"The elements song" by Tom Lehrer

 

¡STOP! ¡AND WATCH THIS!

Este video definitivamente no tiene nada que ver con "Ácidos Nucléicos", más sin embargo, a mi parecer es uno de los ejemplos más significativos en donde se muestra que la ciencia puede ser divertida. "The elements song" de Tom Lehrer, un músico comendiante y un estudioso matemático que pasaba sus ratos componiendo canciones que parodiaban la vida universitaria en el afamado Harvard College.

A continuación, un pequeño fragmento descriptivo de la canción y uno que otro dato curioso:

[ Completamente en inglés ]

 Description of the song

The ordering of elements in the lyrics fits the meter of the song, and includes much alliteration, and thus has little or no relation to the ordering in the periodic table. This can be seen for example in the opening and closing lines:

There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,

And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium,

...

And argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc, and rhodium,

And chlorine, carbon, cobalt, copper, tungsten, tin, and sodium.

These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard,

And there may be many others, but they haven't been discovered.

Lehrer was a Harvard math lecturer, and the final rhyme of "Harvard" and "discovered" is delivered in a parody of a Boston accent—a non-rhotic manner—so that the two words rhyme. Lehrer did not normally speak with that accent.

[ Source: www. wikipedia.com ]

¡AND OF COURSE! ¡THE LYRICS!

There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,
And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium,
And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium,
And iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium,
Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium,
And lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium,
And gold and protactinium and indium and gallium,
And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium.

There's yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium,
And boron, gadolinium, niobium, iridium,
And strontium and silicon and silver and samarium,
And bismuth, bromine, lithium, beryllium, and barium.

There's holmium and helium and hafnium and erbium,
And phosphorus and francium and fluorine and terbium,
And manganese and mercury, molybdenum, magnesium,
Dysprosium and scandium and cerium and cesium.
And lead, praseodymium, and platinum, plutonium,
Palladium, promethium, potassium, polonium,
And tantalum, technetium, titanium, tellurium,
And cadmium and calcium and chromium and curium.

There's sulfur, californium, and fermium, berkelium,
And also mendelevium, einsteinium, nobelium,
And argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc, and rhodium,
And chlorine, carbon, cobalt, copper, tungsten, tin, and sodium.

These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard,
And there may be many others, but they haven't been discovered.


¡ENJOY!