Nyholm Lecture by Martyn Poliakoff

first of all I would like to thank you for coming and I should apologize that I have a cuff but I have been given a eucalyptus cough sweet of such horrible taste that I hope I hope it will cure me without having to take it so but this is the title of my lecture and it's a tribute to run my home who I believe is probably or was the most distinguished or get inorganic chemist that has worked in the UK in my lifetime and so here's a picture of the medal and you will see it is the medal for education and I'm really quite frightened I have no qualifications in education whatsoever apart from my undergraduate degree and so I I've never given an education lecture before and I'm rather frightened after we've heard these experts talking before tea so you will have to forgive me if if I talk rubbish about education and I thought I would begin at the start of my teaching career which is here it's a so-called 88th set military radio and it was that these were state-of-the-art in the late 1940s and at the age of 15 I suddenly found myself from one week to the next becoming Lance Corporal Polyakov and having to teach my classmates how to use a an 88 radio this is the radio this is the battery you wore them on either side of your belt and you had headphones and it's what's called a simplex radio you can either listen or you can speak but not both and so you have a thing here that you squeeze so you squeeze and you might say your message and then say over and then you listen and this is the for the officer to listen there's also an aerial that's not shown and the aerials collapsible like this because obviously if you're in a foxhole you don't want this sticking out saying shoot me here and so you may ask what is there to teach about to radio except squeezing it or not and the answer is that everybody in the army has to speak the same way or else your unit can be identified and in the book it said the handbook that there was some German radio operator who used to say plunk in every message and his unit was tracked from Russia to the d-day beaches just by listening to him and so there was a little boy trying to teach my colleagues how to use radio and that's where I started teaching and the only other thing training I had been teaching is that I read a book which is this one which is really very good teaching as a subversive activity and the main message of this book was that on the mirror in your bathroom you should stick up a notice saying what am I going to teach today and why am I going to teach it which i think is quite a good idea and it had two quite nice concepts or things that teachers and students should avoid and for the teachers they said most exam questions are guess what I'm thinking questions and the students may not necessarily guess what the examiner wants and they said most students use the measles theory reg occation that is if you catch something once you'll never catch it again and so this is particularly bad actually in modular teaching and so I would you can still buy this from Amazon secondhand four pounds 81 plus postage so I would recommend it to you if you want to learn about teaching there are two people that have really been very influential in my teaching there is Alec Campbell who was and died they both died actually in 1999 Alec Campbell who was a technician at Newcastle University where I worked and became a lecturer and he taught the entire foundation year in chemistry he taught in organic organic and physical and demonstrated all the lab classes and he was a fantastic person for me to learn from some of the basics about teaching and the other person is our own Colonel BD Shaw who used the lecture and this lecture theatre unfortunately before the carpet was put down or or there would have been safety issues and he taught me quite a lot about doing lecture demonstrations and BD Shaw sadly is no longer with us but when you go out for the wine look at those bushes under the silver birch trees outside and be detials ashes are fertilizing these bushes so he is still with us in spirit or at least chemicals so this is my first chemistry book is inorganic chemistry and what is interesting from my point of view about this as an inorganic chemist is that it doesn't have a periodic table in it which is extraordinary because the periodic table was invented by Mendeleev for teaching inorganic chemistry and here book published 92 years after Mendeleev doesn't have it but I had a periodic table this is my first periodic table I've got it here it's not very big this used to hang beside my bed how many of you here have got periodic tables in your bedroom Oh quite a few and a I actually when I was at school I had to I had this one which is quite small and the big one that light like that you have in this classroom that was the same and if you look at this it's much the same as now argon is a rather than a R but what is quite interesting is that the groups are labeled from 1 to 7 a and then 7b and then along here 1b it so on and this gave rise to really stupid questions in exams such as compare the chemistry of manganese which is in 7a with chlorine which is in 7b and it's not obvious that manganese and chlorine should have similarities in chemistry though for those of you who are chemists it does form mo 4 - I both of them from mo 4 - ions and so on but fortunately it's been renumber so that there isn't such rubbish nowadays but if you want to know more about these we uploaded a video about the book and the periodic table which have been watched by 5300 people perhaps some of you since then so I then came to Newcastle in 1979 and my first new lecture course because I the first bit of teaching I did I was given somebody else's notes and told it's not an important course use these don't rewrite them and but my first new course with about the chemistry of the main group elements from nitrogen to xenon for those of you who can't remember nitrogen is there xenon there it was actually originally from oxygen to xenon but one of my colleagues disgraced himself and was so slow talking about the carbon group that one year the whole of the