XKCD 3242: The Aperiodic Table of the Elements

 

Source: XKCD.com

I want this on my walls.

Hey, students, if you happen to have access to a large-format printer and can turn this image (the highest-res version I can find) into a vector file so it won't lose resolution when it's blown up, I want this on my walls.

See, it's funny (and awesome) because it shows the periodic table in an aperiodic arrangement.

That's funny to us chemistry folks.

The Periodic Table: Every Year

The discovery of the periodic law and subsequent creation and refinement of the periodic table stands beside the discovery of atoms as the be all and end all of chemistry in my eyes. 

Realizing that the material of our world corresponds to an underlying organizational principle and being able to - even if bit by bit - understand that principle is absolutely stunning to me.

Today's video looks at how what we think of as the modern periodic table came to be, from initially un-organized list of elements through to a quantum-mechanical-model-based periodic table.

Some of the changes come and go fairly quickly in the video, so be ready to pause and review the notes as the video plays.

Have We Found All The Elements?

This video surveys the work being done to create superheavy elements - from the Glenn Seaborg era through today. It's a good start toward understanding how new elements are created, though I would also recommend the book Superheavy - a copy of which I have on my shelves at school.

Put the periodic table in order - game

Source - YouTube video that has nothing
to do with the linked game

Sorry about yesterday's downer.

Try something fun and see if you can put the periodic table elements in order.

In this game - linked here - you're presented four element names, and you're supposed to click on the element that comes next on the periodic table.

For example, you'll start with four options and should choose Hydrogen because that's the first element on the table. From there, you just choose which of the four presented elements comes next.

I've only played it once, and I got knocked out at #62 - which made me kind of sad, I'll have to admit.

(And please don't buy the linked NFTs of the elements. NFTs are dumb.)

Periodic Success: The Hidden Beauty of the Periodic Table

The Royal Institution is a British group founded in 1799 and historically known for promoting and sharing scientific knowledge both within scientific circles and to the general public.

Since 1825 they have been putting on a series of Christmas lectures, many of the most recent of which have been recorded and posted on YouTube for us to see.

This video is the 2014 Christmas lecture going through a fair portion of the periodic table, telling stories about each one and helping us to understand a bit of their arrangement along the way.

MADucation 101 - Periodic Table

See, it's funny because it isn't remotely helpful in memorizing the elements on the periodic table.

This is from a 2010s animated comedy series simply called Mad and modeled after the comedy magazine of the same title.

Pee-riodic tables

The source of this image is a reddit post which included only the following explanation, "The bathroom in our science building has the periodic table in tiles".

I need more info. 

Where's the building? I assume it's a university science building, but there's no info provided.

Why do the metalloids seem to continue diagonally down from the table itself?

How old is the bathroom design? Nihonium (element 113) is the last element shown, and that was created in 2003 or 2004 with the discovery not adjudicated until 2015.

Why do the metalloids, halogens, and noble gases get to continue upward into the border design?

(Oh, and I can't take credit for the title joke. That came from the first comment on the reddit post.)

Can I lick it?

As Q-Tip once asked us...

Can I lick it?

Carl Wilhelm Scheele was likely the first person to isolate and prepare pure oxygen gas - though sadly for his historical reputation, not the first to publish his results.

Scheele also has gone down in history as a chemist known for tasting many of the chemicals that he experimented with in his laboratory.

So, can - or should - you lick the various elements? 

Some -the green ones - would probably be okay. Go ahead, for example, and lick a penny. It might be germy, but the metal itself isn't going to be a problem.

Other - the yellow ones - wouldn't be great, though they're not going to immediately kill you.

The red ones will likely immediately kill you or seriously harm you without much of a doubt.

The purple ones are radioactive and will kill you quickly.

So, can you lick it?

Maybe you can.

XKCD - Classical Periodic Table

Source - xkcd

See, the ancient Greeks believed that the world was composed of four elements: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water.

