UNTANGLING SCIENCE EPISODE 3 – ATOMS AND ELEMENTS*****

 

By Megan

Link: https://www.untanglingscience.com/episode-3-atoms-and-elements (also available on other podcast sites)

Available until: Unknown

I think these episodes get better every week so I might have to invent six star reviews. I feel like I learn so much and it is so much fun to listen to, it doesn’t feel like I am working at all. Darragh Ennis is really brilliant at these podcasts because he makes science sound exciting. Science is very exciting but not everyone has the ability to bring that across. It really helps to learn about it from someone who finds it exciting themselves and really wants to tell us about it.

One of the best things about this podcast is that it makes science relevant to our day to day lives. It isn’t just something which is a bit abstract and irrelevant which we learn from a book because we have to. It’s something that is going on all the time all around us and even inside us. This is such a good way to approach science because it makes it feel more real.

The trouble with science is that it is quite complicated and it is possible to make it sound even more complicated than it is. When this happens, it is very easy for people to give it up because they think they can’t do it. But basic science isn’t really that complicated if it’s explained in the right way. This episode presents the ideas in a really clear way so they do make sense.

Episode 3 is about Atoms and Elements which is extra exciting because I love the periodic table. I knew a bit about it already and this episode is brilliant because it explained a lot of the things I wasn’t sure about. If you look online there are lots of different articles that explain the periodic table in different ways but it’s difficult to find one that really makes sense.

But this episode is so clear, not just with explaining what atoms and elements are and how they work but also with explaining why it’s good and all the amazing things we have been able to do because of it.

Atoms and molecules can be quite scary words but they are lot less scary in this podcast. It breaks down the atom figuratively as well as literally so it makes more sense. It was especially interesting to know how the atomic particles were discovered and in what order because I didn’t know any of that. It does seem quite important and it also tells you more about the story of the atom if it’s all in chronological order. Finding out what people used to believe is as important and as interesting as finding out what we now know is true.

The idea of sharing electrons is also explained really well. That was something I found quite confusing but it seems quite easy now. This podcast makes me feel like I’m not stupid and that I will be able to keep learning more and more.

It does help if you can look at a periodic table when you listen to the podcast but there are lots online. Just be careful with the Wikipedia ones because it has different forms of the periodic table and it would probably be very confusing if you looked at the wrong one but there are some good ones too. You can definitely understand just from listening because it is explained so well but if you have a periodic table too you can actually see it and spot the elements that are mentioned. I got so excited about the four elements that were found in Ytterby in Sweden because element 70 is called Ytterbium so maybe that is one of the four! I think this periodic table is a really good one. https://sciencenotes.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/PeriodicTableAtomicMassColor.pn

There is a really good chart at the top of the blog page too which shows how atom theories changed as scientists discovered new things. It’s a bit small to read on my laptop but I copied it into a document and enlarged it (I hope that’s not against copyright) and then I could read it really well. One of the scientists is called Ernest Rutherford and element 104 is called Rutherfordium and it’s named after him.

There is a lot of information in this podcast. It’s 34 minutes long but my friend who is studying chemistry has done 9 modules of her course so far and each one takes at least half an hour to get through and then it takes even longer to persuade it all to make sense but a lot of what was in those 9 modules was in this episode, only much clearer. It is really compressed into a short space of time but instead of increasing the pressure which is what happens if you compress a gas (I think that’s Boyle’s Law but I’m not 100% sure because there isn’t a podcast about that yet), it actually takes the pressure off because it’s so much easier to understand.

The next episode will be about the Sun and it sounds really exciting. Even if it is a bit too hot for me at the moment.