A Career In The Rare Gases

Abstract

Most of us remember where we were on the occasion of truly seminal events such as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, or the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York City and the Washington, D.C., area. I recall clearly when I first learned of Neil Bartlett’s revolutionary synthesis of xenon hexafluoroplatinate(V). As science teachers, we view ourselves as open-minded and uninfluenced by authority. We regard our scientific beliefs as tentative hypotheses that we abandon or modify in light of new discoveries. Yet in July 1962, at a conference on Advances in the Chemistry of Coordination Compounds at Ohio State University, my open-mindedness was put to the test—and failed! Someone interrupted one of the lectures to announce that Bartlett, a young lecturer at the University of British Columbia, had prepared a compound of the inert gas xenon. Faced with the news that one of ...