[mir]

What is the most most beautiful word in chemistry?

I often find among pupils I help, that the terms in chemistry often is a bigger challenge than the principles. So if we are trying to teach something to anybody, why not use something that is easy to say?

Acetyl-salicylic acid (in Norwegian) is a beautiful word: Acetylsalisylsyre. I guess englishmen is pronouncing it exactly the same except by that 'R' sound :-)

[Donaldson Tan]

chemistry is chemystery

[english]

All of the acid-base indicator names are cool.  Maybe even beautiful, I guess.

Bromocresol purple....thymol blue....methyl orange...phenolphthalein....


Maybe that's just me then.   

[hmx9123]

Fluorine, when correctly pronounced.

Iodinated is kind of funny sounding.

[dfx-]

Fluorine, when correctly pronounced.

Just about to post that

[Ψ×Ψ]

Crystalline. 
I'm trying to grow xtals for diffraction, though, so I might be a little biased.

[hmx9123]

Yeah, I hear that.  'Amorphous' and 'twinned' are evil, vile words in my book.

[Ψ×Ψ]

For that matter, "single."

[P]

Hey ?*?  -  wern't you origionally Psi*Psi ?

(in case you think this compleatly of  topic  -  I always thought Psi-star-Psi had a nice ring to it!)

[ultrashogun]

Indole

[Mitch]

"reactive"

[lemonoman]

cadaverine

[enahs]

"molybdenum", nobody knows how to pronounce it!

[shelanachium]

Just 'beauty' - look at the structures! Get yourself some molecular models, solid or computer-based. Charmed plenty of 'artsy' people with them, who are often enemies of science which they regard as cold and soulless. Maybe few of these became chemists, but they at least saw that chemistry contained a form of beauty they could appreciate.

[shelanachium]

And some may then even try to understand it. Appreciation of Beauty without understanding is a poor thing. Read Walt Whitman's poem on 'Hearing the Great Astronomer' then Asimov's demolition.

So Whitman didn't know what we know, so it's a tiny bit unfair - which Asimov admitted. But wouldn't it move the most poetic soul that because of science we really know that we are stardust, our constituents were born in the deaths of mighty stars that long preceded us?

And no literary scholar ever lost their respect for Shakespeare because they learnt a bit how he did it.  So why should scientific understanding not enhance, rather than destroy, our appreciation of the Universe? Terrible and cruel it can be, but as Alan Paton wrote, it is lovely beyond any singing of it.