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PROFESSOR: Let's get started.
Settle down.
Settle down.
Welcome to 3.091.
I'm Donald Sadoway and I'm going
to be your instructor
this semester.
So what I want to do today
is to introduce my plans.
I've got plans for you.
Plans for learning.
I want to talk a little bit
today about those plans,
introduce myself, introduce
my class curriculum--
the path forward.
So let me begin by saying that
3.091 is the most important
class you will take at MIT.
It's true.
But, you know, anybody who
stands in front of you to
lecture should say the same
thing about his or her class.
If they don't believe that they
shouldn't be standing in
front of you lecturing.
The difference is when
I say it, I'm right.
[LAUGHTER]
PROFESSOR: And it's not just
an opinion, it's because of
the content of 3.091.
3.091 is about chemistry.
It's about the central science,
but it's not just
about any old chemistry.
This isn't a class that you
could take anywhere else in
this country.
This is the only place that
you can take 3.091.
3.091 is solid state
chemistry.
Now why do we talk about
solid state chemistry?
Because engineering systems
are made of solids.
Now I know what you're
thinking-- oh, he said solid
state, he's going to talk
about the chemistry that
constitutes his laptop computer
or the chemistry that
constitutes this
laser pointer.
And that's true.
We will talk about
that chemistry.
But we will also talk
about soft matter.
We as human beings are
chemical machines.
When this hand changes shape,
it is a polymer that is
changing conformality.
These eyes are photodetectors,
band gap of about
two electron volts.
They're not made of
gallium nitride.
They're made of organic
compounds.
Inside, what supports us,
it's a ceramic skeleton.
So solid state chemistry
describes
life science as well.
Well, what we're going
to learn in
3.091 is the rudiments.
We're going to learn
the rudiments.
So what I'm going to do today is
now go through some of the
basic organization.
So tomorrow you're going
to meet your recitation
instructors and get to know each
other and get to know the
recitation instructor.
Today I'll say a few words about
myself so you know who's
standing in front of you.
I graduated from the University
of Toronto in
chemical metallurgy, came down
here in 1977 to spend a year
as a postdoctoral fellow and, I
guess, I lost track of time.
Now what's my research?
My research is in
electrochemistry.
Electrochemistry is the most
important branch of chemistry.
Do you notice some theme in
my professional life?
See, I have tenure.
So what does that mean?
It means you find your passion
and pursue it.
You don't waste time on
trivia, all right?
And that's what I urge
you to do: Find your
passion and pursue it.
So what's my passion?
My passion is electrochemistry
in nonaqueous media.
Anything but water.
Let the rest of the world
work on water.
I work on molten salts, ionic
liquids, and polymers.
And what's the reason
for this?
There's an application.
I'm in the School
of Engineering.
So I'm interested in
environmentally sound
technologies for metal
production, all right?
Right now looking at titanium,
iron recycling as well.
I'm also interested in
electrochemistry as it applies
to energy storage, energy
storage for mobile power.
See this gal here?
She's got the cell phone.
She's not even looking
where she's driving.
[LAUGHTER]
PROFESSOR: So making safe
batteries out of
earth-abundant, accessible
materials for portable power,
ultimately to drive the car with
electrons, electric fuel,
to eliminate this country's
dependence on imported petroleum.
We can do it.
How?
By inventing.
By inventing.
And the way we're going to
invent is to learn the lessons
in 3.091 that will give us the
chemistry we need to invent a
battery that can send that car
250 miles on a single charge,
and put it in a show room for
the same price as a car with
an internal combustion engine.
The only thing that stands
between that image and where
we are today is invention, and
the requisite material is
right here in this class.
We're also looking at
colossal batteries.
Store the grid.
Enable renewables,
wind, solar.
And then, lastly, let's never
forget about dreaming.
So if we want to dream and
imagine that man will return
to the moon or maybe even go to
Mars, we're going to have
to be able to produce oxygen.
We'll live like the pioneers,
produce oxygen from local
resources, produce structural
metals, and even produce
photovoltaic silicon so they can
generate their own energy
from local resources.
And so electrochemistry is the
key enabler for that as well.
So now let's turn to the whole
underpinning of 3.091.
If we take a look at the
performance of any engineering
system it's a combination
of the design and the
construction.
Now the construction is both the
workmanship and the choice
of materials.
Now how do we choose
materials?
We choose them on the basis
of their properties.
So, for example, here's an
application: a beverage container.
This one I'm holding is made
out of an aluminum alloy.
It's a metal.
When I was your age, they
had steel beverage cans.
You can take this same beverage
and contain it in a
glass bottle.
You can contain it in
a polymer bottle.
Why do we make those
various choices?
Because they have the right
mix of properties.
Now how do you determine
the properties?
