So You Think You Hate Chemistry!?

Course Materials

Welcome to the home of the OLLI winter-term 2022 course, "So You Think You Hate Chemistry!?", offered by Gale Rhodes. It is a repeat course (from 2018), but is extensively revised and updated, so if you took the earlier course, you should still find plenty of new things to think about.

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News Flash

Do you know about the James Webb Space Telescope? Do your grandchildren know?

HERE is a letter to my children about how to tell their kids about it. You might learn something, too.

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Back down to business:

For more about what to expect in this course, watch this video:

So You Think You Hate Chemistry, A Brief Introduction

New Class Pages (see links at right) will appear as we proceed.

NOTE: On these course pages, blue text denotes a link to another web page. Links usually open the new page in a new window, leaving the previous page waiting patiently behind the new one.

If you want to do some preliminary reading, read Welcome to One Culture, an introduction to the larger project of which this course is a part. We will draw from this essay, and from many of the resources in One Culture.

You will find links in the column at right to all course readings and resources, with a link for each class or each major topic -- I will see which works better.

While you wait for our first meeting (Wednesday 12 January at 9:30 AM), you can have some fun with the simplest chemical substances, the elements. Here is a listing of them, each abbreviated by its chemical symbol. Some are obvious, such as O for oxygen, C for carbon, and some more obscure: Pb for lead, K for potassium.

The Periodic Table of the Elements:
A list of ALL the elements found in our universe.
Now how do I know that?

Click anywhere on this table to visit a larger version at the journal Science. Hover over any square in that table to see a haiku about the element. See how many of the haiku you can explain from your knowledge of that element. If it's not many, fear not. In our course, many of them will become familiar (with no memory work!). Or go to Wikipedia and look up an element with a puzzling haiku, and see if a little reading will let you in on the joke. Many thanks to Mary Soon Lee for this fascinating and educational version of the periodic table, which she calls Elemental Haiku.

I hope you have fun this term learning about chemistry in the universe around you.

Course Description

Here is the OLLI Winter 2022 Catalog information for this course:

So You Think You Hate Chemistry?

You mean to tell me that you hate elements, which reveal the age of the earth and secrets of stars? You hate compounds, which give foods flavor, odor, and nutrition, and can cure diseases, with amazing precision? Want to understand kitchen chemistry? Want to learn about the chemistry of your body? Spend six classes with a lover of chemistry, and see how chemistry can make your world more interesting (and safer). Definitely not that course that still haunts your worst nightmares. Hating chemistry is not a prerequisite, but it won’t hurt one bit. Repeat Course. Class format will include lecture, discussion, film -- all on Zoom.

Instructor Information

Gale Rhodes loves chemistry. He has taught basic college chemistry, along with biochemistry, structural biology, interdisciplinary courses, and numerous OLLI courses. Publications include biochemical research, interdisciplinary education, natural history, and three editions of a book on how scientists figure out molecular structures. His website, One Culture, http://oneculture-olli.blogspot.com, connects science with other kinds of knowledge.

Brief Autobiography of Gale Rhodes