Shapeshifting: Proposal For a New Periodic Table of the Elements

First time accepted submitter ramorim writes "In honor of the Chemist Day, celebrated in Brazil on this day June 18, 2013, I publish a proposal for a new Periodic Table of Elements (Original, in Portugese) in a modular spiral-hexagonal model, with continuity and connectivity for all constituent units of the matter. This proposal indeed permits to extrapolate the hypothetical elements of the G-block and H-block in the same model."

Comments

More missing elements, to to be discovered.

[Vincent77]

The logic of the table is that it predicts missing elements really well. Does this circular table do the same?

Re:More missing elements, to to be discovered.

[canadiannomad]

This proposal indeed permits to extrapolate the hypothetical elements of the G-block and H-block in the same model.

Presumably that is the purpose of this periodic table...
I would consider an alternative periodic table a success if it predicts new elements or new interactions that the old one didn't.
I haven't been able to see the link, but my guess is that is the goal, not to change the periodic table we have, but to give another way of looking at the elements that allows for new predictions that can help advance research.

Re:More missing elements, to to be discovered.

[gstoddart]

The logic of the table is that it predicts missing elements really well. Does this circular table do the same?

Did you even read the summary?

This proposal indeed permits to extrapolate the hypothetical elements of the G-block and H-block in the same model.

I realize nobody reads TFA, but it's a two sentence summary which says, yes, it does allow predicting hypothetical elements.

You could at least try.

Re:More missing elements, to to be discovered.

[girlintraining]

I would consider an alternative periodic table a success if it predicts new elements or new interactions that the old one didn't.

This, right here. This is the only valid argument for changing an existing and well-understood model when there's no new evidence to consider.

Re:More missing elements, to to be discovered.

[gl4ss]

Ok sac breath, but anyone who doesn't know what the fuck G and H block is can't magically fucking guess, now can they? Fuck you're a fucking tool idiot.

they're some groups of hypothetical elements.

Re:More missing elements, to to be discovered.

[Kielistic]

If you don't know basic terms that deal with the periodic table then just maybe you aren't qualified to comment on whether or not a redesign could be useful.

Re:More missing elements, to to be discovered.

[B'Trey]

I would consider an alternative periodic table a success if it predicts new elements or new interactions that the old one didn't.

This, right here. This is the only valid argument for changing an existing and well-understood model when there's no new evidence to consider.

The Periodic Table isn't a model, or at least not a functional model. It's a chart - a way to represent data. Arguably, a chart is a model of sorts but considering your comment concerning "new evidence," you certainly seem to be implying that it's a model of how things function and this new proposal provides an alternate functional model, which isn't the case. The proposed alternative isn't a new theory of elements. It doesn't change our idea of how things works. It simply presents the same information and understanding in a different way. If the new table doesn't provide any new predictive ability at all but it does, say, present the information in a way that's easier to grasp or makes relationships clearer, then it's worth considering and possibly worth adapting.

Re:More missing elements, to to be discovered.

[Cyberax]

Clearly, you'd skipped chemistry lessons at school. Periodic table _is_ a model, it successfully predicted properties of new elements. The fact that it looks like a table is just a detail.

Re:More missing elements, to to be discovered.

[X0563511]

The name doesn't help either.

In my case yes, I sacrificed chemistry to get a full dose of physics instead. I don't really regret it, though sometimes I do feel the lack. I would expect to see more use out of a database + algorithms rather than a convenient tabular arrangement.

Re:More missing elements, to to be discovered.

[CTachyon]

The Periodic Table isn't a model, or at least not a functional model. It's a chart - a way to represent data.

It's more than a chart. A table is not just a way to represent data; a simple list of all items in random order can represent the data just as well as a table can. A table is a way to organize data -- by spotting patterns, identifying which patterns are most important, then arranging the items to highlight those patterns. By choosing which patterns are important, you are implicitly constructing a model of what the items in the table are.

