In the early 1980s it was discovered that p-block elements such as silicon and phosphorus could be forced into exotic states of existence – low oxidation and low coordination states – within compounds that were perfectly stable at room temperature. Transition metal chemistry, in comparison, was undergoing a period of explosive growth that is still to let up.īut at the same time as Jones was learning the dry conventions of classical main group chemistry, the first signs of a renaissance in the field had already begun to appear in the literature. ‘At that time, it was thought that everything we needed to know about the chemistry of the main group elements was known: the properties, oxidation states and reactivity were pretty well developed and there were no new areas to go,’ he says. ‘Within inorganic chemistry, main group was the most boring part of my undergraduate degree,’ recalls Cameron Jones, a researcher at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, who completed his degree at the University of Western Australia in 1984. As early as the 1970s, it seemed that the main group elements had already given up all their secrets, leaving future generations of researchers with little new to find. Even in pure chemistry terms, the reactivity of main group elements has always seemed a little staid compared to the virtuoso catalytic tricks that many transition metals routinely perform. ![]() ![]() ![]() The s-block metals such as calcium, and p-block elements like boron and germanium, are literally outshone by their flashier transition metal neighbours gold, palladium and rhodium. It is fair to say that main group elements are not the most glamorous members of the periodic table.
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