What relationship can a mummy, a scuba diver, Count Dracula, a lazy monkey, Nebuchadnezzar, Napoleon, a dinosaur, the British Army, the Cold War and even a green dog have with the periodic table of elements? Chemists will probably answer that everything, because everything that exists is composed of the 118 elements that make up the system that orders them and that Dimitri Mendeleev devised in 1869. The explanation, however, is found in the comic The Periodic Table (Graphic Andana2023) that seeks to put a face to the elements and associate them with everyday objects of which they are a part to bring science, in this case chemistry, in a fun and educational way to the little ones, but also to the general lay public. subject.
“The elements are the bricks with which everything is built: from clouds to volcano eruptions, living beings, all our technology… and it is easier to reach people by relating them to something tangible and not with abstract things,” explains Adela Muñoz, professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Seville and coordinator of the comic that will be presented this Monday in the Andalusian capital and that can be read in Spanish and Valencian.
Throughout its pages the elements are presented in first person and concisely tell their origin, what they are used for and how they relate and react with others. And they do so represented by something that characterizes them and that allows the reader to identify them. That is why boron is a mummy, because the Egyptians used it in the mummification process of their dead; oxygen is a diver, because it is essential for human beings or tellurium is presented as a Count Dracula, because it was discovered in Transylvania.
There have been 91 people, including teachers and students from 15 Spanish universities, three CSIC centers and two institutes, who have been in charge of writing the texts and finding the perfect costume for their element. “That harmony in the texts is what I find most beautiful about the comic, because it is very nice that books have a story behind them and this one does,” says illustrator Raquel Gu. Using chemical nomenclature, it is the other essential metal for the alloy that is the comic, because it has been his job to translate into vignettes the texts and ideas that his editors conveyed to him, among them a 13-year-old boy, supervised by his mother, a chemistry teacher.
“It has been a very fun process, there are people with a lot of imagination who have done very funny things. As a person outside of Chemistry, I also looked for what caught my attention the most,” explains Gu about his work, in which he has also had to carry out an in-depth documentation process to find the faces of the discoverers of the elements or others. historical figures linked to the stories behind them. Like the king of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, who in 600 BC used the antinomian to paint the walls of his palace yellow; or Napoleon, whose soldiers almost froze to death when they tried to invade Russia in 1812 because the tin buttons on their uniforms crumbled in the cold, and that he was treated with mercury chloride when he arrived in exile on Saint Helena.
And if tin contributed in its own way to the defeat of the Napoleonic troops in Russia, aluminum spoiled the destroyer SheffieldEdit of the British Navy in the Falklands War. He was covered in that element and when he was hit by a missile, upon coming into contact with oxygen—which makes him burn very easily—he melted, engulfed in flames.
The comic is prefaced by Javier García Martínez, president of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), an institution that also seeks to promote scientific dissemination and that, as far as the periodic table is concerned, is working on a kind of Trivial. “The comic is a fantastic way to tell the story behind the periodic table, which in addition to being an icon of science, is the fruit of the imagination and work of many researchers and scientists who have strived to better understand the world” , he indicates. “Behind it is the solution to many challenges such as the energy transition or sustainability, which is what the chemistry of abundant elements is taking care of: replacing those that are scarce with those that are more present,” he adds.
The book is accompanied by a glossary of the most technical terms that appear throughout the presentations of the elements and that help to understand their meaning and context. It is Gu who was in charge of pointing them out and Muñoz who worked on their definition. Thanks to them we can know that the Cold War was also fought on the board of the periodic table, under the name of the Transphermic War, as the controversy derived from the tensions between the United States and the former USSR is called. elements with an atomic number greater than fermium.
The importance of disclosure
Muñoz’s love for disseminating science is at the origin of this comic. In 2019, coinciding with the 150th anniversary of the periodic table, he asked his 23 2nd year Organic Chemistry students to choose an element and explain it as a monologue. “They devised some costumes and then we had a parade where they interpreted their elements in the House of Science in Seville,” he explains. Muñoz asked Gu, who had already transferred the play to comics Scientific: past, present and futurewhich would recreate the dance of the elements in vignettes so that it could serve as a work base for high school students. The result was posted on the US website and there he was discovered by the daughter of the editor of Andana Gráfica, who was a Chemistry student. When he crossed paths with Gu, she proposed the idea of finishing the periodic table and Muñoz opened the collaboration to complete it to other professors from the rest of the country.
García Martínez delves into how useful comics can be to understand the periodic table and even memorize it: “It is the best cheat sheet in chemistry, the simplest explanation of the universe. But it is also the entrance to a fascinating world of mythology, geology, history… And with each element of the book you also learn Latin and Greek, geography or eating habits. “The concepts in general are very simple, hydrogen is represented with stars, lithium with a battery, helium with the sun… to encourage associations of ideas,” explains Muñoz.
And, yes, we need to link the dinosaur, the lazy monkey and the green dog. Because, although most of the relationships that have been sought are simple and plausible, for other elements it is also necessary to conceptualize: Iridium is indirectly responsible for the disappearance of the dinosaurs because it reached Earth in the meteorite that caused it to cool. Argon is lazy because it does not react with any element—it comes from the Greek Argus which means inactive—and praseodymium is a rare element, like a green dog.
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