Chemistry lessons: a thing of beauty is a joy forever
When I was in junior high school there was a huge 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 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 (actually, it taught many lessons, although 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 (via Pajamas Media), 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:
If you follow the link to the poster at its source, you can click on parts of it to enlarge them and see more of the detail. 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.’
Go here, now! — half a huge hint:
Tom
If that wasn’t good enough, here it is in FLASH.
With appreciations to neo for a fine post.
Ah, a wonderful illustration of the sublime beauty of partial differential equations 😉
Here’s some beauty (in my eyes, anyway).
This hangs in my kitchen…
http://www.pugsly.com/10-FT4.jpg
I couldn’t help noticing the column which contained the “precious metals”: copper (29), silver (47), and gold (79). The next one is Uuu (111) but I can’t make out the name.
Can anyone tell me about that one? Is it more valuable than gold? If so, why haven’t I heard of it? Where can I get some?
And do I want it anywhere near me? 🙂
Here’s an interesting article on Dmitri Mendeleev, the primary creator of the periodic table – he and his mother supposedly walked all of 1,000 miles to Moscow for young Mendeleev to attend a university.
http://tinyurl.com/s97sj
DU
“Can anyone tell me about that one?”
It’s a place holder, doesn’t exist
“Is it more valuable than gold?”
If you have some, most definatly. Any atom that is known had a name. Those are shown to be possible, where they would lie on the element table, but no one knows how to produce them though experiments and math show they *should* be able to be produced (ain’t science fun?).
“Where can I get some?”
It will be man made if we could ever produce it. Many of the heavier elements only exist in man made environments, sometimes for only micro to pico seconds in strange places like particle accelerators after two particles collided (to note, this also tends to produce anti-matter so it’s not something you will get a ring made of anytime soon).
I can always show my major geekiness in two ways. One is a “deputy” card the gave us in fith grade (the police had some sort of fair where we got them) and a plastic periodic table of elements from high school chemistry still in my wallet (I’m 32). The amusing thing is that I use it from time to time – never can remember which are alkalai metals and such.
A local guy (Champaign, IL) built a periodic table box, with vials containing a sample (if viable) of the elements. We have a copy of it at work.
Thank goodness for quantized angular momentum.
What an awesome Periodic Table. Way better than the sterile yellowed mass of texts and lines I was subjected to in school.
——
Strcpy’s correct, many elements above atomic weight 90 are completely unstable, and above 92 are completely man made, only found in nuclear reactors for exceedingly tiny portions of a second.
I don’t know if you’d ever make any money off of actually producing that element – I’m unaware of any uses at all, practical or not, for such incredibly heavy elements – but I think you can claim the honor of naming it after someone. For whatever that’s worth.
ElMondoHummus:
Practical Use???
Element #95 – Americium – is used in fire/smoke detectors.
The half lives of artifical (man made) elements decrease as the atomic number (number of protons in the nucleus) goes up. Elements with number of prtons above 100 are in existence for lifetimes on the order of milli- or micro- seconds.
Plutonium (# protons = 94) is long lived…which is why atomic weapons have a nice long shelf life.
But this is long enough for some of their properties to be measured…
And now I return to writing chemistry lessons. About atomic strucutre, believe it or not.
Since The Husband’s a chemist, I gave him a framed periodic table of the vegetables.
He likes it!
“I don’t know if you’d ever make any money off of actually producing that element – I’m unaware of any uses at all, practical or not, for such incredibly heavy elements”
As said above, many of the really heavy elements are used as things such as neutron sources or as medical isotopes. In (the few) stable forms they are also incredibly dense and can be used for armor, shielding, or munitions. These can be worth quite a bit (I know the US govt spends several hundred million a year on it’s supply of Californium due to it’s usefullness in creating medical isotopes – I knew some of the people involved with that).
Of course, with the unknown elements we have no idea if they would be useful. For all we know those elements may be more revolutionary than anything known to man – then they may be worthless or even so dangerous that we will never make anymore than the very first time.
However, even if this were not the case I am sure it would be valuable just for study. If you had some previously unknown element in your posession I can assure you that you could make money. It may be worthless to mass produce or make as a ring, but that is a different question.
Heh, I also bet you could get a bundle from e-baying the name of the new element too 🙂
H Beam Piper’s short story Omnilingual is built on the premise that the universality of the periodic table would make it a Rosetta Stone for alien languages, and happens to be a fun read if you can find it.
rick,
Here’s an article on your mystery metal.
It’s now called Roentgenium. They synthesized it in 1994. Apparently it would be quite a bit like gold if it weren’t for that fact that its maximum half-life is 3.6 seconds.
If one seeks some philosophy lesson from the table, it can be the following: stability is the reason for existence. Combinatorics can provide us with a huge number of combinations, but most of them are not viable. And laws of stability often create some system, they are not random or opportunist. In biology this concept is known as nomogenesis, it governs variability of life forms and is dual and complementary to Darwinism. Really, it refutes Darwinism as it is taught in Western universities.