The Alkali Metal Series, Reacting with Air and Water

Education Science
YouTube player

If I understand the annotations on this, YouTuber ironnica’s only posted video, correctly, the footage was produced by a New Jersey educational media company in 1991, and the delightfully British narration more recently by somebody associated with the UK’s Open University. In any case, it is a perfectly concise, interesting, and entertaining demonstration of the increasing reactivities of the group I metals lithium, sodium, potassium, rubidium, and cesium. Francium, the heaviest and theoretically most reactive of the alkali metals, is not included because its highly unstable nucleus does not persist long enough to allow for the accumulation of weighable quantities of the bulk element. [via Geekosystem]

16 thoughts on “The Alkali Metal Series, Reacting with Air and Water

  1. Matthew Jachimstal says:

    Based on cesium, I don’t think I’d want to see francium even if it was possible!

  2. Matthew Jachimstal says:

    Based on cesium, I don’t think I’d want to see francium even if it was possible!

  3. Matthew Jachimstal says:

    Based on cesium, I don’t think I’d want to see francium even if it was possible!

  4. Matthew Jachimstal says:

    Based on cesium, I don’t think I’d want to see francium even if it was possible!

  5. Matthew Jachimstal says:

    Based on cesium, I don’t think I’d want to see francium even if it was possible!

    1. Anonymous says:

      Considering francium is highly radioactive, making a francium explosion in your lab on purpose is something you’d want to avoid.
      Also the fact that there is only about 30g of francium in the whole Earth crust (according to wikipedia) doesn’t help ;-)

  6. Matthew Jachimstal says:

    Based on cesium, I don’t think I’d want to see francium even if it was possible!

  7. Anonymous says:

    Excellet educational video but to really MAKE your day you must watch this video afterwards.

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I am descended from 5,000 generations of tool-using primates. Also, I went to college and stuff. I am a long-time contributor to MAKE magazine and makezine.com. My work has also appeared in ReadyMade, c't – Magazin für Computertechnik, and The Wall Street Journal.

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