nitrogen group was left our left out that his lectures were running for hours behind where they should have been and so a whole year you should not minute.this but a whole year a whole year of nothing of graduates went out without ever having a lecture on the group 15 the nitrogen group and so I was given that as well and Romney home was especially tall one of his areas of chemistry was arsenic chemistry so I thought just to give you a flavor of my lectures I would tell you a little bit about arsenic and this is one of my slides it wasn't very good which shows arsenic antimony and bismuth you can see they're all metals and I pointed out which many of you may know that professor challenger who was a PhD student here in 1908 ended his days living in nineteen Elm Avenue beastin their house this is the house it's been slightly extended since he lived there and he was really famous for discovering the chemistry about how molds on people's wallpaper and things like that converted arsenic into volatile compounds that poisoned generations of Victorians who had moldy wallpaper and so I then mentioned the students about the question was Napoleon poisoned by his wallpaper for those of you the younger ones because you don't learn history anymore Napoleon when he was defeated was sent to a very damp island santolina in the middle of the Atlantic and this question was examined by my friend David Jones who's in Newcastle and this is Napoleon sitting room in santolina with the original wallpaper and David managed to get a sample of one of these circles and so here it is and he showed that this green stuff on there was actually a copper arsenic compound called Sheila's green which did contain arsenic and there was enough exotic in the wallpaper to explain why Napoleon's hair has arsenic in it but there wasn't enough to have killed him and quite amusingly anime lien chemists call bruce wild used the same chemistry quite recently for coordination chemistry in organic chemistry and he did a truly mad experiment or rather his lab assistant did so this is the paper if you're interested Bruce Wilde published in 1990 in kimkim I should say that my colleague Steve Howell found this paper I just had the photos and he persuade while Brazil persuaded his lab technician here called pulga to bake some bread in the lab containing arsenic very fortunately I have just stopped being in organic safety officer so I don't have to talk to you about how you would do a safety assessment of baking bread containing arsenic but what he did was they put this compound key in the bread and then they put mold on the bread so it produced this awesome compound by the mold reacting with it and for those of you who are chemist arsenic compounds although they're pyramidal have a very low rate slow rate of inversion so you can get optically active our scenes so what they did was and this is quite clever piece of chemistry they put the moldy bread in here and let this volatile arsenic compound go up here through the tube and into this thing that contained a salt of platinum and so after they waited a few days they isolated from this platen compounds with optically active arsenic ligands and it shows you how 19th century chemistry can be used in modern chemistry I think it's completely bonkers experiment but they have is quite fun so now I want to talk to you about a life-changing event for me and I should explain to you especially those who younger that life-changing events usually don't appear that they're going to be life-changing before they happen they often can seem quite boring and in my case the life-changing event was the EPS LC university visit on 11th of April 2008 the EPS LC is the engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council that fund most of the research in chemistry at universities and in the other physical sciences so there I was like most of my other colleagues getting really excited I was going to go to this and try and get the magic formula so I could get a really big grant in my next proposal but just before I went the day before I got an email from the senior management at the University asking me to go to a fringe event and being obedient I'm registered and got this reply saying thank you for registering for the corporate communication workshop which you must admit does not sound very exciting and so I went this which is in quite a small room in the Trent building and at this meeting Jonathan ray who was at that time the director of communications the university unveiled the you or described the University's YouTube channel being a professor I'd never heard of YouTube and their channel was called test-tube and the university had collaborated with a video journalist Brady Haran and had produced videos about science here is a David I've gotten his surname from life sciences reading a letter out saying that very sadly he has not got a grant from the proposal that he had written and you can see he looks suitably cheerful maintaining the stip up stiff upper-lip tradition of our University and I got really excited by these videos and I went back to my office and sent this email to Jonathan ray and to Chris Rand whose PVC whose aunt delights in the audience saying dear Jonathan I'm really impressed by test-tube I've spent most of the afternoon telling my colleagues and students about it well van Martin now you can imagine that an enthusiastic email like this immediately resulted in an invitation wouldn't you like to make a video so Brady came to video me in a really bad day I had been teaching from morning to mid-afternoon and I was feeling really tired but I did it and the result was seven videos which because my brother who some of you may know my brother is a film director Bradley made on YouTube into the Polyakov box set just to show that I could do it as well as Steven and so they I will show only one of these videos is about teaching so I will show you the one that's about teaching I have doing quite a lot of teachings that those gay students I use dog toys do and feminism second molecular model but it's actually called a weekly just like moms with the same amount of methane so