Properties obviously are
determined by the composition.
We wouldn't make this thing
out of sodium chloride.
It would dissolve.
So composition is important,
but atomic arrangement is
important as well.
Example is 1/2-inch-thick
pine board compared to a
1/2-inch-thick piece
of plywood.
Both pine, but the
1/2-inch-thick pine board is
one solid pine board.
I can take that pine board and
I can fracture it if I strike
it along the grain.
But the 1/2-inch-thick plywood,
I can't do that
because it's 1/8-inch sheet
pine cross-laminated.
1/8 inch north-south, 1/8 inch
east-west. If I try to cut
through that board, I can't
advance the fracture.
Same composition, different
atomic arrangement.
So the thesis of 3.091 is that
the electronic structure of
the elements holds the key
to understanding that
relationship between
composition, atomic
arrangement, and properties.
And once you have properties
that's how
you make your selection.
And away we go.
And that's how we got the
syllabus of 3.091.
So the syllabus has
two major blocks.
The first block is general
principles of chemistry-- it's
going to be about the
first five weeks--
and that's the same stuff that
you get here, 5.111, 5.112,
the basics of electronic
structure and bonding.
And then we part company and
in 3.091 we dig down into
solid state chemistry.
You don't have to take notes.
You can relax.
All this is going to be
burned to PDF and
posted at the website.
So everything that you see in
this class that goes up on the
screen is archived for you.
This lecture is being video
recorded right now and within
an hour will be posted
at the website.
So in the unlikely event that
you can't quite come to class,
it is available.
[LAUGHTER]
PROFESSOR: So now what I want to
do is introduce some of the
operational aspects
of the class.
And we had some handouts
going around.
If you didn't get them we
can get you extras.
But again, this is all posted
at the website.
So you know who I am.
The key person in this operation
is my administrative
assistant, Hilary Sheldon, and
she's just down the hall.
You can roll a penny down
the hall from here
and get to my office.
So if you tell me you tried
looking for me, you couldn't
find me, I know you couldn't
have been trying very hard.
The text is a two-volume set
consisting of the text
Chemistry: Principles, Patterns,
and Applications by
Averill and Eldredge, and then
a second volume that consists
of miscellaneous readings
taken from other
Prentice Hall texts.
And it's identical in content to
the blue book that was used
last year and the year before.
So if you get a copy of
that blue book, you
don't have to buy these.
I don't work for Prentice Hall,
I'm not trying to sell
books, but we will take the
homeworks out of the books to
a great extent.
And the page numbering is the
same, so anything this year or
the last two years
will be fine.
If you have to buy something,
you'll have this.
This one will come with a CD
that will get you into a
mastering chemistry, which
is a sort of a tutorial,
computerized system to help
you with certain homework
problems.
The lectures, Monday, Wednesday,
Friday, here in
this room at 11 o'clock.
The lecture starts at five
minutes after the hour--
gives you five minutes
to get in--
and then the lecture
stops at five
minutes to the next hour--
time for you to leave and then
for the next class to arrive.
And what I'm going to try
to do is establish
some plug flow here.
So what I'm going to try is to
have everybody leave by the
exit to the north here to my
right, and there's also an
exit over the top back.
So leave to your left and that
way it'll be easier for the
next class to come in.
And maybe we can persuade the
people here before us to do
the same and then it'll
be easy to change.
I don't know why but there's
this sort of-- everybody has
to charge to this door.
And I just stand here and
watch people collide.
And I don't know.
Just interesting social
experiment.
And there are two doors.
I don't understand why people
do this, but I'm not in the
social sciences.
Recitations.
Recitations will meet Tuesdays
and Thursdays.
So you'll go to the same hour
on Tuesday and Thursday.
The section should be
roughly 20 students.
And that's where the question
and answer occurs.
Here it's largely I
talk, you listen.
I've got time for a question
like, hey, shouldn't that be a
minus sign?
I can take something
really quick.
But where you get to really
interact with the instructor
is in recitation.
And I've given a direction to my
recitation instructors not
to give you a fourth
and fifth lecture.
You control the content
of the recitation.
So you have to come
to the recitation
prepared with questions.
So they're supposed to walk in
and say, good morning, good
afternoon, what are
your questions?
And you can say, I didn't
understand the last five
minutes of the lecture
yesterday.
Would you do number five
on the homework?
Would you go over secondary
bonding?
That's the sort of thing
that's supposed
to happen in section.
You've been assigned
by the Registrar.
You are forbidden to change
your section on your own.
You can't just squat
in another section.
We do this with the intention
of trying to keep the
enrollment roughly uniform.
We don't want sections growing
to 35 because then that limits
your ability to interact.
If you've changed classes or
you've picked up a UROP, or
what have you, and your
situation has changed, please
go down the hall and meet with
my assistant Hilary, who will
then arrange to move you.
