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Home » Making the acquaintance of the Periodic Table

Making the acquaintance of the Periodic Table

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a slightly revised repeat of a previous post – and today’s attempt to get away from politics.]

When I was in junior high school, there was a large poster of the Periodic Table of the Elements that hung in the science classroom in front of a little-used blackboard spanning the right side of the room, next to where I sat.

I’m not sure whether anybody in the junior high ever learned what the chart was about—we certainly didn’t. But it was a grim reminder of what awaited us in high school, when we’d be required to take Chemistry and Physics and Geometry and Trigonometry and a bunch of other subjects that sounded Hard, and sounded like An Awful Lot of Work.

I wasn’t looking forward to the experience. In my more bored moments in class (and I had quite a few of them) I would glance at that chart on the wall and idly ponder its arcane mysteries. It looked like a more old-fashioned and slightly yellowing version of this:

That chart was the sort of thing that made me nearly sick to my stomach whenever I looked at it, something like slide rules and drawings of the innards of the internal combustion engine, and the long rows of monotonous monochromatic law books in my father’s office.

But then time passed—as time often does—and I found myself a junior in high school, sitting in chemistry class and finally and reluctantly about to penetrate the secrets of the Periodic Table. The teacher, a small, elderly (oh, he must have been at least fifty), enthusiastic, spry man, explained it to us.

I sat awestruck as I took in what he was saying. That chart may have looked boring, but it demonstrated something so absolutely astounding that I could hardly believe it was true. The world of the elements at the atomic level was spectacularly orderly, with such grandeur, power, and rightness that I could only think of one term for it, and that was “beautiful.”

I did very well in chemistry, and even thought of majoring in it in college, although in the end I stuck to psychology and anthropology. But I never forgot the lesson of the Periodic Table – although actually, it taught many lessons, and some of them I did forget. But the one I remembered most was that appearances can be deceptive, and that what lies beneath a bland and stark exterior can be a world of magic.

And now I’ve finally discovered a Periodic Table worth its salt—or, rather, its sodium chloride. Take a look at this, a Periodic Table nearly as lovely as the elemental wonders it illustrates (click on the photo to enlarge):

And then you might say with Keats:

When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

I’m not sure it’s all ye need to know. But I know that the Periodic Table became beautiful to me.

Comments

Making the acquaintance of the Periodic Table — 58 Comments

  1. Landlord neo writes of her “teacher, a small, elderly (oh, he must have been at least fifty), enthusiastic, spry man . . . .”

    It reminds me of my high school chemistry teacher, who fits that description pretty nicely. He had one unusual talent (in addition to being a very good teacher):

    When he would write on the blackboard [they were black in those days; later they turned to green, but I digress], he would start in the center of the board (two adjacent boards, actually) and, facing away from the class, because he was busy writing, he would begin writing left-handed on the left-hand side of the multi-board. Without moving, he would continue writing his notes, right-handed now, on the right-hand side of the multi-board.

    And that’s my story. Back to politics now . . . NOT!!

  2. Definitely off topic: we found out that we have twin grandchildren on the way, daughter in law of the youngest son is pregnant at 41. A happy surprise for all in the family.

    BTW, enjoyed the click on periodic table. 😉

  5. Isn’t it lovely when a teacher manages to infuse enthusiasm in a student? Explaining the purpose of learning a subject is often a good start.

    Keats may not instruct man kind as to all we need to know; but, he certainly offers a valid philosophical base for educators. An educator who does not convey the idea that the search for truth, and the acceptance of truth once found, is of itself beautiful; and that absent truth real beauty does not exist, betrays the title. To our detriment, the concept has been widely rejected.

  6. I was blessed to have an extraordinary chemistry teacher: Steve Fannin. He had a gift for teaching and explaining the arcane mysteries of chemistry. He was also a borderline stand up comic and prankster. We had a lot of fun in that class. My sophomore year of high school: 1992-1993.

  8. I was once asked to tutor a university student who was assigned a research paper on the development of the periodic table. At first, I thought that the topic was too simple for a student majoring in Chemistry, but I quickly found out how wrong I was. It’s a fascinating episode in the history of science.

  10. I was a decent student when I took chemistry and physics in high school but the actual wonderment of the neutron and electrons only dawned on me when I was in my 40’s and really regained my faith taking some adult classes in anatomy and physiology and looking at how all of that little stuff works completed my return to a worshiping believing Christian. How could all of that stuff work without a Creator and I recognize all sorts of other people have their own way of recognizing that Creator, I would not say they are wrong either. There is more to this world and universe than we can ever know.

