"Czar Caesium"

"So, there I was in science class. We'd just been given a project that had to do with an element. Each of us had been assigned a random one, and I got Caesium. I didn't really want to do something as dull as a powerpoint of something as common as an ad, so I did this. Can you see all the symbols hidden in there? Here's an explanation from the paper that I wrote to go with the picture.

"As for the actual design of Caesium, I tried to make him look like a classic medieval king from a colder region (the largest reserve of Caesium is found in Canada, and it was discovered in Germany). I immediately thought “the element must be named after Julius Caesar if it’s called Caesium” when I heard the name, and though I was wrong, the image of a king still remained in my mind. The crown on his head is meant to be made of Caesium, and it’s melting because of its low melting point, which would cause it to melt at body temperature. The poncho he’s wearing includes the spectral lines of Caesium, with the two blue lines that identified the element in the first place being emphasized. The shattering glass of water is meant to capture Caesium’s most well known trait: its explosive reactivity when exposed to water.
The purple designs in the background are harder to see than I intended, but they depict an abstract picture of my design of Caesium melting and boiling, along with the temperatures that the phase changes occur at (measured in degrees celsius). The pillars in the background contain the elemental symbols of the alkali metals, Caesium being highlighted by a blue flame (as the element burns blue-violet). The chair that he’s sitting in has a clock on the top, which has the bohr model of the silvery metal as a design on its face. The clock exists because Caesium is used in highly-accurate atomic clocks. If you look closely, you can also see that the hands of the clock both point to five, and 55 is Caesium’s atomic number.""

 - 2015 Brennan


Jeepers, my younger self had a lot to say about this one. Probably because it was for school. I'm always long-winded in academic settings.