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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 weirdest thing is though, the table itself has a backdrop of some scene of a dinner party where there's 3 robed figures, 1 fat 2 skinny, 28 figures that bear an uncanny resemblance to a disciple of some sort, even a conjurer and mariachi band!
Will wank off Linus Torvalds for fame.
Since the painfully brief article buries the most relevant piece of this story 5 pages into a linked slideshow: An image of the chart in question.
::curmudgeony voice:: Dunno... certainly looks prettier, but at quick glance I can gather a lot more information from an "old school" chart.
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I trust this won't affect The Elements Song by Tom Lehrer. If you've never heard the song, or haven't listened to it since your high school Chemistry teacher played it for you in class, check out the horribly clever Flash animation of the song at privatehand.com.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
Does anyone where we can get a free poster of the Periodic Table or better yet, a chart of the nuclides! It would be great for home schooling :)
The writeup mentioned that the chart had been bought by several schools, but I'm willing to bet that most of them are just putting them on the wall because they're pretty and sort of educational. The tiny dots for each element are going to be a lot harder to read (and stick additional information in) than a regular boxy chart.
Frankly, I liked the 1950s chart after it better. There was a certain beauty in the layout of that chart. The new chart is pretty much just the elements spiraled across a picture of a galaxy.
I read the internet for the articles.
I forgot to mention that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_Galaxy is the wikipedia article.
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.
There's a good collection of periodic tables here. Also note that the periodic table referred to in the article is similar to one produced by Thoedor Benfey.
Nerd 1: Come on, Mr. Simpson, you'll never pass this course if you don't know the periodic table.
Homer: Ehh, I'll write it on my hand.
Nerd 1: Ho! Including all known lanthanides and actinides? Ha, ha! Good luck.
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
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?
Stewart created his table in part because he remembered being deeply impressed, at the age of 12, by a similar one he saw at the science pavilion of the 1951 Festival of Britain. An impressionistic swirl in vivid colors created by the artist Edgar Longman, the table stood little hope of being adopted by classrooms, but it spurred Stewart to study science. He recalls being struck by nature's underlying order: "I realized that the atoms that make up a galaxy can be arranged in just the same form as the galaxy itself." There's a few points from page 5 of the slideshow that really hit home. 1) First, he basically ripped this idea off from a previous chart built in 1951, modernized, gave it a better "UI" and is now shipping it out to the masses. Sound familiar?
2) On a positive note, I believe that the visual upgrades to the chart (although, will color blind people have any issues getting the full content from the chart now?) will definitely help students remember and learn emelents easier. The visual separation should definitely increase the ability for students to remember how many different colors, how many elemnts per color per spiral, etc. 3) What I think is the most interesting point of all of this is the relation of the elements being able to be tied back together and done so in a shape that mirrors the overall shape of the galaxy. It's sort of like the movie "Pi" where we can see trends, shapes, circles and spirals all within our life and this would be just one more example.
Hagrin.com
Element: Unobtainium Still trying to obtain the atomic weight of that one.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
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=
I kept getting bombarded by a near lethal dose of popupium....
I guess I'll need to inoculate myself with a little firefoxium...
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a3/Chem icalGalaxy_Stewart_2004.jpg If you look at the table, you will see its is actually really nice, and easy to follow and work out groupings.
"In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - George Orwell
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.
Still and all, I will probably have it only as a demo tool. The standard chart is much easier to read. It also shows electron configurations more clearly than the spiral does.
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Mrs. Krabappel: Now, on with the Science lesson: who can tell me the atomic weight of Bolonium?
Martin: Ooh ooh ooh! Delicious?
Mrs. Krabappel: Correct. I would also have accepted "snacktacular."
--- What
I remember sitting in high school chem in 1994, thinking that the periodic table would be much better represented as a conical helicoid - a spiral wrapped around a cone.
A few years later I saw a list of known isotopes arranged one element per line and indented based on the weight of the nucleus, with simple hydrogen in the eupper-left corner. The stable isotopes were colored differently, and the color band formed a skewed triangle that would have also wrapped nicely around a cone.
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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
The best way to learn the periodic table is to have it printed on the back of a T-shirt that a cute co-ed is wearing. :P
(You have to see the movie Evolution to understand.)
Sex Position Periodic Table
:)
Enjoy.
In principle, the chart could spiral out forever. In practice, it can't because large nuclei (reflected by large atomic numbers) tear themselves apart with Coulombic (electrical) forces. The question marks are elements that either haven't yet been made (e.g., #113) or haven't yet been named (e.g., #118 -- although there's some controversy about whether it has been made)
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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.
I used to play this educational game for the TRS-80 called "Atom" http://nitros9.stg.net/atom.html.
The screen showed a central nucleus, with spinning electron holes. Your job was to capture free electrons with your little ship and shoot them into the holes. You started with the first shell with 2 holes, one for H and one for He, and then the next shell of 8 appeared for you to fill, etc. etc. Eventually the screen got very cramped, which must be why they stopped at 54.
If you fired the electron and missed the hole, you'd hit the nucleus, and the whole thing would explode. Very frustrating once you had made it all the way to Germainium (I remember playing this game about the same time as the Jackson's Victory Tour, and being tickled that there was an element named Germainium, but I digress).
It's pissing awful. The current one is nice and easy. Groups go down, periods go across.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
No, modern charts have all the elements that can exist on them, the 'gaps' are there because lighter elements only have a few valence electrons. For example, hydrogen and helium are very far apart on the table, but actualy they only differ by one electron. And since Hydrogen has one extra electron, it is grouped with lithium, sodium, potasium, etc. Helium has 'all' it's electrons so it gets grouped with neon, xenon, argon, etc.