  12. Innards, slide rules and charts.

    That’s what made High School great, for me!

  13. Neo:

    I have enjoyed reading your blog postings beginning with your discussion of your political “enlightenment” through many things political along with some arts and dance thrown in.

    Thanks for sharing about the Periodic Table. I have been on the other side -being a teacher of middle and high school science students attempting to share the orderliness of the periodic table with students as they discover by building their own PT from atomic numbers, electron configurations, etc.

    You said, “The world of the elements at the atomic level was spectacularly orderly, with such grandeur, power, and rightness that I could only think of one term for it, and that was “beautiful.”

    It is amazing the order that is found in the Universe for something that, to some people, just happened.

    Your writing there and “Old Texan” reminded me of a scriptural reference from the Christian book of Romans 1: 19-20 (AMPLIFIED): 19 because that which is known about God is evident within them [in their inner consciousness], for God made it evident to them. 20 For ever since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through His workmanship [all His creation, the wonderful things that He has made],so that they [who fail to believe and trust in Him] are without excuse and without defense.

  14. That picture is a screen shot from an iPad app of the same name. Creator made a packet either at Microsoft or in Silicon Valley (can’t recall) and therefore had the time and means to personally collect all the samples of the elements and make VR captures of them.

    Somewhere read his tale of hunting down all these element samples (some of which are *very* not human-friendly to handle) for his collection. Interesting stuff!

    Neo has a deft touch with the Keats-o-matic. Chapman’s Homer would have been over-egging the pudding.

  15. There is a classic science fiction story in which the universality of the Periodic Table is a major plot point: ‘Omnilingual,’ by H. Beam Piper (public domain).

  16. Hooray, parker! Yeah, Iowa!

    It kind of disappoints me that in my career in pharma, I’ve busied myself with pretty much only five elements almost all the time: C, N, O, S and H. Sure, things like Na, Ca and K have made occasional appearances, but for the most part it’s been those five.

  17. Aitch HeLi BeB C NOF NeNa MgAl SiPS ClArKCa.
    Say it quickly. I learned this acronym for the first 20 elements of the Periodic Table during Chemistry class. It’s never left me.

  18. “Oliver Sacks used to count his age in terms of elements in the Periodic Table, and had friends who gifted him elements on birthdays, like Thallium(81) for his 81st Birthday.“
    Here’s more: “The love of chemistry and the periodic table was an absolute constant with me from an early age,” Sacks said. “I loved the elements since I was 10 or 11. I have a periodic table bedspread on my bed. I have shopping bags with periodic tables. I have many periodic tables T-shirts and I have some periodic table socks.”

  19. When I saw the title of this post, I pessimistically assumed the scientific community had just caved to rename a bunch of the elements because so many were either named after white racists or failed to recognize all the prominent African chemists that there have been through the years.

  20. I’ve busied myself with pretty much only five elements almost all the time: C, N, O, S and H. Sure, things like Na, Ca and K have made occasional appearances, but for the most part it’s been those five.

    Professionally, this was true for me to as a medicinal chemist, but I had the fortune to get my Ph.D. in organometallic chemistry, so I used broad range of the transition metals, both as catalysts and actual organometallic complexes. At one time or another, I synthesized molecules and complexes that contained at least one example of the following elements.

    Hydrogen, boron, nitrogen, carbon, oxygen, fluorine, sodium, magnesium, aluminum, silicon, phosphorus, sulfur, chlorine, potassium, titanium, chromium, iron, nickel, copper, zinc, bromine, zirconium, molybdenum (my entire postdoc was devoted to moly complexes), ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, silver, tin, iodine, cesium, iridium, platinum, mercury, lead, cerium, and europium.

    I love explaining the periodic table to anyone who finds the subject daunting. It really is a beautiful thing to understand.

