A Virtual Field Trip to My Periodic Table Table, Sponsored by NOVA

UPDATE: This event is over, but you can watch the recording here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NEYk5hdA4A

Back in the before times I would occasionally have someone ask if they could visit my office to see my collection of elements and the wooden periodic table table that started me in the direction of having an office with way too many element samples, and writing my series of book The Elements, Molecules, and Reactions. I generally said yes to such requests, which are severely limited in number by the fact that my office is in Champaign, Illinois, which is next to a whole lot of corn and soybeans and not much else.

Now my office (at Wolfram Research) is accessible, even to me, only by special permission with all sorts of virus precautions. Visitors are out of the question, unless, of course, they are virtual! Fortunately for anyone interested in the experience, NOVA is sponsoring a virtual visit by Zoom, with up to a thousand visitors possible. I doubt we’ll get that many, but however many show up, it should be fun. Apparently people will be able to ask questions, though I have no idea how that works if there’s more than a few dozen people.

Most likely I’m going to use my phone, and walk around the office showing and talking about the literally thousand of examples of elements, pure and otherwise. When I’ve had school groups in the past, there were always a lot of questions, and people really like seeing the real thing that they’ve seen in one of my books. (Basically everything in The Elements is in that office, including a few things you wouldn’t think should be.) I hope we will be able to recreate some of that atmosphere in virtual form.

The poster advertises videos, which I’ll try to figure out how to do, but I’m not promising it will work very well. My guess is that there’s plenty to show and talk about, and people can always watch videos on their own time.

So, mark your calendar for Wednesday March 24th, 1pm Eastern, 11am Pacific, 5pm GMT. You can sign up now at this link: http://bit.ly/BeyondtheElementsReactions