And that way we can keep some
control over the section size.
Again, you may not change
simply on your own.
And it has to be with cause,
academic cause.
You can't go in and say, I was
assigned to the 9:00 am
section and I don't
do mornings.
That's not going to work.
Homework.
Homework is very
important here.
Homework is a little bit
different, though, in 3.091.
You're not going to be
asked to turn in
homework for grading.
Instead, at the beginning of
each unit, you will be given
homework with the
model solutions
right at the beginning.
This is a study aid, and you can
use the model solutions to
help you understand the
homework material.
Now since we're not asking you
to turn anything in and we do
want to stimulate interest in
the homework, we found a way
to stimulate interest. And that
is that once a week in
section you will have
a 10-minute quiz
based on the homework.
That will ensure that
you've at least
looked at the homework.
And those weekly quizzes will
be graded, and the aggregate
of all of those quiz scores will
constitute your homework
grade in the subject.
And you must take
those quizzes.
If you don't take the quiz--
you got sick or some personal
emergency came up-- contact
your recitation instructor and
within a week of the date of
the original quiz arrange
to take a makeup.
If you don't take the
makeup, we're going
to give you a zero.
And there's no dropping
of lowest score.
Somewhere there's this in the
lore here that, oh, you can
drop the lowest score, the
lowest two scores.
People come to me with this
proposal and I say no.
[LAUGHTER]
PROFESSOR: So let's
get started.
This is homework number one.
It's assigned today.
We're going to save paper--
just go to the website--
and you'll be tested on
Tuesday, next Tuesday,
September 15, at the beginning
of section.
At the beginning of section
there'll be a 10-minute quiz
based on that homework,
and you can get the
homework and so on.
By the way, here's what the
homework looks like.
Chapter 1, Chapter
3 of Averill.
Averill is the major text.
We just refer to it by the
author's last name.
So taken from Averill.
By the way, I don't like to
use this unpleasant term
"test." I like to refer to it as
a celebration of learning.
[LAUGHTER]
PROFESSOR: So it's
a celebration.
We're going to start celebrating
on Tuesday.
There's the website
by the way.
You probably want to
bookmark that.
You're probably going
to go to that a lot.
We're going to keep celebrating,
and so we will
have some monthly celebrations,
monthly tests,
and they've already
been scheduled.
And you will write those tests
during the normal class time.
But on those days we will
spread you out a bit.
I like to see some vacancies.
So you will not be sitting
one next to another.
There'll be at least one human
vacancy next to every human,
and that way you've got room to
spread out, keep your eyes
on your own work.
So those are the dates
and there'll be
more of that in time.
Now when you take the monthly
test, I allow you to use aids.
So everyone will be given in
recitation tomorrow a Periodic
Table of the Elements, very
nice one, laminated one.
So you take that with you to the
test. In fact, you should
take this with you everywhere.
[LAUGHTER]
PROFESSOR: If I run into you at
Harvard Square, I want to
see the Periodic Table, because
every educated person
has the Periodic Table.
You get a table of constants.
So you'll have one of these.
You'll get that tomorrow
as well.
Paper copy, and on there are all
the constants so you don't
have to remember that the
permittivity of vacuum is 8.85
times 10 to the minus
12 farads per meter.
It's on there.
I urge you to use that when
you do your homework.
So it's always amusing to me
during the time of the first
monthly celebration, somebody's
looking at this as
though it's today's newspaper
and they're
looking, where is that?
Sort of revealing about the
intensity with which the
homework has been embraced.
Calculator, something to
calculate with, and I don't
care if you bring in a graphing
calculator or a mainframe.
I don't care.
[LAUGHTER]
PROFESSOR: And you're allowed
an aid sheet, an 8 1/2-by-11
sheet of paper.
And you can write on
the front, you can
write on the back.
You can photoreduce previous
exams down to micro-dot size.
I don't care what you put on
it, but with this, you have
then no excuse to say I really
understood this stuff, but I
couldn't remember a formula.
Actually, many students tell me
that the act of preparing
the aid sheet organizes the
subject matter in their minds.
They bring this with them to
the exam, and they never
consult it, but it just soothes
the nerves and makes
sure that everybody does well
on the monthly test.
The weekly test, no.
The weekly test you bring your
Periodic Table and table of
constants, but no aid sheet.
For the weekly test,
it's a very
concentrated amount of material.
And I'm not going to test your
memories, because that doesn't
prove anything to me.
And then, of course, the
celebration of celebrations is
the final exam.
[LAUGHTER]
PROFESSOR: That's huge.
That's a huge celebration.
It's three hours.
See, these are really
50 minutes.
This is three full hours.
The time and location will
be set by the Registrar.