I could not risk resist bringing these to consider so if you wish to come and play with them afterwards they're still here now Brady and I got on very well together his theory is that we wished we were doing each other's jobs he would like to be a chemistry professor and I really like to be making videos my theory is that we're both obsessive workaholics and therefore we share our addiction to together anyway the upshot was that we got on very well together this is Brady here perhaps you should wave your hand Brady wherever you are so that because you can't be seen very well here and I won't point the laser at you and the and a few weeks later Brady came with the idea of making a periodic table of videos and his idea was that you would have one video about each element and I told him he was mad because how could you talk about some of these elements like this one here element 117 where no atoms have been observed by anybody at least at that time and after some argument he said he persuaded me and so I managed to get some money from a grant that I had plus some money from the School of Chemistry here from our colleague Mike Healy and we decided to make the videos so the idea is that you click on something like hydrogen and there's a video about that and this way I should say that Brady hates this video that I'm about to show you I like it because it's our original trailer and I think it has historical interest but this was what we managed to do in the period of 5 weeks it's very very interesting sample is harshly and I should also acknowledge my colleague Pete licensed who starred in this you should wave your arm as well Pete for this so we started filming on the 9th of June and we finished the website on the 17th of July late at night or it may be early in the morning this was dictated partly by the money being about to ran out or be repossessed by the University and partly because Brady was going on holiday and we had 120 videos there are only 118 elements but there was that trailer and an introduction and the total running time was four hours and seven minutes which is to Harry Potter films all three Artie French films so it's quite so it's really quite long and this was done a year ago was the number of hits of the different elements red means it's more than 200,000 hits and now it's probably 300,000 hits and even pale blue is more than 10,000 hits and what's really surprising is the for example the video here the element francium which is so radioactive that there are only a few atoms at any time in the world that so many people who watch this video which was little more than me pointing at my tie with the various elements on it and so and we got all sorts of comments first of all these are some of the countries not all the countries I've picked out the countries in Africa because I was giving the lecture recently in Africa and you can see there are a huge number of countries where this has been watched and it's even been watched in Afghanistan though I suspect these are the American troops rather than the Taliban and they and we've had lots of comments on every video these are some early comments I like awesome vids I wish I'd found them before I did my science GCSE exam you can't tell whether that somebody who's just done the exam or some middle-aged man who is ruing his misspent youth but I love your videos just watching these videos I've learnt more than the full term at college and and videos like the these is what makes me interested in school and better improving myself thank you then as well as that there some people have had posted their own videos in reply this guy at the time this year and here was a Finnish 18 year old I don't know who this is who had enough cesium to let it off in their bathroom or kitchen and this is slightly mad person who get made videos with a rubber glove wearing a pair of safety glasses and then there was a lot of press coverage the Daily Mail perhaps this is not something one should be proud of a leading Russian business magazine and this one here which was in Hebrew which I don't understand and it took me a long time to get it translated but the the key phrase here says looks as if he went into the barber and said give me an Einstein but make it wild and but um the but we got lots of comments like this I don't care what they do as long as they keep on making videos and so we suddenly found what had been really a quick experiment had become an ongoing project and so I'm now trying to explain to you how we have been taking things forward and the sort of things that we've been doing and one of the things we've been doing is trying to build up the number of subscribers that you have on YouTube and so we did all sorts of extras if you remember 2008 was the year of the Olympics so there was an Olympic video on gold silver and bronze for those who've you're not chemist bronze is not an element the BR on the periodic table is bromine not bronze and you can see that these will watch by quite large numbers of people then in the Large Hadron Collider sprung a leak of helium so we tried to explain why there was helium in the Large Hadron Collider and we go made video rather I made a video about the Nobel Prize in 2008 in which which was for the green fluorescent protein in which I sat in front of the television watched the announcement and then immediately made the video and this has become a tradition so we've done it for years running and in October this year then for November I met the Secretary General of the Swedish Academy of Sciences who said that he was sure he had met me and I said I was so he hadn't and about halfway through the conversation he said that he he now knew he had used our video to explain the chemistry of the Nobel Prize to the Swedish King which I feel is success and then we've done other videos which by far our most successful has been candles at Halloween which was watched by nearly a quarter of a million people in three and this video consists of little more than me lighting a candle and blowing it out with small amount of wolf noise in the background and there we've done a whole series of other ones tea