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Revamping The Periodic Table?
vinohradska writes "There is an interesting article on the periodic table over at Slate: 'Oxford ecologist Philip Stewart has designed a new periodic table of the elements, and it's a hit. American schools are placing orders daily for Stewart's table, and the Royal Society of Chemists recently sent a copy to every British secondary school. Stewart's is the only remake to achieve widespread adoption since Dmitri Mendeleev invented the original periodic table in a fit of brilliance in 1869.' "
The current list has its flaws, but the elements are organized and structured and there is room for the properties of each element on the chart, not on the side as an afterthought.
The poster looks cool and all, but from a good look at it I'm not sure it preserves all the relationships you learned back in Chem 101. Remember... things like electronegativity? [on a periodic table, as you go up and right things get more electronegative] There is a general trend across the periodic table as we know it; by looking at the table you can observe that flourine is more electronegative than nitrogen, and so on. And s, p, d, f shells are logically laid out. It doesn't seem like a circular chart would be as intuitive.
-everphilski-
How the hell does this article qualify as interesting? And what's the big deal? Some
guy with no clue copies an idea he once saw
to produce a less usable form of one of the
most recognizable/universal data structures
on the planet.
Were that I say, pancakes?
Nice try jackass. He quoted the article, gave credit to the source and linked to the original location. By any definition, this is not plagiarism.
Remember... ZG9uJ3QgZm9yZ2V0IHRvIGRyaW5rIHlvdXIgb3ZhbHRpbmU=
This is old news.
The "widespread acceptance" is that it got trendy with some high school teachers.
I remember when our HS chemistry teacher (years ago) showed us a few alternate tables to remind us that there are relationships, and that the periodic table isn't just the 2d table at the back of the chemistry textbook.
Is there any scientific relevance to the layout of this chart whatsoever. If there is I could not find it in a brief read of the article. If I remember correctly from HS chemistry then the last chart had a layout that made it very easy for doing all the chemistry stuff that I can't remember the names of anymore.
Sure, he didn't "rewrite in [h(er|is)] own words"...but read the article again, smart guy:
There is an interesting article on the periodic table over at Slate: ' Oxford ecologist Philip Stewart has designed a new periodic table of the elements, and it's a hit. American schools are placing orders daily for Stewart's table, and the Royal Society of Chemists recently sent a copy to every British secondary school. Stewart's is the only remake to achieve widespread adoption since Dmitri Mendeleev invented the original periodic table in a fit of brilliance in 1869. ' "
Notice the single quotation marks! This means he did not commit (from your link!): "...the act of plagiarizing; taking someone's words or ideas as if they were your own..."
Notice too, that I used the quotes.
AccountKiller
I think one of the most importent aspects of the table is to provide an overview of how the atoms align to eachother.
The table is not a lookup table for atom details of data. There are so many details (protons, weight, melting point, etc...) in regard to each atom, that no table can really display them proberly.
If you are a chemist you will know most of this by heart, so the table is best for teaching the concepts. To provide an overview.
In my opinion the new table do solve some of the issues the old table had. Especially now that it is round, that allows the end collums to meet.
You could almost say; look at the table and tell me how the atom "behvior groups" are like. Now look at the new table, and answer the same question.
In both cases you still need to learn about the "behvior groups"...
-:) Oh no - not again.
www.rednebula.com
No chemists really think that the lanthanides and actinides are "footnotes" in the periodic table. In truth both rows should be inserted under Group 3. We just put them under the table because the first option would make the table too wide.
Hydrogen is difficult to place in a group because it's basically a single proton with a single electron whizzing around it. In fact, in organic chemistry we usually just refer to hydrogen ions as "protons" -- which they are. The element itself has some properties of halogens and some properties of alkali metals, which is why it sometimes gets put in "both" groups.
Practising chemists usually know where the elements they work with lie in the periodic table. Outside of school use, the main use for periodic tables is to quickly find atomic weights (sometimes also electronic configurations or physical properties). Annotated variants of the "old version" are great for this. If this data can't be found quickly, the periodic table is useless.
Check that. I wonder if the one with the boxes is the inspiration that the new guy had. It said he was inspired by a piece of art in the '50s. If that's the case, the new one really sucks.
[ ]
Those would be where we can predict the existence of an element, but haven't found or synthesized one yet.
For example, if you have a set elements with nucleuses containing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9 and 10 protons, you can guess that there should probably be one with 6 in the bunch.
Electron shells are related to these predictions, too; we know how many electrons can be at particular "distances" from the nucleus, so if we have elements with incomplete shells (== room for more electrons), we can predict that there are elements which have complete shells.
Since the periodic table is ordered by protons-in-nucleus-count, and grouped by electron shell number, drawing out the periodic table inherently makes those predictions.
100% with you. Hell, the periodic table has been around longer than the fool who thought he'd quit his illustration class and pretend to be a scientist. Mendeleev was a genius, and i've never understood why he never got the respect he deserved. He was quite literally DECADES ahead of his time whose first draft of the table was written on a cocktail napkin. For those who couldnt be bother to read my rant: Mendeleev = Good This Other Bloke = Bad Science = Pitiful excuse for knowledge
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
The new chart is pretty much just the elements spiraled across a picture of a galaxy.
And the currently used one is pretty much just the elements in a bunch of boxes.
Its a nice picture indeed, I like the look of it, although I agree with some previous posters that a resizing is in order so more information can be associated with each element 'bubble'.
However, I can't remember enough of the properties of individual elements to grasp the underlying structure of this periodic table. I remember my chemistry teacher explaining the elegance of the square periodic table by how the electron orbits are mapped out, the total charge of each element in vertical columns and all the neat stuff like that. What I would like to see before passing judgement on this new one is a mapping of all those cool features of the old table into the new table, so I can figure out how it works and if it truely does lend itself to a better understanding of the elements.
