Here's to a scientific icon

The United Nations has designated 2019 as the International Year of the Periodic Table to celebrate one of the most significant achievements in science.

In March, it will be 150 years since the Russian scientist, Dmitri Mendeleev, took all of the known elements and arranged them into a table.

The Periodic Table of the Elements is to many a masterpiece of organisation in the face of complexity. As scientists, our tendency to group and organise is irresistible and it is the Periodic Table which seems to best embody our gravitation toward the methodical – and certainly one which highlights the benefits of doing so.

The development of the Periodic Table and the advances in our understanding of atomic structure are intertwined. As our understanding increased, so the way in which we organised the elements changed. Indeed, within 100 years of the appearance of Mendeleev’s Periodic Table in 1869 it is thought that around 700 different versions were published – each seeking to balance observable physical properties and theoretical atomic structures in ever more insightful ways.

Our longing to study and organise the elements has survived and adapted to the changing theoretical winds of contemporary physics and chemistry – and it continues to adapt today

Often the creators found themselves hemmed in by the constraints of two-dimensions and allowed their ambitions to spill over in to three- and, on one occasion, even four-dimensions.  (Stowe’s Physicist’s 1989 Periodic Table has been described as being four-dimensional – three spatial dimensions and one colour dimension).

Eventually, attempt after attempt led us toward the standard layout we are used to seeing today. Our longing to study and organise the elements has survived and adapted to the changing theoretical winds of contemporary physics and chemistry – and it continues to adapt today.

Uranium is the heaviest element which naturally occurs on Earth…but as you have probably noticed, it is not the last entry on the Table. Advances in particle physics have meant that over the last 100 years we have created heavier and heavier elements in the laboratory. As throughout its history; when advances change the elemental landscape, the Periodic Table will adapt to accommodate this. This is why, far from a static document, it is expanding – growing with each new element we create.

But there is an inherent problem with some the ‘superheavy’ elements we can now smash into existence – they are unstable. Very unstable – with many existing only fleetingly before they collapse into more basic elemental forms. Yet the fate of all superheavies to be transient in nature might not be sealed. In the late 1960s American Chemist Glenn Seaborg proposed an ‘Island of Stability’– a set of superheavy elements that would, he reasoned, possess a stability impossible for those so far created.

Will we ever create an element heavy enough to be located on this island? Time will tell – but one thing is certain, if we do the ever enduring Periodic Table of the Elements will adapt and incorporate this information beautifully.

 

Phil Prime Editor