We should know by October 1.
The final exam period is
December 14 to 18.
And so what I urge you to do
is as soon as that schedule
comes out and we know when all
the final exams are going to
be held, then you book your
passage for the holidays.
Do not get that order
reversed.
You cannot come to me and
say, I got a really
good price on a ticket.
I'm going Acapulco on the 15th
of December, and your exam is
on the 16th of December.
I'll say, you just got
a zero on the final.
You have to be here for that.
You know why?
I have to be here for that, you
can be here for that, too.
There are about a quarter of a
million students in Boston.
It's a great college town, but
at Christmas time, it's
pandemonium at Logan Airport.
So you want to book your passage
early, but you can't
do it until you know what your
final exam obligations are.
Grading.
Freshman, you know, it's
pass/no record.
Pass/no record.
And so that means that if you
struggle and things don't go
well, you don't have any
blemishes on your record.
Unfortunately, some of the
upperclassmen will tell you as
pass/no record, you
now, barest pass
imaginable/ no record.
Well, I hate to let you know
this, but increasingly I am
being asked by medical
schools, law schools,
scholarship providers to reveal
the scores on the
freshman year.
So think about that before you
call Hilary in late November
saying, what do I need
to get a 50?
I need a 32 on the final?
OK.
But Lord help you, you
get a 31 you go down.
[LAUGHTER]
PROFESSOR: Upperclassmen get
the luxury of the entire
alphabet: A, B, C, D, F.
The final grade composition.
1/6 for homework--
that's the aggregates of the
weekly test scores-- and 1/6
for each of the three tests.
And then the final
is 2/6, or 1/3.
I didn't want to get into
transcendental numbers, so I
made it 33 exact, 16.75 exact.
I could have made it 16.77, I
could have made it 16.81, I
could have made it
anything I want.
I'm the professor.
But I chose 16.75.
Bottom line here is it's really
dumb to fail the final.
If you passed the final, you're
pretty much assured
that we're going
to be favorably
disposed to passing you.
But you fail the final
that says two things.
It says, number one, you don't
have a grasp of the overall
year, but it also sort of
indicates that you ran out of
steam partway through the
semester and stopped working.
It's very bad.
You get a lot of good advice
from upperclassmen, but
sometimes--
I'd ignore that one that says,
hey, you don't have to do that
well on the final.
Anyway, so you have to
get a C level as
a freshmen or greater.
And, by the way, we do
not grade on a curve.
I've seen it in magazines
this last year that
MIT grades on a curve.
I don't where they
get that from.
I don't grade on a curve.
Your success does not come at
the expense of your neighbor.
As far as I'm concerned
everybody in this
class can get an A.
Again, I'm the professor,
all right?
So you say, well, how
do you know that 50
is the right number?
Why isn't it 55?
Why isn't it 75?
Well, I know.
I know.
How do I know?
Because when we grade, we set up
the point scheme so that if
the student has the mastery of
the barest level of competency
of the key concept the
point scheme must
reflect a passing grade--
5 out of 10, 5 out of 9--
and you propagate
that through.
I don't care how much is
written, if it doesn't
demonstrate basic mastery of
the key concept the point
scheme must give 4, 3, 2, 0.
Maybe a 1.
And so that, if you propagate it
through the whole semester,
means 50 is a pass.
There's some wiggle
room there.
How do I know 49.7 is a
fail and 50 is a pass?
That's when I call your
recitation instructor.
[CELL PHONE RINGING]
PROFESSOR: Let's kill that.
We're going to get to
that in a second.
Let's call the recitation
instructor.
And what happens?
I ask the recitation instructor,
well, what can you
tell me about this young lady?
And, oh, she came to all my
classes, she tried really
hard, she came to
office hours.
I don't think the exam is a
proper reflection of her
understanding.
I'll listen to that and
maybe we'll promote.
If, on the other hand, I get the
response, I never saw her,
didn't come to class.
I repeatedly reached out to her,
ignored my entreaties,
she's going down.
[LAUGHTER]
PROFESSOR: OK.
Website.
This is what the website
looks like.
There's a number of tabs here.
The readings are there, the
videos are there archived.
The schedule--
what's going to be coming up.
So, for example, this is
what's going on today.
It says what the topic is,
roughly what the readings are.
I know today you didn't come
to class having read.
And it's OK, we'll
get through it.
But from now on I urge you
to do the readings.
A couple of topics I'm required
to talk about.
My management requires
me to do so.
Academic honesty.
There's a lot of texts here,
but in plain English, this
says don't cheat!
You know what this means!
Now I don't want to hear,
well, in my country, the
custom is--
I don't care what they
do in your country!
You're in my class, and if
you cheat in my class you
will pay for it.
Very simple.
Accept information of any
kind from others--
wrong.
