Virtually everyone who has been in a high school science classroom will of course recall that this is supposed to look like squares from the periodic table of the elements. People who have done chemistry might recall that these three elements are Thorium (Th), Indium (In), and Potassium (K); and they might further recall that in general if you are writing a chemical formula, you put the elements from left to right. If this actually was a chemical formula then it would probably be written KInTh.
I like the visual pun of putting the word 'think' on a cap because putting on your thinking cap is an idiom for which I have no idea where it comes from. I like that most people will have a vague idea that this is a bit sciencey because that at least says that most people have sat through at least a little bit of science classes in their lifetime.
The expectation that this is a bit sciencey is a bit like doctors carrying a stethoscope even though they almost never use them, or maple syrup bottles having those wee little handles on them even though you can't use them, or railway crossing signs having pictures of steam trains on them even though there are almost no steam trains run by commercial railways anywhere in the world. They are all examples where expectations help form mental shortcuts through the use of skeuomorphs, which ironically means that you do not have to think.
The problem that I have is that if you give me a visual game like this, I am going to want to play with it and think. If this serves as an instruction, part of me as a stereotypical first child rule follower, wants to follow the instruction; which in this case is think - about the cap.
Now I know that Potassium as a Group 1 element will readily give up its outermost electron and that Thorium will generally form metallic bonds (if you can even find it) as it has a valency of +2. That only left Indium and when I looked that up on the periodic table and then checked a chemical data sheet to see what its outermost electron shell was doing I went... whoa!
Indium is 5 electrons deficient in its outermost electron shell and the addition of Thorium's two and Potassium's lone electron should mean that that octet is complete; provided you can find more Potassium atoms. Indium usually gives up its 3 electrons but if it is able to steal 5, it will complete its outermost electron shell to look like Xenon's. What I think is possible is that ThInK₃ is actually a legitimate chemical¹.
I imagine that because all three of these things are metals that the only way that ThInK would be formed is as a precipitate in some kind of aqueous solution and that it would fall out as a heavy metal sludge². I suppose that you could also melt/smelt them together but I have no idea if that would be an alloy or what else it would be. Immediately I also can not imagine what kind of practical use that this metallic sludge would have but as an intellectual exercise, ie. as a self-referential³ thought experiment which is designed to make you think, it's ace. The best part is that I don't even have to clean any lab equipment. I throw my imaginary chemical sludge into an imaginary rubbish bin.
I bet that at the bus stop, as we were all standing around in the rain waiting for the bus to come, that most people wouldn't have cared; some people would have thought that it was a bit sciencey; but I was probably the only one who followed the instruction and did some thinking. Admittedly it was useless but that's not different in principle to watching cat videos on your phone.
I might not be able to build palaces and cathedrals from paragraphs like Alexander Hamilton but I have enough lab equipment lying around in the imaginary laboratory to make metallic sludge. Yay! ThInK.
¹If it is not then I would like someone to let me know. I may have accidentally made some imaginary chemical that I can not dispose of.
²You can also make imaginary heavy metal sludge by booking Metallica, Pantera, and Gwar, to play at your imaginary music festival which you are holding in an imaginary field; in the rain.
³This isn't a self-referential footnote but footnote 4 is.
⁴For more information please reread this footnote⁴.
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