Is that joke that on a cosmic level, it’s mostly hydrogen and helium (?) so others get ignored, like how genders other than the usual 2 get ignored? If so, that’s so smart and funny, wow.
Yep. Cosmologists work at the largest scale and often simplify regular matter down to hydrogen (“gas”) and everything else (“metal”).
So if you ever see a reference to the “metallicity” of a star, that can include the presence of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, etc… which chemists of course would never refer to as metals.
Is that joke that on a cosmic level, it’s mostly hydrogen and helium (?) so others get ignored, like how genders other than the usual 2 get ignored? If so, that’s so smart and funny, wow.
Or is it something else that I’m not getting?
Pretty much, the universe is hydrogen, helium, and rounding errors.
Yep. Cosmologists work at the largest scale and often simplify regular matter down to hydrogen (“gas”) and everything else (“metal”).
So if you ever see a reference to the “metallicity” of a star, that can include the presence of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, etc… which chemists of course would never refer to as metals.