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.

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-

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: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.)