The Mendeleev-derived periodic table has done quite nicely for us: it predicted the properties of many elements long before we actually isolated them, and it was doing so well before we understood that the patterns highlighted by the table (the table's implicit model) were ultimately caused by the arrangement of electrons into quantum-mechanical energy-level shells by way of Pauli exclusion, with the arrangement of elements in each row directly dependent on the quantized degrees of freedom in each shell's energy level (hence the 2*[1], 2*[1+3], 2*[1+3+5], 2*[1+3+5+7] pattern in the table's row widths). Think of the table as a quick first-order approximation to the deeper equations needed to compute the true physics, such as the energy of a filled d-orbital in the third electron shell. A more complex table with an extra dimension or two of symmetry might be able to capture more patterns, giving us a more detailed model that produces better, more subtle approximations than the Mendeleev-derived model can yield; yet that new model would still bypass the tough work of calculating how electrons actually behave when packed around a single nucleus. (Or perhaps we could capture some symmetry affecting how an atom forms molecular bonds, or a nucleon symmetry that gives better predictions of stability and half-life or that better captures why the stable proton:neutron ratio isn't a perfectly smooth curve.)

Re:More missing elements, to to be discovered.

[SomeKDEUser]

No, it is not a model. Mendeleeiev noticed regularities in the elements. He found that putting them by rows and columns of properties, he got an arrangements where there were gaps. This was a model exactly in the way that giving names to clouds and putting them in a table is a model.

Because nature is fairly regular, he was right: elements did fit in the missing spaces. But also, whole rows were missing. Now we understand, through quantum mechanics, where the patterns come from -- and also where they break down.

We know that the table is now complete (in that all elements in all rows we have previously observed have been produced), and that relativistic effects may (or not!) make the next row completely different. Because this is the XXIst and not the XIXst, we actually have models to build the next table :)

Re:More missing elements, to to be discovered.

[Cyberax]

It is a phenomenological model. I.e. it doesn't describe the underlying cases, but that's OK. For example, first light spectrum laws are another examples of phenomenological models.

Re:More missing elements, to to be discovered.

[bogjobber]

Mendeleev was not the first person to put together the periodic table. His was just the best/most popular at the time. And if putting types of clouds in a table let you predict new, previously unknown types of clouds it would be a model as well.

The concept of valency was understood at that time, so it wasn't just about physical properties. They may not have understood *why* the elements were periodic, but they successfully used it to predict the properties and relative masses of previously unknown, naturally-occurring but relatively rare elements. It was also one of the more important developments that lead to the discovery of subatomic particles, because the periodic table made clear that the properties of elements were not directly related to their atomic mass (ie tellurium was placed ahead of iodine, even though tellurium's atomic mass is greater than iodine's) which was a very significant distinction for the time.

Re:More missing elements, to to be discovered.

[cold fjord]

Spot on.

Just looking at a couple of the columns in Mendeleev's table shows the considerable utility of the current table. You can see the properties of the elements as arranged tend to be similar to their neighbors: fluorine, chlorine, bromine, and iodine have useful similarities. Likewise: helium, neon, argon, krypton, exon, radon - all noble gasses. Flip to the other side, and lithium, sodium, and potassium are all highly reactive metals. Then consider carbon, silicon, and germanium - all useful in creating base wafer materials for semiconductor work. It is easy to go on, and on. Although other chart formats may have their uses, I think that Mendeleev's is very difficult to improve upon. It is simple, powerful, and easy to use.

Re:More missing elements, to to be discovered.

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

Euhm, if you studied physics, have you somehow missed that the standard model is also essentially a table and a few rules about what positions in the table mean ?

And you may have failed to notice that the physics teacher claimed that chemical elements are made up of standard model particles, and they thus "explain" the chemical elements ... and then proceeded to skip actually showing how you get the composition of any actual element and/or isotope (except maybe H+). Sadly that's not a coincidence. It is thought that the standard model does indeed predict which elements are stable or not, but nobody's ever been able to actually verify that in calculations for anything more complex than Lithium. And something like Oxygen is so far out of reach of the formulas it's not even funny, not to mention Uranium.

Sadly at this point in time, the idea that chemistry can be rigorously poven using physics as a base is just a fantasy. Given that they've failed to actually do that for centuries now, I dare say it's not just because nobody ever thought of doing that.