Here Randall Munroe has classified the modern elements on the periodic table into airs (elements that are gaseous at room temperature), waters (elements that are liquid at room temperature - Br and Hg), earth (solids at room temperature), and fire (the radioactive elements).

Not a lot to figure out there, though there is still an explainxkcd article on it.

Oh, and congratulations if you figured out why I posted this today.

Periodic Table...unstable bench

Source - Reddit

 The bench looks to be sturdily enough installed to me.

Though the table needs to be updated with the newest elements and the names for elements 110 and 111.

See, it's funny, though, because many - but not all - of the inner transition metals are radioactive meaning that their nuclei are unstable and will decay into more stable nuclei.

It's a joke that requires a little chemical knowledge but that falls apart if you have a lot of chemical knowledge.

Periodic Table Regions

Source - xkcd

There's a whole lot of jokes there - my favorite of which is the "You Are Here" triangle.

Enough jokes, in fact, that I'm going to let explainxkcd explain why it's funny.

Bigger Periodic Table - Periodic Table of Videos

This video is, admittedly, from 2011, so the "just published" article (read it for free here or here or a summary here) that's mentioned in the beginning is well past its newness by now.

At some point the periodic law isn't nearly as neat and clean as I teach my students, and I kind of love that fact. The fact that the edge cases of superheavy elements start to stress our understanding of the quantum mechanical model is fascinating and to me shows that there are more things in Heaven and Earth...

Source - wikipedia

Iron? Like iron?

Maybe maybe maybe
byu/Make-this-popular inmaybemaybemaybe

Yes, like iron.

I'm reminded of a question that one of my former students asked me quite a few years ago. We were two thirds of the way through the year of honors chemistry, and she said that she had been reading the ingredients on her toothpaste the day before and found sodium fluoride. She asked if that was the same sodium and the same fluorine that we'd been talking about all year.

"Yes," I said, "it's the same elements."

She followed up, "so, are there other things in my house that are made of elements?"

"Yeah," I answered, "everything in your house - and the house itself - is made of elements."

"Like, the same elements on the periodic table?"

Clearly, Sarah (or maybe it was Sara - it's been a while since this conversation) was one of the lucky ten thousand that day.

I've done the iron demonstration below in class before - though I used a blender to get even more iron particles out of the cereal by chopping it finer.

The video at the top, of course, also shows one of the lucky ten thousand today.

Great use of spaces on a building

 

Source - Reddit

I would 100% study in that building. 

It took me a while, but I was able to find that it's at UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) in Mexico City. Here's a Google Map link.

And I appreciate that it's up to date.

No idea what they'll do when the eighth period has to be populated, though.

Outdated Periodic Table

 

Source - XKCD

That would be so much easier to memorize.

As you can see if you look at the timeline of the Big Bang, that's about right that half an hour after the big bang, the only elements would have been hydrogen (75% of the universe's mass), helium (25%), lithium (trace amounts), and radioactive beryllium.

Of course, I'm not sure what this periodic table could've been printed on - or by whom, but that's not the point.

The rollover joke - Researchers claim to have synthesized six additional elements in the second row, temporarily named 'pentium' through 'unnilium'. - is also outstanding.

Reimagining the Periodic Table

This week's video recommendations comes to us from one of my current students, Nick, who has a refreshing curiosity about chemistry. He also recommended the taste test of the alkali metals video and says he's tasted some of those alkali salts - which is not to be recommended, folks.

I've seen the forms of the periodic table that are shown - cut and pasted really - in the above video and even have a Lego version of Giguere's 3d periodic table in my classroom.

I really like the above video because it shows that there's still more than one way to show the periodic law.

Periodic Table Changes

Source - XKCD

See, it's funny because the periodic table isn't the shape it is because of any sort of design sense. There are all sorts of details that would look or seem better if they were changed, but they can't be changed because they're based on properties, electron configurations, and property similarities - not on what would look neat.

