Shapeshifting: Proposal For a New Periodic Table of the Elements

First time accepted submitter ramorim writes "In honor of the Chemist Day, celebrated in Brazil on this day June 18, 2013, I publish a proposal for a new Periodic Table of Elements (Original, in Portugese) in a modular spiral-hexagonal model, with continuity and connectivity for all constituent units of the matter. This proposal indeed permits to extrapolate the hypothetical elements of the G-block and H-block in the same model."

Re:More missing elements, to to be discovered.

[gstoddart]

The logic of the table is that it predicts missing elements really well. Does this circular table do the same?

Did you even read the summary?

This proposal indeed permits to extrapolate the hypothetical elements of the G-block and H-block in the same model.

I realize nobody reads TFA, but it's a two sentence summary which says, yes, it does allow predicting hypothetical elements.

You could at least try.

Slashdotted

[Megane]

Since the original is unavailable, you might want to google for unusual periodic table [google.com] to see other interesting variations of the periodic table of the elements.

Alternate Periodic Tables

[Comboman]

I wonder ... how many other useful representations / arrangements there are of the periodic table.

A surprisingly large variety [wikipedia.org] actually.

Well, not the first...

[AliasMarlowe]

I'll just leave this here [wikipedia.org]. Some of them also allow predictions of undiscovered elements. At present, I can't say whether the new form differs from previous circular or spiral forms in any significant way, because its site has evidently been slashdotted.

Re:More missing elements, to to be discovered.

[Cyberax]

Clearly, you'd skipped chemistry lessons at school. Periodic table _is_ a model, it successfully predicted properties of new elements. The fact that it looks like a table is just a detail.

Re:More missing elements, to to be discovered.

[CTachyon]

The Periodic Table isn't a model, or at least not a functional model. It's a chart - a way to represent data.

It's more than a chart. A table is not just a way to represent data; a simple list of all items in random order can represent the data just as well as a table can. A table is a way to organize data -- by spotting patterns, identifying which patterns are most important, then arranging the items to highlight those patterns. By choosing which patterns are important, you are implicitly constructing a model of what the items in the table are.

The Mendeleev-derived periodic table has done quite nicely for us: it predicted the properties of many elements long before we actually isolated them, and it was doing so well before we understood that the patterns highlighted by the table (the table's implicit model) were ultimately caused by the arrangement of electrons into quantum-mechanical energy-level shells by way of Pauli exclusion, with the arrangement of elements in each row directly dependent on the quantized degrees of freedom in each shell's energy level (hence the 2*[1], 2*[1+3], 2*[1+3+5], 2*[1+3+5+7] pattern in the table's row widths). Think of the table as a quick first-order approximation to the deeper equations needed to compute the true physics, such as the energy of a filled d-orbital in the third electron shell. A more complex table with an extra dimension or two of symmetry might be able to capture more patterns, giving us a more detailed model that produces better, more subtle approximations than the Mendeleev-derived model can yield; yet that new model would still bypass the tough work of calculating how electrons actually behave when packed around a single nucleus. (Or perhaps we could capture some symmetry affecting how an atom forms molecular bonds, or a nucleon symmetry that gives better predictions of stability and half-life or that better captures why the stable proton:neutron ratio isn't a perfectly smooth curve.)