  21. There are 3339 stable or radioactive nuclides known. These include isotopes(same proton number, different neutron number) and nuclei of same mass with different proton numbers. These are the blocks and legos that make up the bricks in the universe. If we keep shaking these, we sooner or later will shake together some cytidine, guanine, adenine and uracil or thymidine, and ATP, etc. We have found so far and surprisingly about 4000 exoplanets in the Milky way. There are an estimated 11 billion to 40 billion total planets in the Milky Way. If we assume there are 10^11 galaxies in the universe, this implies there are @10^11×10^10 planets if the galaxies are approximately like ours. This is 10^21 planets we have to work with to find the number in the goldilocks zone. These are low estimates.
    Say one planet in a thousand is suitable for life as we know it and is in the goldilocks zone. This gives us 10^18 planets that are pretty much like ours in the right place around their stars. And, if we could examine all these planets, at any stage of their evolution, we might find some that have shaken and stirred these atomic legos blocks into life forms. In fact, the numbers are so large that we are certain to find life forms. In fact we are certain to find animals like us. And we are even certain to find animals like us that are about in our same stage of evolution. In fact we are certain to find animals like us that wear clothes and drive cars. In fact, because of onomatopoeia, we are certain to find animals like us that use a few of the same words that we use. . ..we can go on and on and assume our universe is a lot larger than the observable universe and has many more galaxies with many more stars per galaxy and many more planets per galaxy. If we keep extrapolating we can begin to see almost exact copies of ourselves, some individuals sitting at their desks writing in blogs just like this one.

    Screwing our brains to think large, up there on the way to infinity, gives us astonishing conclusions. (NB infinity is infinitely larger)

  23. The chemists of the 19th century accomplished an amazing feat in developing the periodic table. They found a structure through careful experimentation and observation. However, it took quantum mechanics to really show the beauty of the periodic table. All one needs to get the first two rows of the table is the simple, and not quite right, Bohr model and the Pauli Exclusion Principle. The Bohr model envisions the atom as a little solar system with the nucleus as the star and the electrons as planets in quantized orbits. Add electron spin and the PEP and the Periodic Table begins to form. As the atoms add more electrons the Bohr model breaks down as electrons start interacting with each other and we need to go to the full Schroedinger picture of QM to get the energies, etc correct. One of my pleasures as a teacher was taking physics majors on this journey from the simple Bohr model as sophomores and the surprise of starting to build the Periodic Table, to the beautiful complexity of the more complete picture as seniors taking their QM course.

  24. Neo
    I memorized that song [The Elements] when I was a child.

    Ironically, The Elements was the only Tom Lehrer song I didn’t memorize.
    When it’s fiesta time, in Akron Ojjjjjjhio…. (Ohhhhio…) (Spanish jjjjj)

  26. I’m sorry if it offends, but I do not think the table shown is beautiful, while at the same time, I see it as unusable. Of course, that is my opinion.

  28. When Xylo-boy was a sophmore in high school his chemistry teacher, Dr Bond 🙂 , offered the students a meal at the restaurant of their choice at the end of the school year if they could memorize the table. Nobody had ever been able to take him up on this. I offered my boy the equivalent of 100 USD or so if he could memorize the table. several days later he came to me and said it was memorized. I sat down next to him with a pencil and clean sheet of paper. In a short while he returned it to me 100% correct – no errors, no omissions – all symbols, atomic numbers and elements in their correct rows and columns. An amazing feat. I cannot recall if he took up Dr. Bonds offer. Next year Dr. Light was his Physics teacher.

  29. My high school chemistry class was one of the best. We started by memorizing the first 20 elements in order, then went on to acids/bases, chemical kinetics, computation of pH, gas law, Lewis notation, bonds, hybridized orbitals, etc. The teacher came out of industry and could tell some stories. What he taught has served me well ever since.

  30. When I was 14, I had religious education lessons at high school in the chemistry lab. I found the lessons to be less than inspiring, and I amused myself by memorizing the first 105 elements of the periodic table of which there was a large poster at the front of the class. I have not forgotten it, and it was useful 7 years later when I was taking my finals in physics.

  32. @Xylourgos, Dr. Bond! LOL! 🙂 (“The name is Bond… Covalent Bond.”) Who taught the bio class??

    Yancey, no vanadium? I used to proudly carry around a blue stain from synthesis of a vanadium carboxyl complex in college. Until one day, my mom washed the lab coat. Probably just as well, since the compound turned black eventually, it turned out, as the vanadium went from V(III) to V(V), I guess.

  33. Dnaxy: keep on shaking and making purines and pyrimidines. No big deal. Hooking them together in just the right sequence and forming a double helix, that’s a big deal. Who created the needed ligases?

    You say “This gives us 10^18 planets that are pretty much like ours in the right place around their stars. And, if we could examine all these planets, at any stage of their evolution, we might find some that have shaken and stirred these atomic legos blocks into life forms. In fact, the numbers are so large that we are certain to find life forms.”

    With such big numbers of intelligent life out there, why has there been zip evidence registered on our radiotelescopes these past ~70 years? “If we could examine all these planets”? That has been our best shot. It is painfully obvious that we cannot ever “examine all these planets”. It is up to them, ten to the eighteenth power in number, to prove, yes unequivocally prove, themselves to us! Hasn’t happened, has it?