Represent somebody else's work
as your own-- wrong.
You know this.
It was Juvenal, the Roman
politician, said men need not
so much be instructed
as reminded.
I'm not telling you anything
you don't already know, but
I'm going to say it so no one
can say, well, nobody told us
it wasn't OK to erase our
answers and hand them back in
for more points.
I just did.
All right?
So if in the unlikely-- but
it happens every so often.
Maybe every two, three years.
And people get caught.
You know why they get caught?
Because for the first time in
your life you're being taught
by people who are as
smart as you are.
[LAUGHTER]
PROFESSOR: My TAs are
really smart.
And it never ceases to amaze
me-- somebody succumbs and
does something dishonest,
and they get caught!
They get busted!
And what happens then?
Then I get angry.
You know why?
Because we can't settle
that in my office.
You can't come and
cry in my office.
I have to take this episode to a
committee here at MIT called
the Committee on Discipline.
It is staffed by faculty, by
administrators, and by students.
And the case is brought before
the COD at a hearing and a
punishment is decided.
And it can be anything from
suspension to expulsion.
And of the three categories,
faculty, administrators,
students, which category do you
think is most severe on
infringers?
AUDIENCE: Students.
PROFESSOR: Your peers.
You got it.
You know, because people my age,
old faculty, they'll be
like, oh, they're just
kids, whatever.
The students say, no!
Throw them out!
[LAUGHTER]
PROFESSOR: So it's not going to
be me that's going to expel
you, it's going to
be your peers.
So don't do it.
And if you're ever in an exam
and somebody's pressuring you,
just raise your hand and
ask to be reseated.
For all I know, the guy next to
you has got a bad case of
B.O., you just want to move.
We will not ask any
questions, so take
yourself out of the situation.
Conduct yourself
appropriately.
Classroom behavior.
Now this is the first lecture,
there's a whole bunch of
violations in here right now.
So I'm going to say it now and
we'll fix it for next time.
We've got 425 seats here, we've
probably got 475 people,
and there's only one way we can
make this system work and
we have to observe certain
rules of decorum.
And I make the rules.
So if I want to maintain a
fertile learning environment
I'm going to ask for these
rules to be observed.
No talking at all.
No talking.
Little conversation here, little
conversation here--
it disturbs people.
I don't want any
food or drink.
No food, no drink.
One exception is
the professor.
[LAUGHTER]
PROFESSOR: Because I do not want
to have my throat get so
dry that I can't finish talking
my way through the end
of the class.
Otherwise, no food or drink and
no disruptive behavior.
No horseplay or anything
like that.
And wireless communication
devices must be silenced.
Cell phone goes off, you get
up, you leave the room.
That's it.
AUDIENCE: Is water OK?
PROFESSOR: If you need water
because it's some kind of a
health thing, fine.
But I do not want to see a whole
bunch of people drawing
on water bottles.
Don't need it.
Don't need it.
You can go 50 minutes without
your little--
whatever.
[LAUGHTER]
PROFESSOR: You know why?
I'll tell you why.
It's not because I'm trying
to be a control freak.
This is a chemistry class, but
it's chemistry-centered.
You didn't just come to MIT to
learn some geeky techno stuff.
You're preparing for a
professional career, and part
of that is how you behave, how
to act as a professional.
And you cannot learn behavior
by doing problem sets.
How do you learn behavior?
You learn behavior
by observation.
And how does one
teach behavior?
By modeling.
If you're in some high-level
committee meeting and all of a
sudden your cell phone goes off
and you're scrambling and
you can't find the damn thing,
it's in the bottom of your
briefcase, right?
I can't tell you how
vulgar that is.
You're in a professional
setting, you commit
professional suicide.
And I need to tell you that.
If you think it's
OK you're wrong.
So let's get in the habit.
Disable the damn thing.
What do you need?
You're going to call
your stockbroker?
What's so important right now?
And on an exam, that thing goes
off I take the exam in
front of everybody and--
[MAKING RIPPING NOISE]
PROFESSOR: --we introduce a
defect, it's called a tear.
[LAUGHTER]
PROFESSOR: And then I put a zero
on it like this, with a
circle around it.
It's called a donut.
[LAUGHTER]
PROFESSOR: All right.
Now let's talk about
some lighter
things, more upbeat things.
Look, I want you to succeed
in this class.
Now how are we going
to succeed?
You go to the listing
in the bulletin
you'll see this, right?
And you zoom in here
it says 5-0-7.
What's this mean?
Well the 5 is 5 contact hours.
3 here and 2 with
your recitation.
The 0 is lab.
There's no lab with
this class.
So what's the 7?
The 7 is the reading,
the homework,
preparation, et cetera.
