bond.”

I think this is a good approach to teaching chemistry but one thing I wonder is how students know where the metaphors end? Sure, potassium and water don’t like each other, but why is potassium wearing glasses? And is it true that zinc can’t dance?