The Stuff You Should Know Doin’ Science Playlist: Legs! Legs! Legs! (The Periodic Table)

**Josh** (0:01)
Here we are, friends, the last episode of our Doing Science playlist. It's been quite a ride, hasn't it? If you're super bummed about it ending, you can just start all over again.
This episode on the periodic table that we released just a couple years ago became one of my favorites, because I had to give myself a crash course in chemistry, and I learned a ton of stuff that I never knew and probably never would have learned if we hadn't taken this one on. As you will hear, I got pretty jazzed about it. I hope this episode gets you jazzed about it, too.
Thanks a lot for spending some of your time with us, listening to our Do In Science playlist. We'll be back in September with another one. Until then, keep testing your predictions.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:45)
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

**Josh** (0:55)
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too. And this is the We'll Get Through It edition of Stuff You Should Know about the Periodic Table.

**Chuck** (1:06)
Uh-huh, I have other names for it.

**Josh** (1:09)
Yeah, I'll bet you do. Can you say any of them?

**Chuck** (1:13)
This is the Only Time I Hate My Job edition.

**Josh** (1:16)
Well.

**Chuck** (1:17)
This is the Now We Can Stop Talking About the Sun episode.

**Josh** (1:23)
Maybe.

**Chuck** (1:26)
And this is the My God, Why Do We Ever Do episodes on Chemistry edition. I failed chemistry. It's the only thing I've ever failed was chemistry.

**Josh** (1:34)
I don't think I even ever took chemistry to tell you the truth.

**Chuck** (1:38)
Hey, you didn't fail it.

**Josh** (1:39)
Right. You can't fail if you don't try.

**Chuck** (1:41)
Yeah.

**Josh** (1:42)
That's my motto.
Here's what I figured out about this. Like driving myself mad, trying to learn this stuff and understand it.
There is a lot of people out there who have written articles and explainers on the stuff that we're going to talk about, who literally don't know what they're talking about. And yet they're presenting their information like they do. And it's wrong and you can't understand it. Or in cases where you can understand it, it still doesn't fully answer the question. There's a lot of stuff out there like that on this, especially as it gets more and more like arcane, right? Yeah. There's a whole group of people out there, chemists, molecular chemists, physicists, who understand this. But you can put them all together and they can't coherently explain any of it to anybody else. They can just talk to one another like this. Where we are, where us and everybody listening in this episode right now is stuck in the middle. We know enough that we can notice when somebody is wrong or not correct or doesn't know what they're talking about. But we don't know enough to understand what the actual scientists are saying and then come back and explain it. So, first of all, Breton Cap off to Livia for helping us with this one.

**Chuck** (3:02)
Boy, Livia should get a bonus for this one, quite frankly.

**Josh** (3:05)
For sure. And then second, we might have to edit that out. We'll have to take the budget.
Secondly, we're smarter enough to get all this across. We are. But we're also transparent enough to admit when we're like, we don't understand this part.

**Chuck** (3:22)
Yeah. I mean, there's a few parts I still don't get. I imagine, the good news is, I imagine that maybe about 20 percent of our listenership is even hearing this right now.

**Josh** (3:34)
I hope more than that because it's really interesting stuff.

**Chuck** (3:38)
Would you click on something called How the Periodic Table Works?

**Josh** (3:41)
Well, we're going to have to come up with something else. I think we'll call this one Legs, Legs, Legs.

**Chuck** (3:48)
Colon, Tiny Lettering Periodic Table.

**Josh** (3:50)
Exactly.

**Chuck** (3:53)
The sex episode.

**Josh** (3:55)
Right. We'll see. We'll trick them into listening to it.

**Chuck** (3:59)
All right. I know I can get some of this at the beginning, so if you allow me to talk about one of the only parts I understand.

**Josh** (4:06)
Sure.

**Chuck** (4:07)
All right. Great. I'll kick it off because we have to set the stage for pre-periodic table construction, which is to say that late in the 18th century, we were scientists working from the Aristotelian, that's to say, Aristotle system, which we've talked about some recently, which is, hey, we got four elements, dry earth, water, and air. And then after that, science became a little more nuanced, and they're like, hey, actually, we think there are more things out there, more building blocks.