I pledge to you, you give me 7
hours-- you go to the 5 hours
contact and 7 hours--
you will not just pass this
class, you will flourish in
this class.
How do I know this?
Because I used to chair the
committee on admissions and
I've read applications.
I know the quality of individual
in this room.
You should have seen, there were
11,000 applications piled
up like this, each dossier like
this, and they just get
copied down on a four-by-six
card.
We get here on a Presidents' Day
weekend and we got stacks
and stacks of the cards.
We're looking at your whole
academic life is on a
four-by-six card.
And I pick that up
and I go, yes.
Literally at this speed.
About 45 seconds.
No.
[LAUGHTER]
PROFESSOR: Hell no!
[LAUGHTER]
PROFESSOR: That's how I spent
Presidents' Day weekend.
And so you got through a very
grueling selection process.
What's the corollary of that?
Listen carefully to this:
Everybody in this room has the
intellectual apparatus
to pass 3.091.
The only people who fail
3.091 are people who
choose to fail 3.091.
They choose not to come to
class, they chose not to go to
recitation, they chose not
to work the homework.
I don't know why they
make those choices.
But I guarantee you if you give
me this amount of time,
you'll do well.
It's straightforward.
Number one problem you are going
to face this fall is not
secondary bonding, it's
time management.
So I used to call this
strategies for--
what did I used to call it?
I forgot.
I used to have it something
like, survival strategies.
But I don't want
you to survive,
I want you to flourish.
So I call it recipe
for success.
There are different venues
for learning.
OK?
So lecture, that's here.
That's my responsibility.
Recitation, that's Tuesdays
and Thursdays.
That's my staff.
Now reading, that's you.
Homework, that'd be you.
Weekly quizzes is you,
monthly tests is you,
final exam is you.
[LAUGHTER]
PROFESSOR: What we have
here is a partnership.
See?
[LAUGHTER]
PROFESSOR: So I'll do my
part, you do your part.
You know, one of the things
beyond the basic learning of
the chemistry that we're going
to attempt here is a
transition.
You are going to change in
ways you can't imagine.
I want you to think about the
way you are right now, and I'm
going to ask you to think
about how you feel about
yourself on the last
day of class.
You will be amazed, and it's
not because you know a few
more chemical equations.
And what one of the things that
I want to see happen and
to help facilitate is the
transition from student, which
you are as a high school
graduate, to scholar.
And the difference between a
student and a scholar is a
scholar takes ownership of
his or her learning.
So you're going to take
ownership of it.
You know, is this
going to be on?
Are we responsible for this?
Go back to high school.
Here you're a scholar.
You say, how can I learn
more about this?
That's the difference.
So I think we've
covered enough.
I think we don't want to just
have the whole day, welcome to
MIT, welcome to MIT.
So what we're going to do is
we'll get into the lecture,
and in the very brief amount of
time we have left I'm going
to talk about the beginnings
of chemistry.
We're going to talk about
taxonomy, classification,
nomenclature.
And to help introduce this I'm
going to refer to the writings
of William Shakespeare.
We're going to integrate
some humanities here.
We're going to read from
Romeo and Juliet.
Maybe there are people here
who were admitted on the
strength of the performance
in Romeo and Juliet.
Maybe one of you was Romeo,
one of you was Juliet.
Maybe one of you did
the lighting.
Maybe one of you did
the set design.
Maybe one of you took
the tickets.
Somehow you were involved,
right?
Because we're all involved.
So let's take a look.
Act 2, Scene 2.
Romeo: "But soft, what light
through yonder window breaks?
It is the east"--
that's the east. East Campus
is that way, right?
[LAUGHTER]
PROFESSOR: "It is the east, and
Juliet is the sun." That
has nothing to do with
nomenclature.
Maybe photon emission, but--
that's a joke.
We'll get to it.
Now Juliet: "O Romeo, Romeo!
Wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and
refuse thy name.
Or, if thou wilt not, be but
sworn my love, and I'll no
longer be a Capulet."
See she's a
Capulet, he's a Montague.
You know, the Hatfields
and the McCoys.
And this is a metaphor.
It's as old as literature.
It's about warring factions,
two communities that can't
stand each other based
on prejudice.
And then these two youngsters
fall in love, and how love
triumphs over hatred,
and so on.
It's powerful stuff and
it's written here.
Romeo: "Shall I hear more, or
shall I speak at this?"
Remember, she's up high, he's
doing "Shall I hear more,
shall I speak at this?" Fellows,
the answer to that
question is don't speak.
Don't interrupt her.
All right.
So now she goes, "'Tis but thy
name that is my enemy.
Thou art thyself, though
not a Montague.
What's Montague?
It is nor hand, nor foot, nor
arm, nor face, nor any other
part belonging to a man.
O, be some other name!
What's in a name?
