I just want to mention that much activity is taking place recently concerning the best possible design for the time honored periodic table of the elements.

Here are just a couple of quotes on the table,


[The periodic table] is probably the most compact and meaningful compilation of knowledge that man has yet devised. The periodic table does for matter what the geological age table does for cosmic time. Its history is the story of man’s great conquests in the microcosmos [1].

----------Shapley, H. Of Stars and Men: The Human Response to an Expanding Universe; Beacon Press: Boston, MA, 1958; pp 38–39.


“Perhaps the most recognizable icon in all of science is the periodic table of elements. This chart has become our model for how atoms and molecules arrange themselves to create matter as we know it. How the world is organized on the most minute level. Throughout history the periodic table has changed. Newly discovered elements have been added to it and other elements have been disproved and either modified or removed. In this way the periodic table acts like a store of the history of chemistry, a template for current developments and a basis for the future of the chemical sciences…a map of the world’s most basic building blocks.”

Robert Hicks, episode 1 of Distillations from Chemical Heritage series.
http://distillations.chemheritage.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/episode1final.mp3

The Periodic Table is nature’s Rosetta stone. To the uninitiated, it’s just 100-plus numbered boxes, each containing one or two letters, arranged with an odd, skewed symmetry. To chemists, however, the periodic table reveals the organizing principles of matter, which is to say, the organizing principles of chemistry. At a fundamental level, all of chemistry is contained in the periodic table.
That’s not to say, of course, that all of chemistry is obvious from the periodic table. Far from it. But the structure of the table reflects the electronic structure of the elements, and hence their chemical properties and behavior. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to say that all of chemistry starts with the periodic table.
----------Rudy Baum, C&EN Special Issue on Elements.

The number of periodic tables that have been published numbers an amazing 1000 or more, including many new ones on the Internet. See for example, Mark Leach's compilation at his metasynthesis website.

But recently there has been a positive explosion of activity with people debating whether the periodic table would look better in 3 or even a higher number of dimensions.

To be continued,

Eric Scerri
author of The Periodic Table, Its Story and Its Significance,
Oxford Univertsity Press, 2007.