Re:More missing elements, to to be discovered.

[Cyberax]

You're confusing about 10 different issues. Let's start:

1) Standard Model deals with subatomic particles.

2) Standard Model has no effect on _chemical_ properties of elements. They are determined by the structure of electron shells. Incidentally, the Periodic Table models the structure of the outer electron shell.

3) To predict _chemical_ properties you need only to use relativistic Schroedinger equation, it can't be solved exactly for anything past hydrogen, but it certainly can be solved numerically. For example, the color of gold and copper is a relativistic effect that can be derived from quantum description of electron orbitals. It's possible to simulate even fairly large molecules and people are now working on protein folding simulations from the first principles.

4) Predicting nuclear stability is another problem entirely - it's way too complicated, because of a huge number of strongly interacting particles in a nucleus of a typical atom. It's like the many-body problem in classical mechanics - you get a chaotic behavior even with a small number of weakly interacting bodies and a simple inverse-square motion law.

Beehive not a table

[Anonymous Coward]

The proposal looks more like a beehive than a table. Little wonder that the current design, with its' inherent expand-ability, has experienced sustained longevity.

Re:Beehive not a table

[MozeeToby]

inherent expand-ability

Actually, if you expanded the table in the way that is intuitively obvious (and provides the most meaning) it's about 5x wider than it is tall making it difficult to work with in a physical sense. As it is almost always presented, important information is totally lost on most people when they look at it.

Re:Beehive not a table

[securityfolk]

From my hobbyist messings-around with PTOE, it seems that the Lanthanides and the Actinides are about unstable nuclei due to neutrino decay and the crazy electron configurations (Have you looked at those outer shells?? It's a mess!). If it were up to me, I would stop the table at Lead. Nothing really happens in 5f until after then anyways.

Re:Beehive not a table

[securityfolk]

Sigh.... neutron decay... I meant neutron.

Re:Beehive not a table

[CODiNE]

I like that idea.

Stop the table at Lead, then add a "Here be Dragons" below.

Re:Beehive not a table

[MagusSlurpy]

"Here be physics." That's enough to warn 95% of us chemists away right there (including me).

Re:Beehive not a table

[Zorpheus]

The Lanthanides, also called rare earth elements, are not unstable.

Re:Beehive not a table

[dkf]

it seems that the Lanthanides and the Actinides are about unstable nuclei

Well... the Actinides are all unstable, but the Lanthanides are stable and interesting for their various uses in various high-tech materials.

OK, by "stable" I mean "have stable isotopes" and some of those "unstable" Actinides have very long half-lives.

Valence?

[Gothmolly]

I thought one of the useful applications of the old table was that you could read down the columns and find 'like' materials, for instance, the halogens all sort of behave alike, the noble gases, etc. I don't see how that works here. And now of course, the article (the Google??) is now slashdotted and I can't recheck it.

I don't see how the old table didn't work I guess.

Re:Valence?

[iggymanz]

though this one can't be viewed at present, various spiral tables in the past had such similar elements on same radius line from center. Another "hip" thing to do was include the neutron in the inert gas family and before hydrogen in outward spiral.

Re:Valence?

[gstoddart]

I don't see how the old table didn't work I guess.

I don't think anybody is saying it "didn't work", but that we can convey even more information if we laid it out a little differently.

So, if everything is in a spiral, the arms of the spiral instead of columns of the table contain the 'like' materials -- but I have no idea of what the 'more' information is since I haven't taken any chemistry classes in 25+ years.

Re:Valence?

[captn ecks]

The page is available again and I believe that information is represented by following the connections 45 degrees up and to the left in the proposed chart.

Error establishing a database connection :(

[Anonymous Coward]

The subject says it all.

Re:Error establishing a database connection :(

[X0563511]

Interestingly, I would expect just dumping the data into a database and using algorithms to figure things out would make more sense.

Site already blown to bits

[54mc]

Error establishing a database connection that looks suspiciously like a broken WordPress on the source material. Google link shows a translation of a translation of a translation...

So Hydrogen and Florine are in the same "column"

[medv4380]

I can see where this "attempts" to make more sense. I'll still be going with Mendeleyev Derivatives. This proposal is just fancy for the sake of being fancy.

what?

