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.' "

Comments

Interesting, but not useful chart

[waynegoode]

The new table looks interesting and it does give a new perspective, but I don't think it will replace the old periodic table. The main reason is that the "table" is mostly whitespace, or in this case, blackspace. Because of this the symbol for eachelement is written so small that it is hard to read and the other information is relegated to a list on the side. People complain who complain about the inelegance of the current periodic table should complain even louder about this list. It has no structure or elegance; it is just a plian, simple list.

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.

Re:Interesting, but not useful chart

[vethia]

I agree. The new table is a cute exercise in graphic design, but the splayed-out spiral arms make it confusing and difficult to follow if one actually intends to use the table for scientific purposes. Current users of Mendelev's periodic table are also familiar with the patterns it creates, such as the noble gases. Having the rows "end abruptly" as the article claims has a scientific use. The current periodic table makes it easy to pick out certain groups of elements that share vertical similarities, as well as helping to visually calculate electron shell levels for each element. There's no way a chart like this could ever replac the functionality of Mendelev's original design.

I'm not sold on it

[everphilski]

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-

Re:I'm not sold on it

[BioCS.Nerd]

Excellent point everphilski. On the topic of intuitiveness, it seems to me that most people think in terms of rows and columns more easily than circular relationships, at least in our culture (e.g. some cultures think of time as cyclical, versus ours which sees time as linear).

Perhaps someday when we see something like e-paper become more affordable we'll see dynamic tables that change according to the relationship you currently want to view. E.g. the table reorders itself when you want to view elements in terms of melting points, or perhaps by relationship when as super atoms (as described in the article slide show).

Re:I'm not sold on it

[rtshrubber]

This was exactly what I was thinking. As a professor who teaches general chemistry, this table is pretty, but as a resource of information about the elements, it really pales in comparison to the more standard table in use today. Learning about trends in reactivity, properties, atomic and ionic radii all seem substantially more difficult to "see" in this chart.

Also, while chemists seem to argue about how to number the groups in the current table, the group numbers are still quite useful in determining information about groups of elements including the number of valence electrons that most directly influences the bonding of the elements. This table just makes this bad situation worse.

Wtf?

[belg4mit]

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.

Overview, not data...

[Saggi]

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"...

The slideshow is a little misleading

[jhw3]

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.

Re:What the question marks?

[greed]

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.

Re:It is a big gay chart

[stratjakt]

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.

It seems harder to read, but prettier

[JimmyStewart]

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.

well, I DO like it

[museumpeace]

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.

much lost functionality

[nasor]

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.

Re:Free poster?

[drakaan]

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.

Re:An image of the chart.

[dwhitman]

If he were dead, Tufte would be rolling in his grave. This thing is simultaneously an incredible example of chartjunk and low information density.

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.)

Re:(almost) RIGHT

[CrazyMik]

This is incorrect as well. Vertical groupings are not all that matters. Rows matter too, as you can see properties change form left to right (or vise versa). Properties like electronegativity, atomic radius, etc. These effect a great deal of why certain elements react the way they do. THat is the beauty of the table, it shows an increadable number of variables and how they relate.

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