Periodic Table Illustrates Progress Of Science
April 1, 2019 at 3:35 p.m.
By Max [email protected]
How it was developed and its significance are perfect illustrations of the process of scientific progress. Even if you know little about chemistry, the periodic table has played a major role in your life and lifestyle.
What is the periodic table? There are over 100 elements and they are usually presented to reflect their detailed structure.
Elements are the simplest chemicals. Examples include hydrogen, oxygen, iron and nitrogen. (Hydrogen and oxygen combine to form water.) An element cannot be made any simpler because it contains only one type of atom. There are over 100 types of atoms, and so elements. Most of them are metals. The rest are called non-metals.
The periodic table is organized in the order of the number of protons in the nucleus, which is called “the atomic number.” This means that hydrogen is the first element with one proton in each nucleus, helium two, lithium three, and so on.
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. Some — like gold, iron and sulfur — had been known since ancient days. Others — like manganese, molybdenum and tungsten — were recent discoveries.
John Dalton, an Englishman, showed that elements reacted in fixed proportions by weight, but also that those proportions were ratios of small whole numbers. The simplest way to explain this was to suppose each element to be composed of tiny, invisible particles, all of the same weight. The Greek word for “indivisible” is "atomos." Thus the atom was born.
Dalton's work was followed by contributions from Jacob Berzelius, a Swede. He furnished chemistry with its language while coming up with the idea of abbreviations that now occupy the periodic table's rectangles.
Back in England, Sir Humphrey Davy employed a newly developed battery to discover sodium and potassium in 1807 and magnesium, calcium, strontium, barium and boron in 1808. He also showed that chlorine, previously thought to be a compound of oxygen, was actually an element.
After Davy's findings, new elements were being found more frequently — iodine (1811), cadmium and selenium (1817), lithium (1821), silicon (1823), and aluminum and bromine (1825).
As more and more elements turned up, the search for some order intensified. In 1864, John Newlands, an Englishman, published what is known as the law of octaves, which arranged the known elements in order of atomic weight. Dimitri Mendeleev, however, is primarily credited with the table's inception.
According to a recent article in The Economist, Mendeleev looked like a mad professor. His hair was cut just once by a shepherd using wool shears. He also behaved like a mad professor, prone to dancing rages. On the other hand, he was consummately patient and arranged the 63 then-known elements in a pattern, arguably the most important game of patience ever played.
Gaps in his table were subsequently added. Radon was added by William Ramsey, another Brit. With various collaborators he added argon in 1894, helium in 1895, and neon, krypton and xenon in 1898. Ramsey used the newly developed technology of cryogenics, which he used to liquefy air and then separate it into its components according to their boiling points.
Fast-forward to the 1930s, when physicists discovered that radioactivity could in essence be reversed by bombarding atoms with subatomic particles to increase their atomic numbers. This way, new elements were produced. Technetium, created in 1937, was the first. Many others, including francium and actinium, followed. From then the extension of the table became work of physicists, not chemists.
At a fundamental level, all of chemistry is contained in the periodic table and chemistry is an integral part of our lives. There are many examples of chemistry in our daily lives.
For example, digestion relies on chemical reactions between food and acids and enzymes to break down molecules into nutrients the body can absorb and use. Cooking is a chemical change that alters food to make it more digestible. The heat of cooking denatures proteins, promotes chemical reactions between ingredients and carmelizes sugar. Drugs work because of chemistry; the chemical compounds attach to binding sites for natural chemicals in our body.
Max Sherman is a medical writer and pharmacist retired from the medical device industry. He has taught college courses on regulatory and compliance issues at Ivy Tech, Grace College and Butler University. Sherman has an unquenchable thirst for knowledge on all levels. Eclectic Science, the title of his column, touches on famed doctors and scientists, human senses, aging, various diseases, and little-known facts about many species, including their contributions to scientific research. He can be reached by email at [email protected].
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How it was developed and its significance are perfect illustrations of the process of scientific progress. Even if you know little about chemistry, the periodic table has played a major role in your life and lifestyle.
What is the periodic table? There are over 100 elements and they are usually presented to reflect their detailed structure.
Elements are the simplest chemicals. Examples include hydrogen, oxygen, iron and nitrogen. (Hydrogen and oxygen combine to form water.) An element cannot be made any simpler because it contains only one type of atom. There are over 100 types of atoms, and so elements. Most of them are metals. The rest are called non-metals.
The periodic table is organized in the order of the number of protons in the nucleus, which is called “the atomic number.” This means that hydrogen is the first element with one proton in each nucleus, helium two, lithium three, and so on.
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. Some — like gold, iron and sulfur — had been known since ancient days. Others — like manganese, molybdenum and tungsten — were recent discoveries.
John Dalton, an Englishman, showed that elements reacted in fixed proportions by weight, but also that those proportions were ratios of small whole numbers. The simplest way to explain this was to suppose each element to be composed of tiny, invisible particles, all of the same weight. The Greek word for “indivisible” is "atomos." Thus the atom was born.
Dalton's work was followed by contributions from Jacob Berzelius, a Swede. He furnished chemistry with its language while coming up with the idea of abbreviations that now occupy the periodic table's rectangles.
Back in England, Sir Humphrey Davy employed a newly developed battery to discover sodium and potassium in 1807 and magnesium, calcium, strontium, barium and boron in 1808. He also showed that chlorine, previously thought to be a compound of oxygen, was actually an element.
After Davy's findings, new elements were being found more frequently — iodine (1811), cadmium and selenium (1817), lithium (1821), silicon (1823), and aluminum and bromine (1825).
As more and more elements turned up, the search for some order intensified. In 1864, John Newlands, an Englishman, published what is known as the law of octaves, which arranged the known elements in order of atomic weight. Dimitri Mendeleev, however, is primarily credited with the table's inception.
According to a recent article in The Economist, Mendeleev looked like a mad professor. His hair was cut just once by a shepherd using wool shears. He also behaved like a mad professor, prone to dancing rages. On the other hand, he was consummately patient and arranged the 63 then-known elements in a pattern, arguably the most important game of patience ever played.
Gaps in his table were subsequently added. Radon was added by William Ramsey, another Brit. With various collaborators he added argon in 1894, helium in 1895, and neon, krypton and xenon in 1898. Ramsey used the newly developed technology of cryogenics, which he used to liquefy air and then separate it into its components according to their boiling points.
Fast-forward to the 1930s, when physicists discovered that radioactivity could in essence be reversed by bombarding atoms with subatomic particles to increase their atomic numbers. This way, new elements were produced. Technetium, created in 1937, was the first. Many others, including francium and actinium, followed. From then the extension of the table became work of physicists, not chemists.
At a fundamental level, all of chemistry is contained in the periodic table and chemistry is an integral part of our lives. There are many examples of chemistry in our daily lives.
For example, digestion relies on chemical reactions between food and acids and enzymes to break down molecules into nutrients the body can absorb and use. Cooking is a chemical change that alters food to make it more digestible. The heat of cooking denatures proteins, promotes chemical reactions between ingredients and carmelizes sugar. Drugs work because of chemistry; the chemical compounds attach to binding sites for natural chemicals in our body.
Max Sherman is a medical writer and pharmacist retired from the medical device industry. He has taught college courses on regulatory and compliance issues at Ivy Tech, Grace College and Butler University. Sherman has an unquenchable thirst for knowledge on all levels. Eclectic Science, the title of his column, touches on famed doctors and scientists, human senses, aging, various diseases, and little-known facts about many species, including their contributions to scientific research. He can be reached by email at [email protected].
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