There’s one thing my buddies and I can agree on,
That life’s pretty good as an atom of neon;
No pining for love and no reason to flirt,
Because loners we are, so completely inert.
And my name is Ned, a magnificent neon,
Been bouncing about in this box for an eon.
The forces between us we barely can feel,
So a gas of our atoms is nearly ideal.
There’s only one rule that we’ve clearly made known:
Don’t mess with this gas—just leave us alone!
If you push us too far, you will certainly see
The power of “PV=nRT.”
One day we were forced to impose this one rule
After (pardon the pun) we had “lost our cool.”
I’ll tell you the awfully painful story.
Beware, as the details are rather gory.
Long, long ago, we would peacefully roam
In a luxury test tube; she was our home.
’Twas roomy with crystal clear views, and atop her
Was placed a tightly-fit rubber stopper.
Now, life was serene; we had nothing to fear,
As our pressure inside was one atmosphere,
And the size of our home—few others could beat her—
A spacious hundred milliliters.
(Incidentally, we easily saw
That, thanks to the Ideal Gas Law,
’Twas true, at two hundred ninety-eight K,
0.004 moles of us lived there that day.)
But anyway, there we were, living our lives,
When a girl with a Bunsen burner arrived,
And the next thing we knew, its flame became blue.
We were heated so fast we didn’t know what to do!
So we bounced all around with a newly found ardor.
Each time we hit glass, we now hit it much harder.
Our collisions with glass were all nearly elastic,
So the change in momentum was rather fantastic.
From a human’s perspective, this translates to a measure
Of a really enormous increase in the pressure.
But you don’t need a microscope’s view to agree;
You just need “PV=nRT.”
See, the heat invaded the test tube, and
Our gas wasn’t given the right to expand.
The “T” was increased, and to keep the equation,
The “V” couldn’t change, so the “P” saw inflation.
The pressure built up so severely, in fact,
That before the poor girl had some time to react,
CRACK! We pushed on the glass ’til it burst.
That day will live on in my mind as the worst.
By our beautiful home were we quickly bereaved
As the difference in pressure was swiftly relieved,
’Cause we quickly expanded, without an obstruction,
But as we flew out, we surveyed the destruction.
Shards of our home flew toward nearby lasses
Who weren’t wearing their safety glasses!
The problem was thus exacerbated.
From all of our friends were we separated.
To imagine the graphic events makes me wince,
And alas, I’ve been quite bitter since.
The lesson, my friends, is a real no-brainer:
Don’t ever heat a sealed container!
(In addition to appearing in Atomic Romances, Molecular Dances, this poem previously appeared (excerpted/edited in the textbook and in full in the Teachers’ Edition) in Active Chemistry (2007), It’s About Time, Education Division of Herff Jones, Inc.).