    The silence is not deafening. It is telling us something else. Who or What created the elements? Who or What created the Big Bang?

    I suggest a read of “Undeniable”, by Douglas Axe, a biologist. And “Who Designed the Designer” by Augros, a philosopher.

  35. “The world of the elements at the atomic level was spectacularly orderly, with such grandeur, power, and rightness that I could only think of one term for it, and that was ‘beautiful.'”

    Neo…I would have thought your acquaintance with Genesis chapter 1 would have done the same. 😉

  36. The Goldilocks zone is an illusion. For many stars it results in planets that are tidally locked with their star. In our solar system Uranus got knocked on its side, and the “north” pole faces the sun for half the orbit, then the “south” pole faces the sun for the other half. When the earth was slammed by the Mars sized object that caused the moon, and our slight tilt, had the result had been like Uranus, we would have 6 months of light, and 6 months of dark. Being in the “Goldilocks” zone does not help.

    Venus has, in addition to being too close to the sun, a day longer than its year, 243 earth days. Imagine earth with 122 days of light and 122 days of dark. Again, being in the “Goldilocks zone does not help.

    I did a back of the envelope calculation of things that make multicellular intelligent life difficult or impossible. There is a good chance we are alone in the galaxy.

    The universe is dangerous. We orbit a long lived, very stable star. This is important. It took over 3 billion years for life to transform earth into a place we could breath, and protected from radiation. An even more improbable event is creation of multicellular life.

    An important factor: most stars are close to the center of the galaxy, where a black hole periodically blasts stars within 20,000 light years with killer radiation. Closer in are more supernovas with killer radiation within 100 light years. More gamma ray bursters. More stars that pass close by and send showers of comets to cause “deadly mountains on fire”, to crash into the sea. What if: instead of a dinosaur killer every 60 million years, one every 600 thousand years.

    These are just a few of the reasons that point to ours Earth a very sheltered place in the universe, that allowed we clay to become aware of God. He seems to desire relationship. Why us?

  37. Markie: “I’m sorry if it offends, but I do not think the table shown is beautiful, while at the same time, I see it as unusable.”

    I have had that chart version for a few years, and it is wonderful. In actuality, the elements are in 3D, and it is fantastic. On the back it has the information. For me, the visual 3D physical reality of the elements gives the story of the discovery of their periodicity and the vertical and horizontal structure of the table an even stronger sense of the profound.

    I get updates on the products the guy sells in my email, including bedspreads with the elements in bas relief, and other scientific toys and amusements.

    The only problem is that his name is Ted Wolfram, but when I looked it up it turns out it is a guy named Theodore Gray, who somehow used to be associated with Wolfram, who has a wide selection of delights. So go to theodoregray.com for some interesting possibilities.

  38. parker,

    Congratulations! As the father of twins, tell your son and daughter in law that they are about to take one heck of roller coaster ride. Buckle up!

    But its a great ride!

  40. I started high school chemistry classes during the 1964 presidential campaign.
    One of our neighbors put a bumper sticker in his car that read “AuH2O” for president. I thought it was so clever! 🙂

  41. Even if some event is extremely and incredibly unlikely, say a planet is favorably situated for life once in one trillion planetary systems, once in 10^12, then that event becomes a near certainty when 10^21 systems are examined, for we then have 10^8 such examples that we find in the observable universe. No matter how rare an event, it becomes almost a certainty with a large number of trials. If something is not forbidden by the laws of physics, it becomes a certainty. There are animals who are identical to people arguing this same issue right now, somewhere else in the universe.

  42. Thank you Neo for an interesting look at a previously very dull subject for me. And thank you Minta Marie Morze for theodoregray.com Those engine models and combination lock gifs. Just wow.

  43. Dnaxy,
    you think life is the result of fun at the galaxy’s Las Vegas.
    But numbers do not make it so, no matter how well you count the cards.
    Even Watson, co-discoverer of DNA, did not think so.

  45. “Is there in truth no beauty?” would seem to be answered in the affirmative.

    “The Bohr model envisions the atom as a little solar system with the nucleus as the star and the electrons as planets in quantized orbits.” – physicsguy

    I miss those charts. So easy to visualize the little atoms. QM is more like visualizing something from The Twilight Zone.
    The only problem I have with Lehrer’s song is that the elements are not in order, so its usefulness is limited to amazing the rubes.
    “New Math,” on the other hand, is a good introduction to either remedial subtraction or alternative bases, and I sometimes sang it to my Introduction to Computer classes (back in the Dark Ages), although there was always some poor soul who begged me to slow down so he could take notes.
    I worked as a coder once where we didn’t have an assembler for converting instruction mnemonics and just wrote everything straight out in octal.
    Good times.