See, the periodic table is appropriately periodic meaning there's a repeating pattern in its layout. In this case there's a repeating pattern in the properties of the elements when the elements are placed in order by their atomic number. Lithium is similar to sodium which is similar to potassium and on down with rubidium, cesium, and francium. With those similarities noticed, the elements were placed in columns with a new row (or period) starting every time those properties repeated.

It would be nice to see helium moved above beryllium, and there are some reasons why it maybe should be moved over there, but there are way more reasons why it belongs in column 18 with the noble gases.

Admittedly, changing the element symbols (iron = Fe but maybe should be I...silver = Ag but maybe should be Sv, and so on) is within the powers of a bunch of chemists if they really wanted to do it, but just moving the inner transition metals so they don't look dorky down at the bottom of the table isn't within the powers of those same chemists because it would require those elements to have different properties and different electron configurations. Those aren't things chemists have the power to change.

Maybe next week I'll rant about all the non-periodic periodic tables that I get shown in the course of my job.

Meet Dawn Shaughnessy - the real-life alchemist who expanded the periodic table

Dawn Shaughnessy - source llnl.gov

"The periodic table is chemistry's holy text."

I love that quote, the first line in an article from gizmodo.

The periodic table - I guess the discovery of the periodic law and subsequent creation of the periodic table - is the absolute ne plus ultra (yeah, I have a big lexicon, deal with it) of chemistry discoveries. That pattern - repeating properties of the elements when lined up by atomic number - has made the world, the elements that make up our everything utterly understandable and systematic rather than a random series of unconnected substances as they seemed to be before Mendeleev came along.

But Mendeleev's periodic table only included somewhere around 63 elements (his first had 63, his last versions had more than that).

Until William Ramsay came along and added the noble gasses, discovering four elements.

And Albert Ghiorso came along and - with the other scientists like Glenn Seaborg in his various labs - added in a dozen man-made elements.

The newest additions to the periodic table aren't necessarily the work of solo chemists toiling away in laboratories. They're the work of collaborative efforts between scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Labs (near San Francisco, CA), the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (in Dubna, Russia), and a few other specialized sites around the world.

One of the lead scientists, Dawn Shaughnessy, is the subject of the gizmodo article linked above (and here again). She and her team have been instrumental in discovering six elements, the last four of which only received names just three years ago. Plus her team donated a $5000 grant to Livermore High School's science department, which is pretty cool.

Oh, if you wanted to know how new elements are created, check out this video...



...or this one about the search for elements 119 and 120...

2019 Nobel - lithium-ion batteries

Source: XKCD

That's not really what the 2019 Nobel prize in chemistry went to, but it would be funny if it had.

Instead, the 2019 Nobel prize went to a trio of scientists who developed the technology for lithium-ion batteries.

Where does the periodic table end?

The totally honest truth is that the periodic table doesn't actually end.

I mean it stops for now, but it isn't finally finished because we keep making elements. The naturally-occurring elements stopped around 92 with uranium (having skipped technetium and promethium on that journey to uranium). Since then, we've only found the rest of the 118 (for now) elements via particle accelerator, bombarding naturally occurring elements with other naturally occurring elements.

Sam Kean - author of The Disappearing Spoon, a great chemistry book - goes through some of the details of the man-made elements here in sort of answering the question about 'where does the periodic table end?'

Though as Eric Scerri wrote a few years back...

It is simply not yet clear whether the principle that elements in the same column in the periodic table behave similarly remains valid for very heavy atoms. The question is of no great practical consequence, at least for the foreseeable future. The loss of predictive power in the superheavy realm will not affect the usefulness of the rest of the table. And the typical chemist will never get to play with any of the elements of highest atomic numbers: these elements' nuclei are all very unstable, which means that they decay into lighter elements instants after being created. 

Still, the question of special relativity's effect strikes at the very heart of chemistry as a discipline. If the periodic law does lose its power, then chemistry will be in a sense more reliant on physics, whereas a periodic law that holds up would mean the field maintains a certain level of independence. In the meantime, perhaps, Mendeleev's ghost should just kick back and marvel at the success of his favorite brainchild.