Periodicity

In the early nineties, when CERN first threw the World Wide Web open for everyone, some of the happiest people on the planet must have been chemists. They now had a neat little way to represent their beloved Period Table (PT). With hyperlinks, they could finally display all the important data about each element without being constrained by those little boxes. So, they set about populating the web with hundreds of these tables, improving them diligently as the technology improved.

Some of these online periodic tables are beautiful. See this Interactive Periodic Table, by Michael Dayah, which is clearly the best functionally. Read the 'about' page to understand how to work it. Or this more artsy one, from the Royal Society of Chemistry. Both came to me via Craig Stoltz's blog, 'Web 2.0h...really?'. I thought just these two exciting enough to warrant a post.

And then, I spoke to my friend Vinoo Samuel, and he explained the weakness chemists have for online periodic tables. I searched, and I found PTs in 'spectroscopic' colors and in spiral and circular shapes. Also, some really bizarre ones, with their elements linked to comic books where they were mentioned (Krypton - Superman - Krypton Chronicles,Volume 1, Number 1, September, 1981, cover), or to science fiction stories (the first deliveries of asteroidal cobalt were flown down to the north central Pacific Ocean in the form of lifting bodies in the year 2116...). And of course, there are the spoofs, such as this 'Creationist/State of Kansas' PT.

Offline, too, there has been some truly amazing efforts to ensure that the Periodic Table is never out of sight. Theodore Gray could never make the mistake that Time.com made (an index without an index, see my previous post). As he observes with some indignation, "In the well over a century since its invention by Dr. Mendeleev, the world has consistently failed to notice the word "Table" clearly contained in the name "Periodic Table", and has insisted in printing it on paper, hanging it on the wall, putting it in the back of chemistry textbooks, and generally doing all kinds of things with it that having nothing to do with being a table.". So of course, he created a Periodic Table that was - a real table! Chemists, I assume, were also behind this PT inspired song by Tom Lehrer.

And yes, there are the dangers of overdoing this stuff, especially if the people involved are not really chemists, as this complaint about an error riddled Periodic Table shower curtain proves.

Mendeleev would be proud.


Thanks to Ron Rinehart for leading me to most of these tables.