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.

[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.

[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]

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

[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).

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.

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.

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.

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)?

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.

Alternate Periodic Tables

[Comboman]

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

A surprisingly large variety actually.

Anyway

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

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

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.

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.

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....

It's neither periodic nor a table

[shadowofwind]

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