There's still spaces to to add onto at the end for elements like Unununium which include larger and larger elements. But there are no 'gaps'.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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.
I believe it was in last month's "Discover" magazine that a different new periodic table was discussed; this one was designed by an earth scientist and was oriented specifically toward his professional needs. There's no reason that it should replace the "standard" periodic table, but if it's better for his needs, more power to him.
The periodic table is a kind of model, and like all models, it's just one way of simplifying the real world and diagraming it for easy understanding by humans. There's no reason everyone should use one model of anything for all purposes, and if this new "galaxy" chart helps middle school kids learn and understand chemistry before moving on to the "standard" periodic table, it's a good thing.
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
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I guess I've just never looked at this table very much, its sort of a...periodic table.
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 strange thing is that high school chemistry books that I've taught from treat Mendeleev as a sort of Socrates/demigod figure, yet make no mention of Moseley's contributions, which really advanced chemistry. We wouldn't know anything about the inner workings of the atom if we didn't know and understand atomic numbers.
As for this new poster... it would be something I'd put up on the wall of my classroom to attract attention and give students a new way of looking at the elements, but for any serious work, we'd still have to use the standard periodic table. There's nothing wrong with looking at the elements in a new way, but that doesn't mean it will be useful beyond generating interest in science.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Gandhi
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!!!!
Stick to the biblical periodic table: earth, water, air and fire....
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Now the periodic table. Is nothing that I learned in school sacred?
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Much about the chemistry of the elements can be obtained from:
8 501080/qid=1121871924/sr=1-5/ref=sr_1_5/002-082468 3-5368037?v=glance&s=books
0 633654/qid=1121872078/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-0824 683-5368037?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
Essential Trends in Inorganic Chemistry by D.M.P. Mingos, D. M. P. Mingos
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/019
and
Chemistry of the Elements by A. Earnshaw, Norman Greenwood
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/075
Rote memorization is quite different from actual learning.
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
Most people's preferences are to stay with the things that they already know, and what they're familiar with. (except in mating, but that's a whole 'nother issue).
... could this be a better form for someone who isn't already familiar with the periodic table that we've grown up with? Is it easier for children to understand?
I like the old chart because all of the detail is right there with the element -- I don't have to go and look at the chart along the right side of the page to get all of its details. But
Yes, the whole 'galaxy' thing is most likely to get children interested in science. They'd have probably worked a dinosaur in there, too, if someone hadn't pointed out that it'd then be sexist, and appeal to boys more than girls, but if it gets the kids interested, and maybe they then move to what we think of as the 'normal' periodic table (being that it's much more dense with its information), it doesn't really hurt anyone.
It just makes it so that the kids won't get jokes like the Periodic Table of Condiments quite as quickly. (of course, the folks who made it didn't understand the Periodic Table of Elements, or they'd have placed similarly behaving items in a column, with the most reactive elements towards the edges, except for the far right column for things that never go bad)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
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.
See this. (warning -- Flash animation).
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
- Upsie-Dasium (obscure MST3K reference)
Any others?
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Hydrogen and Helium differ also by one proton and two neutrons.
Atomic H: 1 P, 1 e
Atomic He: 2 P, 2 N, 2 e
The reason they are grouped as they are (vertical groupings are really all that matters) is because, in their atomic state, those species have very similar physical properties.
That being said, oxidized Li is *somewhat* similar to He (atomic radius, further reactivity, etc).
IAAC (Chemist)
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
Now he's going to have to build a new table of elements
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They missed the point entirely, and would have been better off making two distinct versions sold as a bundle. They both would resemble the current periodic table, but one would have a naked woman ghosted in the background, the other a naked man.
Using my new patented (R), (C) and (CC), method, I guarantee that high school age kids would stare at it for hours during class, and the learning would flow from that. It can't be any dumber than the current US educationals standards, and adults can enjoy it too.
As a side benefit, it may end up in garages and truckstops world-wide. Educate the masses I say!
-Charlie
http://www.superliminal.com/pfractal.htm has an interesting representation, dating back to 1995.
Wow I really dislike the 'we dont need a footnote for X elements' anymore argument. The current periodic table tries to convey 4 key concepts with its current layout:
1. What seperates diffrent elements in number of protons
2. electron shells/sub orbitals
3. radius size, and other properties dealing with how many electrons it has
4. Common physical charecteristics.
Number 2 is my argument of why there is a 'footnote' in the periodic table. the first 2 columns are s orbitals the ones in the middle Sc-Zn are d orbitals and on the other side is p orbitals starting with B-NE. The footnote is f orbitals. Now please dont start the argument, well if that is the case then He should be in column 2. Alot of Chem programs do this weird thing where He is produced twice on the periodic table once above colomn 2 and in its usual place.
As for the new layout it dystroys this simple oh what orbital is being filled layout. as well as for the life of me I cant figure out why H, He, Be, and Li are on the same rung.
Never could figure out why my girl liked my bitch tits, then I found out she was a lesbian.
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
A much better chart for physicists and physical chemists is Stowe's 3-D periodic table. http://chemlab.pc.maricopa.edu/periodic/stowetable .html which arranges things according to the principal quantum numbers. It comes out completely symmetric.
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Well, when dealing with water chemistry, clearly hydogen hydroxide is a special case amoung the alkalines! It still makes more sense to have hydrogen over lithium than over florine, however. I wonder how different the properties of hydrogen and lithium are in conditions where metallic hydrogen is stable.
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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.
Actually in one of Tufte's books he discusses a spiraling representation of the periodic table. Discussion may develop at http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-ms g?msg_id=0000v6&topic_id=1&topic=