If all the nice relational properties of the old table are preserved in the new one in some sort of structure, then with some tweaking it might be quite useful. But until someone can point those features out to me, a pretty picture it will remain.
This is not a sig.
The guy's an ecologist. The fact that schools are ordering it just shows what's happened to our education system.
They want a more "PC" or enviro-fiendly periodic table, not a more accurate or useful one.
My kids are going through grade school, and on conference with the teacher, I found out that they dont teach math by having the kids do arithmetic problems over and over until it's second nature. They just briefly touch on subjects like multiplaction and division, to "give the kids a sense of it", in the teachers own words, then move on. The entire curriculum is designed so the stupidest kid in america can pass, and therefore feel good about himself.
I don't know if I suddenly became an old crank, but what the fuck? This is the education strategy we've chosen as we dive headlong into the age of technology?
I moved my kids to private school. I figure the cash spent now is much less than having to support a public school "graduate" into my 90s.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
There is a lot of whitespace. To be as easy to read as a conventional periodic table, this chart would have to be printed much larger. I'd think that a good graphic designer could take care of much of that problem, however.
I like the spiral nature, although that's a little hard to read as well.
As a scientist and educator, I'd say he's done a good job. As a graphic design, the new table leaves a lot to be desired. I wouldn't fault the author for that, the skills necessary for good science or good teaching don't have much in common with the skills for good design.
Jimmy Stewart, P
assuming all the other data a typical periodic table [poster sized or wall chart] crams in to each element's box can be added to this depiction.
Don't you see that all the orbital or shells [that make for a confusing notation that chemists painfully memorize and physicists gleefully re-explain with Schroedinger's wave equations that mean nothing to most of us] are made much more intuitive in this representation? This new chart can still give those with no education in atomic physics the intuitive recognition of "what should come next", "what's missing" and "what will weigh more" as the old chart has. Consider that chem teachers are are told to regard as advanced any student who understands this notation[search for "Level 3, the student is able to...". Or considered how labored even a chem101 treatment of this material is.
One thing I will concede: Pauling's notion of "electronegativity", so useful to chemists, was clearly related to location of an element on the standard periodic table [changing most strongly as you traversed diagonally from lower left to upper right]...its not so clear here.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
The traditional periodic table is arranged the way it is for a reason. With an ordinary periodic table, simply looking at an element's position on the table will give you information about its
-electronegativity/electron affinity
-the radius of its electron cloud
-ionization energy
-lattice energy
-valence electron configuration
Maybe there's a way to deduce all that from this new "galaxy" aragnement, but the article doesn't mention it and it's not readily apparent to me.
If you're home-schooling but not giving your kids daily interaction with other kids, you're not doing it right. That's part of school, whether at home, or on a public campus. That's why you get grades for "plays well with others" in elementary school.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
It's just wrapped so the left meets the right and put in a circle.
Electronegativity is there, you're just not looking at it right I guess.
This table adds one more thing, it relates the numbers to electron shells even more explicitly than the other chart. The shells are there, they are the circles in the galaxy, they're even in the correct order they are filled, from inside to out.
But that having been said, this chart is a loser in my book. It doesn't add much to the other table. And most imporantly, it's like 95% non-information. Which means you have to print it huge just to see any information at a glance at all.
I can't see how this chart is going to supplant the current chart, which has nearly the same informative content in 1/20th the space.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
The new one may be pretty and logical, but it's not terribly useful. A periodic table for a working scientist must not only show the elements' relationships with each other but also provide a huge amount of extra information about them. A good periodic table can fit onto a single piece of letter/A4 sized paper and includes all the elements, their names and symbols, their atomic weights, electron configurations, valences, whether or not they're metals, and usually some extra information like their electronegativity, melting and boiling points, density, crystaline structures, or the acid/base properties of their oxides. This new version wastes way to much space on its pretty background picture that could instead be used to convey that kind of information.
Significantly, having that information embedded into the table itself rather than on a separate chart makes a big difference in understanding it. With the information on the element squares, it's easy to see periodic trends in the behavior of the elements that aren't obvious when the same data is shown in tabular form.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
That was Mendeleev's great triumph, that the table predicted then-unknown elements that turned out to exist with their projected properties.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
The ones in the article are way cool (they start a ways down). Amazing what actual design knowledge (rather than a geek thinking it's easy) can do.
The image of the galaxy is what Tufte calls a "duck" - a decorative style element that dominates a chart without conveying useful information. The color coding is also chartjunk; it conveys nothing that isn't already implicit in an element's location in the chart. Most of the ink in this graphic (galaxy, color fills) conveys zero information.
It gets worse. To keep from obscuring the cute galaxy picture, the designer shrank the atomic numbers to an illegible point size, and then threw away useful data (like atomic weight, electronic configuration and common oxidation states, all of which fit into a rather smaller chart than this which is hanging on my wall.)
I think the spiral view is just connecting the inert gases to the group 1 metals, something that is taught when the table is read from left to right.
There is nothing new here. Move along
Though I agree that the periodic table is essentially linear and this is simply another way to fold it up in a visual representation, I think there NEEDS to be that disconnect between noble gasses and the next element as it is inherent chemically.. you fill up your shell, bam... onto the next shelf/row/spiral groove/etc.
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*not guaranteed
That is beautiful. It makes me want to go back to studying physics again (been many years). Just looking at it hints at the underlying structures of modern physics, and makes you need to understand.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
No, because skin color and ethnic background are not under the control of any individual. Religion is a choice, albeit one often made implicitly and constrained by childhood brainwashing. Active ignorance of science and refusal to accept objective evidence that conflicts with cherished beliefs is definitely a choice. Bad choices deserve opprobrium.