It follows boron in electronic sequence
Without it, we would have no existence
It's not at all brassy
For a guy like Djerassi
To call carbon "the atom that makes a difference"
Indium is quite a tempting seducter,
Wooing many a chemistry instructor,
A Lewis acid in brine
Making reactions benign
It turns ceramic to superconductor.
Boron forms diborane, but with some added bluster,
It can combine to make what's called a cluster.
It's acidic, not caustic,
With hydrogens agostic,
Reducing organics with all the strength it can muster.
The farmer injected ammonia
Into his soil with a great ceremonia
But bacteria in the soil
Did all the hard toil
In making his corn grow phenomonia
An observer's testimony in the trial of Mr. Leaving Group vs Mr. Nu:
"Mr. Nucleophile came from back
Mrs. Leaving Group fled from attack
Single-stepped assault
No others at fault
The horror of the SN2 ransack
contributed by Annie Orman
Amino acids in chains
Are the cause, so the X ray explains,
Of the strengthening of wool
And its strength when you pull
And show why it shrinks when it rains.
‹A Lindo Patterson quoted in Laidler "To light such a candle" page 263
Phenolphthalein is utile, I think
For endpoints it serves as a link
At the point in titration
When we need visualization
It suddenly turns a hot pink
The Clausius-Clapeyron pair
Were two men with a p-chem flair
Who said natural log of p
changes with T
as delta H over RT square
contributed by Todd Wilkinson
For isomers, Van't Hoff and LeBel
Created a theory that still works quite well
to understand variations
in optical rotations
carbon must be tetrahedral
Baekeland made Bakelite, Staudinger re-wrote the rules,
Carothers made nylon, and DuPont used his tools.
Some are brittle, some are elastic,
Some polymers turn into plastic.
It's all better living through macromolecules
contributed by Dr. George Bennett
A mosquito was heard to complain
that a chemist had poisoned his brain;
The cause of his sorrow
Was para-dichloro
Diphenyl-trichloroethane
There was a young chemist in Ealing
Who with trinitrophenol was dealing
But he added red lead
And, the truth must be said,
They found him a splash on the ceiling.
I gladly accept contributions. Send them by email to me cjosefson@mail.millikin.edu
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