chemistry for the Chinese New Year and snow chemistry which has been aired more than once when there has been snow in the UK and Atlanta at 12 o'clock we had 64,000 208 subscribers which placed as a 2149 in the YouTube list of subscribers which is about 300 places above Chelsea Football Club and though so we've then been on trips abroad so here I am at the GSI in dumb start the Institute where the elements roentgenium number 111 was synthesized and here I'm sitting in the control room wearing the same jacket talking about the chemistry so I really began to learn a bit more we've put on captions all our main videos are now captioning captioned in English which is useful first of all because most of our viewers are not native speakers of English they also help those who are and have hearing difficulties but it's also useful in a classroom if lots of people are watching different videos they can watch it silent with the captions rather than having different my voice and my colleagues playing is a sort of Tower of Babel and we've also had quite a lot done in Spanish and we've had 169 translated into Brazilian Portuguese and once something has been translated you can automatically through YouTube translate into another language so this is an automatic translation of the video and cesium but I'm not capable of telling whether this is a correct translation so my Chinese colleagues didn't tell me afterwards whether it makes sense and we have done some public shows for those of you from outside Nottingham this is the Broadway cinema which is the leading arts cinema in the Midlands I would like to say in the UK but that's perhaps a bit much and we did the performance where we made a video that was shown on the small screens the one that people watch while they're queueing up to buy their tickets and so on and then we did a live performance in May 2009 and I don't know if you've ever lectured in a cinema it was the first time I had and when you look at them they are designed to burn really well so trying to do chemistry lectures is dodgy and here is my colleague Sam Tang demonstrating dry ice and this is me looking at myself really large on the screen it's quite frightening I suppose unless your film star seeing your face quite so big on the screen and feels a bit strange so we've started we went last year in May Brady and I to an exhibition which had been set up completely independent of us by museum called in Rio de Janeiro where they had used our periodic videos as the basis of an exhibit and here the group who did it and we were trying to make them and names out of elements Martin there weren't enough letters but Brady did quite well making his and we've now started making videos about Ed compounds as well as elements and this was originally funded by EB SLC it's now funded by Aldrich chemicals one of the largest chemical suppliers and this includes our most watched video here which was done but particularly by my colleague Darren Walsh who's sitting here which at lunchtime today had just passed 600,000 views 600,000 331 and this involves dunking a cheeseburger into concentrated sulfuric acid and the rather flimsy priest text that there is sulfuric acid in I'm sorry in the hydrochloric acid it's dumped into under the pretext that there is hydrochloric acid in your stomach but not quite of that strength and it ends up in an indescribably yuck mess which the viewers like and of course talking about molecules gives me quite good opportunity when I'm traveling to talk about molecules so here's a picture of me talking about ozone on Bondi Beach and I was totally unaware that these people were there and of course with all this traveling and made me think that an ideal place to try and show these videos would be on long-haul flights there are people sitting there and you can't pay much attention to the screens because every few minutes they say fasten your seat belts or would you like some more drinks or whatever so I just feel it would be really good place to show these videos and also you could then add your neighbor and say have you seen this one and so on but we don't yet have any good contacts with Airlines so if you know somebody who is senior in an airline do let us know in peps we can do that so the physics department started a rival channel or I should say complementary channel called sixty symbols they don't have a periodic table in physics so they made one up and it is very successful very in a few days time they will overtake the number of subscribers that periodic videos has have made I think 160 something videos we've made 386 which just demonstrates that physics is only half as interesting as chemistry I appear on one or two of these videos particularly Schrodinger's cat which is rather fun though my model was a mosquito rather than the cat and so this really comes a question that whether we're making any impact and Brady and I wrote an article about a year ago for the quite up market journal called nature chemistry in which we discussed this how would you judge whether making an impact and so you can look at the number of views but the problem with that is you can't distinguish between a school teacher who's showing the film to a whole class of pupils or some really sad individual who's sitting at a garret watching the same video over and over again Brady classes me in the second class of this and you can look at the number of subscribers but the problem is that it's quite difficult to see how our subscribers numbers compare with other people and how are the number of people who answers scribe who they join the channel and then think it's boring and unsubscribe we lose about 10% of our viewers subscribe and then unsubscribe and you can't get this information for other people so we decided although it's not totally scientific that the best thing to do is to look at the comments that people post on the videos and so this is one that was posted on 26 of January that's very typical of the sort of comments we're getting which says I'm picking my GCSEs next week you've contributed a lot in to making me interested in choosing chemistry Thanks and we also get comments