That which we call a rose by any
other word would smell as
sweet." That's properties,
right?
"So Romeo would, were he not
Romeo called, retain that dear
perfection which he owes
without that title.
Romeo, doff thy name, and for
that name which is no part of
thee take all myself."
Beautiful writing.
400 years ago and it's
just fantastic.
Well, that's no good.
That's not the way it
works in science.
In science we have to agree--
[LAUGHTER]
PROFESSOR: We have to
agree on the name.
And so this is taken from
Chapter 1 of the text, and
this is the classification
of matter.
This is about stuff and the
different forms of stuff.
Over here we have the simplest
form of stuff,
which is the element.
And we're going to start here
in 3.091 and we're going to
work our way all the way through
this table, starting
with electronic structure and
how electronic structure
governs stuff.
So let's start with
a history lesson.
We'll start with a
history lesson.
And the history lesson
goes like this.
What are the origins
of chemistry?
The ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs
refer to khemeia,
which was a chemical process
for embalming the dead.
You know the Egyptians were very
fixated on the afterlife.
And the chemists, the chemists
were revered in that society--
not like here.
They were revered in that
society because they knew how
to prepare the body
for the afterlife.
Embalming is a chemical
process.
A few years ago I
was in London.
I toured the British Museum
and came upon this.
This is 18 inches tall.
It's the mummified cat.
It's a fantastic example
of mummification.
It's a beautiful-- most people
go zooming right past it.
They're looking at the
big dinosaurs and
all that other nonsense.
But this, this is beautiful.
Mummified cat.
And then khemeia expanded to
other chemical processes:
dying of cloth, glassmaking,
and metals extraction.
The chemist could take dirt
and turn it into metal.
Sorcery.
Some things haven't changed.
I'm in that tradition: producing
metal from dirt.
And they were always looking for
an overarching theme, to
unite the heavens with
the simple elements.
So the seven known,
naked-to-the-eye, astronomical
bodies were associated
with the seven
known chemical elements.
And you could even talk in
this priestly language.
So if you wanted to make a
bronze, which is an alloy of
tin and copper, you could say,
well let's have the confluence
of Jupiter and Venus.
It's all there.
Mercury.
Why do we call it Mercury?
Mercury's a metal that's liquid
at room temperature.
It's fast. Because Mercury is
the planet that moves quickest
around the sun.
Very nice.
So this is what we knew
2,400 years ago.
We had the seven metals,
carbon, and silicon.
And the beginning of the shift
from practice to theory, or
from craft to science, is with
the work of Democritus.
Democritus, who lived
around 400 BCE.
Democritus, who was Greek.
He described the physical
world as consisting of a
combination of void
plus being.
Void plus being.
These are lofty words.
Listen to this.
Void, being not some
little equation.
It's big, big ideas.
And how did he describe void?
Void is something that we
would recognize, in his
language, as akin to what we
recognize to be vacuum.
And being, he said, was
comprised of an infinity of
atoms.
He coined the term "atom."
"Atom" comes from the Greek
tomoi, which is to slice.
And then if you put "a" in front
of it as in apolitical
or amoral, cannot be sliced:
indivisible.
The atom cannot be sliced,
and so to these atoms he
attributed these properties.
They're indivisible
and eternal.
I mean, this takes you all the
way to E equals m c squared.
From 400 BCE, and that's all
he had to work with.
This is brilliant.
Absolutely brilliant.
But to show you that things
don't always go in a linear
fashion for the better,
along comes Aristotle.
Aristotle, another Greek, and he
decided, nah, we don't need
all this carbon, sulfur,
and so on.
He said, we will have four
essences that will describe
the earthly world.
Four essences.
And here are the
four essences.
Earth, water, air, fire.
So those are the Aristotelian
essences.
And there's actually a
fifth essence that
describes the heavens.
That's why we say something
is quintessential.
It's heavenly, it's et cetera.
So these are the
four essences.
All right?
And then it gets even worse
because he has compounds, a
combination, so you can take
fire plus earth and make dry,
earth plus water make cold, air
plus water make wet, air
plus fire make hot.
This is nuts.
[LAUGHTER]
PROFESSOR: And it dominated
science for a long, long time.
Because we know really earth
is an aggregate.
It's an aggregate of different
minerals which are compounds.
Water, as you know,
is a compound H2O.
Fire is the product
of combustion.
It doesn't even belong
in this set.
And air is a solution.
It's a homogeneous mixture of
nitrogen, oxygen, argon,
rising levels of carbon dioxide,
sulfur dioxide.
And if you're next to
an aluminum smelter,
tetrafluoromethane.
And so on and so forth.
And finally this thing
was knocked down.
So we can look at this chart
and go back to this one and
say, now we can make
the connections.
All right.
Here's the way the elements
looked at the time of the
American Revolution.
