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

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: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: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.

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.

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: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.)

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....