Not too long after the announcement that IUPAC had settled on names for the 4 elements needed to fill out the 7th row of the periodic table, I started thinking back to what Tom Lehrer’s Elements Song would sound like today. The first recording I had heard was his 1967 performance in Copenhagen but even then it was outdated, with Mr. Lehrer kindly requesting that the audience mark down newly-discovered lawrencium in the margins of their programs. But with a nice, round number like 118 I was sure we had enough to flesh out a new verse, right? Just cram the new ones in somewhere and shift things around to make sure it still rhymes, easy.

Why this is Not So Easy™

The stress pattern is quite rigid, and Mr. Lehrer adheres to it faithfully. The first beat of each measure is hit the hardest:

AN ti mo ny, AR se nic, a LU mi num, se LE ni um, and...

For the most part this didn’t present too much of a challenge, save for the names that have a dactyl at the beginning (e.g. PRA-se-o-DY-mi-um). With names that start with a trochee (e.g. O-ga-NESS-on), you could put a minor stress on beat 3 without drawing too much attention to it. For the rest, judicious placement of “and” and “there’s” can nudge the syllables into place.

Still, after quite a while messing around, I still wasn’t able to fit everything in — always exactly one element would get left out. I suspect there’s a proof applying the pigeonhole principle to show there simply aren’t enough stressed syllables to get everything in there, but I haven’t tried formalizing it. In the end, poor dubnium was relegated to the final line as an afterthought. If you can find a more elegant way of including it, I’d be eternally grateful.

After getting most of the elements in place and having some fun with assonances and alliterations, the last major hurdle is the music itself. The original has six sections in ABC ABC form — (a) the basic verse, (b) the basic verse with a brief key modulation, and (c) the resolution ending with that flurry of trochees. It’s not clear which section would be best to double to fit the seventh verse. In my head I suppose I maintain a somewhat clunky ABAC ABC pattern, but since I can’t play the piano well enough for this song, this is left as an exercise for others. We may need to wait until elements 129 or 130 ¹ to neatly fill an eighth verse for an ABAC ABAC pattern or something along those lines.

This is what I’ve got in the end:

The Results

There’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,
And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium,
And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium,
Technetium and iodine, ruthenium, uranium.

Promethium and francium, niobium, moscovium,
And lead and americium, nihonium, flerovium
And bismuth, oganesson, copernicium, potassium
And holmium and helium and hafnium and hassium.

Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium,
And lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium,
There’s bromine, livermorium, and indium and gallium,
And bohrium and thorium and thulium and thallium.

There’s yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium,
And boron, gadolinium, dysprosium, iridium,
There’s strontium and silicon and silver and samarium,
Darmstadtium and lithium, beryllium and barium.

Seaborgium and scandium and cerium and erbium,
Lawrencium and phosphorus, meitnerium and terbium
And manganese and mercury, molybdenum, magnesium,
And sulfur, rutherfordium, roentgenium and cesium.

There’s praseodymium and platinum, plutonium,
And gold, protactinium, palladium, polonium,
And tantalum, and tennessine, titanium, tellurium,
And cadmium and calcium and chromium and curium.

There’s fluorine, californium and fermium, berkelium,
And iron, mendelevium, einsteinium, nobelium,
And argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc and rhodium,
And chlorine, carbon, cobalt, copper, tungsten, tin and sodium.

With dubnium, we’ve covered all the elements of which we know,
And we’ll need a bit more funding if we want to fill another row.
[ Hold out hat for grant money from passerby ]