[internerdj]

A spiral model has potential since the underlying phenomenon could be described in spiral terms but this just didn't make any sense to me. Reading order was all foreign (even from the author's native language.) The potential for more connections could have been worthwhile but it wasn't clear what each dimension of connectivity meant.

Re:what?

[camperdave]

It would seem to me that the current layout with its rows for the electron shells, and the columns for how many electrons are in the shell, would be of much more use. I'm not a chemist, but I don't see how a spiral layout would be "better" at pointing out relationships between the elements.

There goes ``Omnilingual'' (maybe?)

[WillAdams]

H. Beam Piper posited that an archeological team, finding the remains of a reasonably advanced civilization would be able to puzzle out their language(s) based on the fundamentals of math and chemistry in his novel ``Omnilingual'':

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19445

I wonder what he would have thought of this, and how many other useful representations / arrangements there are of the periodic table.

Re:There goes ``Omnilingual'' (maybe?)

[H0p313ss]

H. Beam Piper posited that an archeological team, finding the remains of a reasonably advanced civilization would be able to puzzle out their language(s) based on the fundamentals of math and chemistry in his novel ``Omnilingual'':

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19445

I wonder what he would have thought of this, and how many other useful representations / arrangements there are of the periodic table.

Nice to see I'm not the only one who remembers this. Consider though that they confirmed the information it out from the electron shells and atomic weights since they had already found reasonable guesses for number symbols and "months", the fact that it was arranged as a table was just one of the clues used to decipher it.

(The concept of a periodic table as Rosetta Stone was reused in a Stargate episode and probably elsewhere, but Omnilingual is the oldest one I know of.)

Re:There goes ``Omnilingual'' (maybe?)

[FatLittleMonkey]

I wonder what he would have thought of this, and how many other useful representations / arrangements there are of the periodic table.

His Martian table of elements wasn't exactly Mendeleevian. Two columns, forty six elements in each. So I don't think Piper'd be shocked. The characters already knew they were in the chem department because of a Bohr representation of a Uranium atom. I suspect, given their knowledge of page numbers and number-names (ie, 9 and nine), chemists would have eventually figured out any "table" of elements, even if it was a spiral or some other form. It may not have happened on Mars, though.

(The moral of the story was that studying extinct alien civilisations needs physicists and chemists, not just traditional archaeologists and linguists, since the only possible Rosetta Stone is nature.)

Re:It may work, but is it practical?

[Anonymous Coward]

it will be harder to print and put on the walls of our chemistry rooms.

But totally awesome to put on our spiral staircases.

Needs better /. editing

[Sowelu]

Foreign language submissions are all well and good, but shouldn't our esteemed editors be editing the submitted English into grammatical English (or paraphrasing it)?

Re:Needs better /. editing

[sconeu]

Your naivete is so charming.

Re:Needs better /. editing

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't even do that when the original submission is in English. If anything, Slashdot editors make it worse.

Slashdotted

[Megane]

Since the original is unavailable, you might want to google for unusual periodic table to see other interesting variations of the periodic table of the elements.

Re:Slashdotted

[robogun]

The Wikipedia article on the topic.

Alternate Periodic Tables

[Comboman]

I wonder ... how many other useful representations / arrangements there are of the periodic table.

A surprisingly large variety actually.

Ease of use

[sjbe]

This is the only valid argument for changing an existing and well-understood model when there's no new evidence to consider.

There is one more possible reason which is if it makes the information somehow more comprehensible or easier to work with to someone appropriately trained. I'm not a chemist so I can't really speak to the difficulty or failings of the current periodic table versus this proposed one. However if this proposed version is somehow easier to work with and gives equivalent (or better) results then that could be a credible reason to use it. If it saves time or mental horsepower then that could be a good reason to use it.

Re:Ease of use

[CastrTroy]

Different periodic tables might be better for different uses. Maybe one would be good for PhD's while others would be good for high school students who don't really intend on studying chemistry after high school or their bachelor's degree. Maybe a different periodic table would suit organic chemistry better. I doubt there's one periodic table that works best for all of chemistry, just as there isn't one programming language or IDE that works best for all types of programming.