from really quite professional scientists this message here is from was in response to our video in elements 114 and 116 were confirmed as having been discovered and pull Carol who was chair of the committee that had made this decision sent an unsolicited email saying I just watched your video in the new element 114 16 and found it exceptionally well done accurate insightful what a delight which is quite heartwarming and then like David who was lecturing and before tea we have made a Wordle of the hundred most common words that are found in a whole number of comments I can't remember it was something like two hundred thousand comments and you can see the word like is quite big and really is quite big and love and chemistry is reasonably big and for reasons that the peps less obvious there is hair cancer there and so generally it's quite positive we can also look at photos and gifts and things that we've been sent there's somebody outside when you have the wine you will see their collection of elements that fans have sent me and I like this one this is a guy called Eddy who at the time of this photo was 11 in Arkansas and his mother Arkansas's in America for those of you who haven't done geography and his mother he mother is mother wrote to us and said that she couldn't think of what to get him for Christmas he was a great fan would we send a signed photograph so we sent it and here is her photo of Eddie and wrapping the castle and here it is when he got is open and assuming assuming that his mother is is being genuine with him she couldn't really have faked such a photo and then there's this photo which I quite like I gave a lecture in Sydney and I came out of the lecture and there was the schoolboy indan who rushed up to me and said he was really sorry he couldn't come to my lecture because he had been at school but it slipped out in his lunch hour just so he could come and see me and say how much he enjoyed the videos and I was quite moved which is why I'm making such a strange face and they so I think that these things are really quite encouraging and this is a youngest viewer who's an 18 month old baby what then was 18 month old in Denmark we put this video this picture on the video and I said that I was rather disturbed by the gun and there was a reply posted by the father saying there was no need to worry it had been in the family a long time which I'm not sure dusk and then there are our own students and this is Becky and who they're making me a birthday cake and he is red Miller who's in the audience who's icing it and they made me group of them made me a whole periodic table of cupcakes which was in the fryer here and a large number of students to be precise 118 were paired with cakes free cakes 117 because I had one and I particularly liked this cake here with hair on it so the previous birthday I was given what was the world's smallest periodic table that was engraved on one of my hairs you can see this is my hair and on this hair here which was engraved in the university's nano Center there is a periodic table not a very good one but you can just about read it and you can even see it even had the latest element of that stage copernicium on it's number 112 and so the question is how do we know it's the smallest periodic table well if you go out and buy your Guinness World Records on page 106 thirty-six you will see this which if you blow it up saying the smallest periodic table in the world we're unfortunately with a picture of me in my wildest nightmares I could not have imagined being in the Guinness World Records but you see so this then really raises the question about why the video do the videos work and from an educational point of view they're really quite surprising there I have absolutely no educational objectives we do not sit down and write learning objectives and so on and there is no storyboard or script for any of our videos and in fact even those participating like me are not always sure what we're going to say before the camera starts and when they're more than one person on the video each person is filled separately so dr. a does not know what dr. B is going to say or has said and there is absolutely no culprit message we don't sit there saying come to Nottingham come to knotting or whatever and the most surprising thing of all is that there is absolutely no editorial control when I make a video the first time I see it is when it has been watched probably by 300 people on YouTube and this has the advantage that we can operate really quickly from having an idea to having the video there can be I think a record has been about three and a half hours when the element kirpan its iam was named and it works because there is trust between the scientists and the video journalist so the other things that are unusual is that they're quite funny the videos but they're by and large trustworthy occasionally we make mistakes but usually as soon as we notice them we post of a comment or something so it's clear and the other thing is if things go wrong we still show them if the wonderful experiment like pizzazium doesn't go off for whatever it is we don't hide the fact and we tackle sometimes really quite difficult subjects I made now six videos about people who are quite close to me who've died and talking about feeling sad and showing our emotions which I think those watching seem to appreciate and it's also very helpful for me and the other thing which is really important is our videos are made with professional quality cameras and they're broadcast quality but they look amateur but they are very slickly and professionally cut and the most important thing is because there is trust and partnership between the scientists and the journalists which is very unusual if not unique and of course the really important and key thing for the success is Brady Haran who's shown here and this is Brady and me as you can see in Sydney Harbour and I think this photo also demonstrates our joint obsessive nature we had to get here we had both travelled about 24 hours on different flights for various reasons and we both arrived in Sydney at about 6 o'clock in the morning