The alchemists gave us arsenic,
antimony, and bismuth
in the 12th, 13th,
14th centuries.
In 13th century India, there
was zinc isolated.
There's a tall zinc pillar
still standing there.
Platinum is an American metal.
It was unknown to
the Europeans.
It was discovered when the
Spanish came to the Americas.
Actually, it's kind of ironic
because plata is silver, so
platina is sort of like a
diminutive of silver, which in
point of fact is backwards
because silver melts at 962
degrees Celsius, platinum
melts at 1768.
It is nobler than silver.
It has catalytic properties.
It is even fashionable in
jewelry now if you know how to
work with it, because gold melts
at 1063 and platinum
melts at 1762.
A lot of jewelers can't
work with platinum.
It's too high-melting.
It's a fantastic metal.
It's an American metal.
[LAUGHTER]
PROFESSOR: It really is.
I mean it's an American metal.
I didn't make this up.
It's true.
And then we see these
other elements.
Discovered, discovered,
discovered, discovered.
Now we see modern science.
So what does it mean,
discovered 1766?
There was no hydrogen
before 1766?
They found it?
No.
It means that Cavendish isolated
it and documented its
properties.
Hence, it was discovered.
Now I've been cheating here.
This is actually lined up in
a way that we already know,
where the story is going to
end with this, with the
Periodic Table.
I'm just lying them on the table
in a way that makes it
possible to anticipate.
But this was the first table of
elements that is of record,
and this was by John Dalton, the
English chemist, who put
these in order of atomic mass.
They're organized in ascending
order of atomic mass.
And he also started a system
of chemical symbols.
And you can see that iron has
an "I" with a circle around
it, and zinc has a "Z" with
a circle around it.
And the Swedish chemist
Berzelius said, you know I
don't think the French are going
to like to use "I" with
a circle around it for iron,
or Germans aren't
going to like that.
We better choose something
a little bit neutral.
So they chose Latin.
And that's why iron is "Fe" for
ferrum, and gold is "Au"
for arum, and so on.
But this was the
first attempt.
John Dalton actually
was a polymath.
He was also working on vision,
human vision, and he suffered
from an affliction that is
present in about 10% of men,
which is red-green
color blindness.
And he did the original work on
red-green color blindness.
In fact, in some circles it
is known as Daltonism.
It's the same man,
John Dalton.
Other classifications.
Dobereiner in Jena talked
about triads.
And if you took the atomic mass
of chlorine, added it to
the atomic massive of iodine
divided by two, you get
something that's not
too far off the
atomic mass of bromine.
Newlands was a musician and
he talked about octaves.
So if you start here, if this
is a diatonic scale, so this
is C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C.
So potassium lies an octave
away from sodium.
He was ridiculed.
They said, have you considered
perhaps putting the elements
in alphabetical order?
They were cruel.
Scientists can be very
cruel to new ideas.
And, in fact, in your book this
is some of Newlands work,
and you can see to what extent
it helps understand things.
But the first proper
organization came in 1869 with
Mendeleyev, and also 1870 with
Lothar Meyer in Tuebingen, the
Periodic table as we know it.
And this is the set of
elements that were
known at the time.
And this is a page from the
paper in which Mendeleyev
published the Periodic Table.
And here's the smoking
gun right here.
It's right here where he says,
in this new system, in this
proposed system, there are very
many missing elements.
Very many missing elements--
that was the key.
Because he knew that even though
arsenic has the atomic
mass next highest to that of
zinc not to put arsenic under
aluminum, not to put
it under silicon.
It had more in common
with phosphorus.
So he put it under phosphorus,
and so did Meyer.
But what Mendeleyev did, which
was a first, he said, there
are missing elements here.
There is an element that lies
between silicon and tin, and I
predict what it's
mass will be.
I predict what it's chemical
formulation will be, how it
will react with oxygen.
The predictions.
And how did he get this?
Because he used to travel by
train and he would sit in the
train station on his trunk
playing solitaire.
And he'd be going down
one suit, and then
there'd be a gap.
And he'd go down the other suit
and he could go farther.
And so the concept of, I know
there should be an eight of
spades here, but I have
to stop at the nine.
I've got a seven but there's
something in there--
triggered his imagination and
led him to have the courage to
say, there are elements there
and I will predict their
properties.
And when they were discovered
how close he was is shocking.
Absolutely shocking.
So we'll get to that next day.
But before you go I want
to leave you with this.
This is the portrait
of Mendeleyev that
you typically see.
This man on in years,
disheveled, sort of mad
scientist look.
Don't remember that.
Look at this.
This is Mendeleyev, age 35, when
he proposed the Periodic
Table of the Elements.
OK.
We'll adjourn.
We'll see you on Friday.
