This Element Doesn't Fit the Periodic Table

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What I was most surprised to learn is that H+ ions are literally just a single proton floating around like “look at me, I’m an atom too!”

"There are at least three credible places you can stick it" will be my new fave insult.

Feels like the periodic table is like a Mercator projection and Hydrogen is at one of the poles.

It reminds me of the argument about whether or not 1 is a prime number

Hydrogen should be all on its own IMO. Being a single proton makes it extremely unique and more over it's a primordial element.

Many years ago, when I was first learning Science (1965), the Noble gases were classified into Group 0 (at that time, there were VERY few compounds of these gases, so their valency was believed to be 0). Later, this was changed to Group 8, now 18. So now we have an unused Group 0. Put both Hydrogen and Helium in there, since Helium does not completely share the properties of the Inert - sorry - Noble gases and stick them top middle. This should at least keep the astronomers happy...

I've heard of sticking with both the alkali metals and the halogens, never with group 14. But when you say the outer shell is half full in both, then it makes sense.

Its probably worth noting that the properties of a chemical metal actually come from electron degeneracy which is a function of both temperature pressure and technically electron density. To get a metal you just need there to be more electrons than can/will settle into an energetically stable energy configuration. If you change the temperature and pressure within the equation of state this will allow you to change the properties of an element making nearly every element able to behave as a metal for example. The metallic luster, the high thermal and electrical conductivities, and even the near incompressibility are all properties of the Fermi sea that forms around a metal. On that note the element Beryllium also breaks a bunch of rules namely that it really only behaves as a metal in a pure state otherwise it prefers to bond covalently and has a strong grip on its valence electrons second only to Helium which makes sense when you realize it has two full s orbital shells. It should be noted that Florine is only the most electronegative element in its electrically neutral valence state Helium and Neon are the two most electronegative elements if missing a valence electron able to basically steal an electron from anything else on the periodic table. This is one of the ways alpha particles cause so much damage as they more or less steal the first two electrons they come across. Nothing but Helium can steal an electron from helium if you want to ionize Helium you need to use high energy ionizing radiation. Helium also has a net spin state of zero meaning it tends to act like a boson particularly under low temperatures. So rule breaking is pretty much a thing for all the really light elements.

"There are at least three credible places that you can stick it". Wasn't expecting that this time of night...! 🤣

Hydrogen walks into a bar and asked sodium hypobromite for a date. Sodium hypobromite said: NaBrO.

3:22 my chemistry teacher went one better - he turned the lights off, dropped MAGNESIUM into a beaker of water, and warned us to not look directly at the beaker because the blindingly white flashing light could literally blind us - just not in that order X-D This guy also lit a hydrogen balloon on fire with a candle that he had glued onto the end of a meterstick - in the classroom, no less - and placed a certain chemical which reacts spectacularly with hydrochloric acid into a beaker of hydrochloric acid and some carcinogenic dish soap (leftover from before the government banned carcinogenic soaps and the school stopped using it for cleaning), placed a ceramic jack-o-lantern over it, and said, "this is why you don't eat the chemicals" (paraphrasing) as the jack-o-lantern vomited so hard it came out its nose and eyes! Loved this guy!

I think we should treat hydrogen like an element of it's own class. No one element is exactly like it, and is the first element, the building block if you will. Slap it up in the middle above the rest, on it's own, in it's singular superiority.

I always liked checking the different versions of the periodic table, and the one thing that always stood out to me is just how... nobody would (or could, even) agree where to place hydrogen. My favourite by far was the one version that just gave up and put it literally on the border (on the top left corner), a little away from all other rows and columns of the table.

Giving up and letting graphic designers "do their thing" is also why we often end up with Lutetium and Lawrencium, which are transition metals, being stuck out there with the Lanthanides and Actinides. Although unlike Hydrogen, there isn't an accompanying debate concerning their chemical properties.

Rather than moving Hydrogen, I'd suggest moving the noble gases to the left of all the alkali metals. It'd be like starting to count from zero instead of counting from 1 - when you consider the nobles as fully empty s orbital, not a full p orbital. Then H is all alone, which it really should be. This makes sense with thr many wrap-around depictions of the Table also.

The periodic tables back when I was doing high school chemistry just had hydrogen sitting above left of fluorine to show that it was kind of similar to the halogens but not the same. Something else to note is that the transition metals (the light pink in your periodic chart) and the lanthanide and actinide series don't really behave in a periodic fashion either. And one final thing, the electron shells are actually probability orbits and are usually shaded in a particular way with the darker areas being where the electrons are most likely to be if you were to look for them at any particular point in time.

My wife says ,when I'm in my element . I don't belong either.

I'm certain I was never taught the periodic table's meaning/purpose; I just learned more than I did in 5 years of secondary school.

In astronomy, anything besides hydrogen and helium is considered a metal. Also the shells are Hamiltonian for the Schrodinger equation, which gets messier as you add more protons Edit: matthewhafner in the comments pointed out that the Hamiltonian gets messy beyond h-1 (1 proton and 1 electron) as adding anything else creates a n-body problem which has to be solved numerically