Boring answer, did you say? AU CONTRAIRE, MON PETIT BERYLLIUM ATOM.
Of all the charts and tables and organizational tools for keeping information straight that mankind has invented, none is more impressive or more inspired than the Periodic Table of the Elements.
You might think of it as some tool of the devil that you had to memorize or study, and of which you have no fond memories. But the Table? IS AMAZING. The table is genius. The table is a work of inspired predictive power that boggles the mind.
Why is the Table so cool? Well, for a number of reasons.
As you may know, the Table was devised in 1869 by a scientist named Dmitry Mendeleev. At the time, scientists were trying to find ways to order the elements. Mostly they were trying to use atomic mass to put them in order. That didn’t really work. Mendeleev’s amazing insight (and it was amazing…I can’t imagine how he thought of it, it was pretty counterintuitive) was to group the elements in rows and columns based solely on his empirical observations of recurring chemical properties like melting points, bonding affinities, electronegativity, etc. These properties seemed to cluster and group the elements in ways that Mendeleev noticed and used for his table.
Cool as that is, it didn’t stop there. It became clear to Mendeleev that there were holes in the table where he suspected that other elements existed. And he was right. The holes in the table pointed the way for chemists to discover the missing elements. So the Table not only organized the existing elements, it actually predicted and helped discover elements that were not known at the time.
But there’s still more coolness to come. In 1869 no one had the first damned clue about atomic structure. Orbitals, subshells, electrons…it was all unknown. But as our understanding of atomic structure became more sophisticated, it became clear that Mendeleev’s table was actually organized based on atomic structure. Each new row (they’re called periods in the table) represents a new energy level. As you go left to right across the groups (what the columns are called in the table), you’re filling up each subshell with electrons until when you get to the far right, the noble gases, the level is filled and you jump up to the next period and the next energy level.
So Mendeleev, having no knowledge of subatomic structure and using purely observations of the elements’ physical characteristics, designed a table that actually revealed the way atoms are put together.
I find that pretty damned amazing.
Incidentally if you like this answer and want to reblog it, I c&p’d it from a post I wrote about the table ages ago. That one isn’t an Ask so it might be nicer to reblog.