and by lunchtime we had made six new videos and here we are we're actually two school where one of the school teachers was a real fan and it had a fantastic view of Sydney and of course here is the Wiggly giggly which had a trip to Australia as well so the obviously much of the accessor to the team and here of my colleagues Debbie has just produced the baby so sadly she can't be here but without these people the videos wouldn't be like they were and I think last week we had a very nice comment posted on YouTube which I think sums the whole thing up it says I'm sure many young people not only learn some science thanks to these videos but also decided to start a career in science as a result you meaning all the team at the University of Nottingham making videos in periodic videos sixty symbols etc making a great contribution to science and I think this is a very nice summary and I'm delighted that there's at least one of the stars of periodic over sixty symbols Roger who's sitting there and we also have to thank the people who have provided money and really quite small companies like Briggs which the local company and burton-on-trent which makes brewing equipment has produced some money and also the Animax Charitable Foundation that is run by one of my former duties who has made money in later life and feels that chemistry should be promoted and we're very grateful to all these people and finally I would just like to thank my long-suffering wife Janet who has probably watched more videos than any other non chemist and sometimes has had to watch them more than once if I feel that she has not appreciated it sufficiently so thank you very much indeed and so um so finally since we're here to on the run I home I thought I would just show you the video that we made for him to celebrate this occasion today I wanted to tell Brady about a prize that I'd won named after an Australian chemist Ron Nyholm and he told me that it was Australia Day today so it seems particularly appropriate and Ron Nyholm is a chemist whose name is not terribly well known outside in organic chemistry but who is one of the great father figures of inorganic chemistry and also of chemical education and the Royal Society of Chemistry has a medal in his name one year it's awarded for inorganic chemistry in the next year for education and so on backwards and forwards and I won it for education so here's the medal and you can see there's a picture of Ron a home and there's quite an impressive crest on the back of the Royal Society of Chemistry and it's made of silver and it has my name on it what's really exciting for me is that I was awarded this for my contribution to chemical education largely by YouTube so first of all I should thank everybody is watching because you contributed to my winning a prize and I'm very grateful to you but what is amazing about Romney home who died in 1971 is that most of the things that I and my colleagues teach as inorganic chemistry here in Nottingham and across the world were pioneered by him not that they discovered them but that he brought them together as being important points of inorganic chemistry and in a few days time I have to give a lecture about Ron Nye home and education and I'm going to talk a bit about how he worked in arsenic stray quite a nasty area of chemistry I've never worked in Arsenic and he also worked very heavily on the structure of molecules an area where many of you who are watching if you've been studying chemistry at school will have come across his work was in predicting the shapes of molecules of the main group elements he produced a theory together with an canadian chemist who Ron Gillespie to explain these shapes when I was a student it was called an AI home Gillespie theory now it has a rather less romantic name of VSEPR valence shell electron pair repulsion but the idea is that you count up the number of electrons or pairs of electrons and molecule and the number of pairs of electrons determines the shape of the molecule if therefore it can be tetrahedral like this one and or if there's six of them you have an octahedral molecule this is my commando molecule and if they're five you can get different shapes but usually you get this one which is called the trigonal bipyramid and he also explained that if you have full but atoms bonded round and two pairs of electrons you get a square shaped molecule with the electrons above and below but the really exciting thing that Nyholm explained was actually the bond angles of molecules and he explained that in a molecule like this one this is sulfur tetrafluoride for fluorines and the sulfur in the middle yellow for sulfur he explained there in this molecule why these two here were pushed backwards by the presence of a pair of electrons here it is quite funny because of him this molecule sf4 which is really quite an obscure molecule has become really famous in structural inorganic chemistry Ron Nyholm if you read his obituary was meant to be fantastically warm character whenever he went into a room he the conversation all lit up and he was really a great enthusiast and one of the big disappointments of my life was that I never met him and I very nearly met him I was at a party in Cambridge in 1971 in December when he was due to arrive but on route to Cambridge he had a terrible car crash he drove into the back of another vehicle and was killed and it was a real tragedy because he was only 54 probably much of his best work was ahead of him but he died and I think it is a tribute to the excellence of his work that more than 40 years after this car crash he's still remembered every year with one of the most prestigious medals of the Royal Society of Chemistry I think it's really good for us today on Australia Day to think about the memory run my home who really made in organic chemistry the exciting subject that it is today thank you

Channel: nottinghamscience

Views: 97,477

Rating: 4.9634333 out of 5

Keywords: Martyn, Poliakoff, Lecture, periodicvideos, Periodic, Table, of, Videos, Ron, Nyholm

Id: 3vjHzofEM_A

Length: 51min 7sec (3067 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 10 2012