OK, so it turns out that a lot of people are mystified by the periodic table of the elements as used by chemists, and mostly I think that this is because chemistry teachers are usually pretty awful at explaining things to people.

But we're all patriots here, Brothers, so I am happy to help! OK for this tutorial you'll really need to print out a periodic table to look at while you're reading this. If you don't do that, you might think that you're saving yourself five minutes, but you're not because you're going to read word soup here and it won't be any better than high school was. I find this about learning things - if you don't engage yourself with the material, you'll never get it. Russian will always look like a series of squiggles to you unless you chose to look for a pattern. Chemistry is no different.

The other thing that I'll ask you to do is to familiarize yourself with the terms atoms, molecules, elements, electrons, protons and neutrons, because I'll use those terms here quite liberally and will assume you already know them. Go ahead and look up any of those words that you don't understand. I'll wait.

Still with me? So I forget the actual story about how the cat came up with the periodic table, but it's similar to the way that a card player holds cards in his hand. If you're playing card game with people, and somebody deals you some cards, as soon as the cards are in your hand, you're going to organize them.
In classical poker, most people will lump them together. For right handed players, cards that they want to keep might end up on the right side of their hand, while cards that they'd prefer to discard end up on the left. If you have three of a kind, you probably put them in a row.

The periodic table is much the same, somebody put some cards together for the different elements, and when they arranged them they started noticing patterns. Just like a hand of cards, somebody sorted the elements into a way that made sense to them.

So what was the big pattern? Why does the periodic table have the funny shape that it does? Go ahead and pull up your copy of the table that you printed, and grab a pen because you're actually going to write on it. This is especially valuable if you're a hunter/warrior type, because if you don't engage your hands while you read this, you won't remember as much it.

For purposes of reference I will be teaching from this chart: https://sciencenotes.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/PeriodicTableBoilingPoint.png

I really like that table because it is color coded. Boy will that make our work here easy! Which brings me to my first point, that the periodic table of the elements are organized into columns that chemists refer to as families. The first family that I want to call your attention to, is the purple family on the far left. What is the first element in that family? Can you find it without my help?

The first element is "He" as seen on the diagram, which stands for Helium. Don't get anxiety of you don't recognize many of the symbols, because I'm a professional engineer and I only know what maybe half of them are by sight. Some of the names (or symbols) come from Latin really, so don't feel stressed out if the different letters and symbols don't immediately mean something to you. I would bet that if you started asking professional chemists the names for all of these elements, many of them would be quickly stumped! There are only a few common ones that a chemist would be expected to memorize.

So back to Helium. What do we know about Helium? Helium is inside balloons that people give away at parties. Many have probably seen someone breath helium to allow them to talk in a funny voice. And it's pretty harmless, for the most part. Know why it's harmless? Because it generally won't react with anything. In fact, none of the elements in that purple family are reactive at all, which is why chemists gave it the name, "Noble Gases." Back in the day, people used to assume that nobles were kind of aloof and wouldn't want to interact with common folks. So the name for that entire family of elements is somewhat of an inside joke. They don't react at all, or they barely do. Above He you'll see Ne (for Neon). Like all of the other elements in the Noble Gas family, neon isn't very reactive either. Chemists also nickname this particular family "swamp gasses," because they used to assume that these elements could be found in swamps.

As an exercise, go ahead and circle all of the different families on your printout with your pen. Feel free to use the model that I posted as a guide. Next label the Helium family as "Noble Gases."

Now I'll cover a more reactive family, immediately to the left of the Noble Gases in blue are the Halogen family. That word is probably familiar to men that work in automotive shops, because they need to keep "halide" waste separate from regular petrochemicals. Just what makes halides so interesting? Halides are among the more reactive elements that we'll be learning about. Up first is Florine (symbolized by an F), an element that is controversial on this very website. What makes florine so controversial? If you scroll down from the F a few rows, you'll run into "I" for iodine. Because florine is in the same family (Halogen) as iodine, it reacts in the same way. As such there are some people on the far right who worry that from a public policy perspective, having too much florine in the water supply is harmful because it competes (and outcompetes) with iodine inside of your body. They react the same way, because they are in the same family. Go ahead and make some notes of this on your printed copy.

OK, so here is where things start to get a bit complicated. Do you remember when I told you that you'd need to know the terms, protons, neutrons and electrons to understand this tutorial? Well it turns out that I totally lied and you actually won't need to know that much about either protons or neutrons. Neutrons and protons don't generally influence the chemical behavior of an atom, other than determining what family an element is in. It's the electrons that get most of the attention in chemistry.

So why might a chemist obsess over the behavior of electrons? It is the behavior of electrons that determines the chemical properties of a given sample of matter. Notice how close the Noble Gas and Halogen family are on the periodic table? That's definitely not a coincidence.

The Noble Gases are non-reactive precisely because they have the exact number of electrons to stay "happy." How can an atom be happy? Well they can't really, but they can have something called a "full valence" which is as close as an atom can come to being happy. What is a full valence, you ask? Frankly it's beyond the scope of this tutorial, but suffice it to say that it's something that all atoms really really want. Atoms will freak and and cause tremendous chemical reactions, even explosions, in an effort to get the full valence because it's what they want. Once an atom achieves a full valence it will probably form a molecule and become much more stable. Atoms really really want the full valence.

Because the Noble Gases are so non-reactive, as you might have guessed they certainly do have a full valence. They have the exact right number of electrons for their mass and are perfectly happy. They don't feel the need to react with anything. They're all set!

Because the atoms in the Halogen Family are so close to having a full valence, this is what makes them so reactive! They're almost there, see? They want to react and reach the full valence, forming a molecule in the process.

From here you can divide any atom that is not a noble gas into one of two groups - electron donors and electron receivers. Electron recievers are atoms that don't have enough electrons to reach the full valence. This is certainly true of the atoms of the Halogen family. They are one electron short of having the full valence (notice how they are one square away from the noble gases?) and if they could only find some helpful atom to donate a single electron to them, they'd have a full valence. They would be completely happy this way, and would cheerfully form a molecule with any atom willing to donate just one measly electron! Not too much to ask, I hope.

Who would be so generous to help? Go ahead and find sodium on the periodic table, it's symbol is "Na." And now here I'll point out that in the same way that Russia (on a map) is close to Alaska if you rolled a map into a cylinder, that Sodium (Na) is close to the noble gases if you rolled it into a cylinder. This also, is not a coincidence. If Sodium were to donate a single electron (maybe as part of a chemical reaction, or something) just to get rid of it, it's chemical profile would default down to the same level as Neon. It would have a full valence, ergot would be completely happy with itself.

Think of one of the most commonly known chemicals, table salt, or Sodium Chloride as you probably remember from chemistry class (NaCl). This illustrates what we were talking about nicely. The Sodium (Na) in the molecule is an electron donor, and boy is it happy to be rid of it. Chlorine, being a Halogen is an electron receiver. The perfect match for each other.

This pattern of electron donors, and electron reception is basically what defines about 78% of the rest of chemistry. Acid/Base chemistry kind of relates to this, but is generally much less important than most people think in terms of understanding chemical reactions. It's all about the electrons.

(continued: https://voat.co/v/networksecurity/3173486/18167522)