For many years, chemists and other scientists thought that the inert or noble gases — helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon, and radon — could not form chemical compounds and a valence of zero. In recounting how scientists did indeed create chemical compounds with the noble gases, Isaac Asimov, a chemist himself, wrote:<\/p>\n
“The discovery of the noble-gas compounds came as a shock to some chemists and as a healthy object lesson to all. The universe is a very complicated place and there is very little of it we have penetrated. Even those portions of the universe with which we feel well acquainted can still hold surprises.”<\/p>\n
Isaac Asimov, The Noble Gases,<\/em> New York: Basic Books, 1966, p. 157.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For many years, chemists and other scientists thought that the inert or noble gases — helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon, and radon — could not form chemical compounds and a valence of zero. In recounting how scientists did indeed create chemical compounds with the noble gases, Isaac Asimov, a chemist himself, wrote: “The discovery of … Continue reading ““The universe is a very complicated place…””<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[245],"class_list":["post-6963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-meditations","tag-isaac-asimov"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6963"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6963\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6964,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6963\/revisions\/6964"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}