I thought nerds were supposed to be at the spearhead of progress or something, but on the Periodic Table they sound more conservative than many 90-year-olds.
People have been making spiral versions for a hundred and forty years - even before Mendeleev - for the good reason that the sequence of elements is a continuum, and you can only make it into a table by chopping it into bits and losing many of the connections between neighbours. For example sodium seems 'opposite' fluorine when they are almost side by side.
The point of a chart of all the elements is to show where they lie in relation to each other, not to convey detailed information on individual elements; that is much better done by a page in a book or on a screen.
As for the galactic background, how else to say without words that the world of the unimaginably vast and the world of the utterly tiny are part of one reality? If that means using a lot of black ink, doesn't that symbolize the fact that 'solid' matter is in fact mostly the emptiness inside and between atoms and inside and between galaxies?
As for saying that Stewart 'ripped off' Edgar Longman's 1951 mural (which was the first and until now the only elliptical periodic chart), that's the opposite of the truth: he has reminded the world of its existence and restored the colourful beauty of the original.
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I thought nerds were supposed to be at the spearhead of progress or something, but on the Periodic Table they sound more conservative than many 90-year-olds. People have been making spiral versions for a hundred and forty years - even before Mendeleev - for the good reason that the sequence of elements is a continuum, and you can only make it into a table by chopping it into bits and losing many of the connections between neighbours. For example sodium seems 'opposite' fluorine when they are almost side by side. The point of a chart of all the elements is to show where they lie in relation to each other, not to convey detailed information on individual elements; that is much better done by a page in a book or on a screen. As for the galactic background, how else to say without words that the world of the unimaginably vast and the world of the utterly tiny are part of one reality? If that means using a lot of black ink, doesn't that symbolize the fact that 'solid' matter is in fact mostly the emptiness inside and between atoms and inside and between galaxies? As for saying that Stewart 'ripped off' Edgar Longman's 1951 mural (which was the first and until now the only elliptical periodic chart), that's the opposite of the truth: he has reminded the world of its existence and restored the colourful beauty of the original.