Anyway

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Oh for god's sake. Even the original in Portuguese is slashdotted.

Hmm

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

I decry the validity of this new proposal because they could not even predict the Slashdot effect, in any language.

Well, not the first...

[AliasMarlowe]

I'll just leave this here. Some of them also allow predictions of undiscovered elements. At present, I can't say whether the new form differs from previous circular or spiral forms in any significant way, because its site has evidently been slashdotted.

Change is bad. Tom Lehrer

[Ukab the Great]

will have to revise his elements song. And you'll now have to sing it in rounds.

Re:Sounds awesome!

[RenderSeven]

On the plus side, I know little enough about the physics that the original Portugese is no less baffling than the translation would be if it weren't slashdotted.

Re:Brazilians have more pressing matters

[gmuslera]

American have even more urgent matters like this, but as everyone pretend that nothing is happening, better focus in new periodic tables.

Iron-y coincidence?

[thatseattleguy]

One interesting feature of the table is the resulting position of iron(Fe) - it serves as the single, pivotal point that "links" the two halves of the table and spiral together.

And, of course, iron is at the bottom of the binding energy curve - it can't be fissioned or fusioned to provide net energy output.

My physics education is too far in the distant past to discern if these two things are just a coincidence - or significant feature resulting from the inherent structure of the table.

Interesting, but I don't get it

[Giant Electronic Bra]

I've seen various 'periodic tables' over the years (I have a chem degree), but this one just doesn't do anything for me. What exactly are the extra relationships being depicted here? In what sense is He for instance intermediate in properties between H and Li (which are vastly more similar to each other chemically than either one is to He and in the standard periodic table this is apparent). Nor do I see any special close affinity between say C and Al, yet they are adjacent in this table (in a standard periodic table these elements are fairly close but not adjacent).

I don't even understand the choice of positions of elements on this table. It seems in some degree arbitrary. Why a spiral? Why this PARTICULAR spiral arrangement? I really must be missing something here....

Re:Interesting, but I don't get it

[countach]

Yes exactly. This table might be brilliant, but we aren't told exactly what the extra relationships are that are modelled. If some label could be applied to the various rows to tell us what value the table is giving us, it might make sense.

Re:Interesting, but I don't get it

[Giant Electronic Bra]

Yeah, the article just blathers on about how wonderful the hexagonal arrangement and spiral layout are, etc. Maybe there's some significance, but if the OP wants us to know about it he should write up a better description, lol.

Re:English, motherfucker do you speak it!?

[EmagGeek]

El perro, el perro, es mi corazon
El gato, el gato, el gato no es bueno

Cilantro es cantante, cilantro es muy famoso
Cilantro es el hombre con el queso del diablo.

The Disappearing Spoon

[Snotnose]

I just finished this book (http://www.amazon.com/Disappearing-Spoon-Madness-Periodic-Elements/dp/0316051632/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1371593805&sr=1-1&keywords=disappearing+spoon), it's pretty entertaining for chemistry and sciency types.

It's neither periodic nor a table

[shadowofwind]

But five out of six bees think it's a big improvement.

Hydrogen is too different from anything else

[Arrepiadd]

Hydrogen behaves in odd ways and it's hard to place it in a specific place that fits all "needs". In some ways hydrogen behaves like halogens. Among other reasons because it can only establish one bond, like other halogens (since it's highest occupied orbital [which, coincidentally, is the only one] is missing one electron). Of course, since it's highest occupied orbital only has one electron, it fits nicely in the first column of the periodic table, where all elements have only one electron in their highest occupied s orbital. But all the elements on column 1 are metals and they readily react with water, which the hydrogen molecule doesn't. So, from that perspective H cannot be an element of group 1.

It's Portrait Oriented!!!

[SomeoneGotMyNick]

I kept telling ThinkGeek, "I only have a shower stall, you insensitive clods!!!" and that their landscape oriented periodic table shower curtain doesn't fit correctly.

Now I can get a new style periodic table that fits a shower stall that's taller than it is wide!