    *The Star Trek episode title is from a poem by the 17th century English poet and clergyman George Herbert, from his poem “Jordan (I)”, line 2: “Who says that fictions only and false hair/ Become a verse? Is there in truth no beauty?”

    More minutia than even a Trekker needs to know –
    https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Is_There_in_Truth_No_Beauty%3F_(episode)

  46. It’s a good and beautiful table.
    But as shown, it is not complete.

    Clue: I prefer to code in ‘C’….

    It’s also my favourite windup for school science teachers.
    Teacher: “Everything is made up from elements in this table”
    Me: So what is a neutron star made from?”
    Teacher:” Well, neutrons obviously”
    Me: That would be element…..?”

    Start counting from zero! 🙂

  47. Cicero:
    Thank you for the info on Undeniable”, by Douglas Axe and “Who Designed the Designer” by Augros. In the immense universe of writings, my Hubble had not focused in on either of these stellar events.

  48. Presbypoet:

    You wrote “These are just a few of the reasons that point to … Earth a very sheltered place in the universe, that allowed we clay to become aware of God. He seems to desire relationship. Why us?”

    This reminds me of what an inspired ancient sage wrote; “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him?”

  49. Hmmm, they’ve added some elements since I took chemistry. My high-school chart ended with lawrencium, I think. 103? Of course, as I tell my son, in those days cell phones were the size of a breadbox and were made of stone and wood. And then he asks what a breadbox is.

  51. How much fun is it to wax and wane on the days of school, unfettered by agenda-oriented lessons infused with political skews and messaging.
    Today, school districts are injecting major changes in curriculums with a radical book titled, “White Fragility”. An utterly pathetic effort to politicize and indoctrinate young minds with a whole new definition of, The Table of Elements.
    This new one is about placing first the element of, GUILT, on white people. And PRIVILEGE. On and on it goes. Science, not so long ago, was the last bastion of unadulterated, unpolluted, no nonsense lessons. GONE ARE THOSE DAYS.
    Global Warming ended this. How? With research scientists vying for a limited pool of government funding of research projects. Scientists have been faced with selling their souls, compromising their principled positions, turning away from empirical data, to gain research dollars with many “strings” attached. What a tragic state our education system is in today. And it is entirely a consequence of the radicals who’ve taken it over. Going all the way back to terrorists, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, just two examples of radicals who gained access to inside those rooms where establishing and controlling curriculums and education policies take place. They’ve heavily influenced the state mandated education policies and system in Illinois ever since. Other states have been similarly affected by still more radical ideologies.

  52. I found this strange that neither in Neo post nor in comments below is never mentioned the actual inventor of the Table, Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev. In Russia the Table is usualy refered to as Mendeleev’s Table, or Mendeleev’s Periodic Law.

  53. Sergey
    I found this strange that neither in Neo post nor in comments below is never mentioned the actual inventor of the Table, Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev. In Russia the Table is usualy refered to as Mendeleev’s Table, or Mendeleev’s Periodic Law.

    Good point. On occasion I see a posting that claims that Stalin transformed a “backwards, primitive” country into the 20th century. My reply is that while Tsarist Russia may have had a lot of illiterates, it also had a high level of culture. In addition to pointing out world-class music and literature, I point out Mendeleev’s creating the Periodic Table. And of course, also Lobachevsky. (Not to mention engineers like Sikorsky or Timoshenko- whose fleeing the Revo enriched the Wrst.)

  54. Sergey:

    At the time, we definitely learned about Mendeleev. But there wasn’t a big emphasis on it.

  55. “…a book…”

    Of whose short stories and vignettes the one called “Iron” (the stories are named after elements; Levi himself was a trained chemist) has got to be among the most extraordinary short stories ever written, as Levi describes a very close friendship that may well have helped him survive Auschwitz.

    (Caveat: OMMV)

  57. Since I was a kid infatuated with science, I was often given science-oriented gifts. One of them was a card game called Elemento:

    https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co457866/elemento-boxed-educational-chemistry-game-base-games-chemistry

    No one would play Elemento with me but I enjoyed reading the Elemento cards and looking at the accompanying Periodic Table chart. It gave me a heads-up on that bit of magic and order in the science world plus weird elements like ytterbium.

    It’s worth clicking on the link above for the game box cover showing 1960 children intent on learning through an educational game. Pure Lileks bait!

    It was a simpler world.

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