Science Is Fun @sciencefunn
Mendeleev: invents periodic table so people won’t have to memorize the elemets’ properties
Chemistry teachers: makes the students to memorize the table
Mendeleev: [visibly upset man in crowd]
Every inventor’s curse: you build the tool to end the suffering, and the institution turns the tool into the suffering. Mendeleev arranged all the elements into a logical system precisely so nobody would have to memorize their individual properties — the pattern tells you everything, that’s the entire point of the table. And then chemistry teachers around the world for the next 150 years decided the best use of this organizational miracle was: memorize the layout.
Mendeleev died in 1907. The periodic table is now mandatory memorization in roughly every school on Earth. His ghost has been watching this for over a century. The expression on that man’s face in the photo is exactly how Mendeleev’s spirit feels every September when school starts again.
Fun fact: Mendeleev was so confident in his table that he left gaps for undiscovered elements and predicted their properties — gallium, germanium, scandium — all found later, all matching his predictions within a hair. The man was a genius. The teachers made his genius into homework.
Also notable: the meme itself misspells ‘elements’ as ‘elemets’ — a real Mendeleev-level move, since the actual man once said that science is about understanding, not about spelling. The typo is canon.
0 Comments