January 09, 2007
Periodic Puzzling
Rusty Rockets in Scienceagogo:
Despite the periodic table's ubiquitous presence, how many people would have known what polonium (Po) was prior to the media circus surrounding the poisoning of Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko? The periodic table, which has symbolized chemistry ever since its controversial conception during the 1860s is largely thought of as a fixed reference work, but the table is yet to be completed, and some lucky scientists' careers involve running high-energy tests to fill in the gaps and perhaps catch a glimpse of the table's ultimate limits.
To UCLA chemist and historian Eric Scerri, author of the recently published The Periodic Table: Its Story and Its Significance, the periodic table symbolizes and encapsulates the whole field of chemistry. "It is completely unique in science. Chemistry is the only field with one simple chart that embodies the essence of the field. This wonderful tool serves to organize the whole of chemistry," he says. So while Dmitri Mendeleyev will always be known as the man who "invented" the periodic table, it's perhaps fitting that the table was actually the brainchild of six independent scientists.
More here.
Posted by Abbas Raza at 10:25 PM | Permalink
Comments
I think most students of science know that there were several attempts at arranging the elements in a coherently progressive design. It is just that the others focused on properties like the atomic mass which didn't lead to a satisfactory catalog. That was really the genius of Mendeleyev's astuteness. He arranged the elements according to their "behavior" ( a function of the atomic number, a property unknown at that time) and came up with with this handy, compact and elegant arrangement even when he was forced to leave gaps in his table for elements which were unknown at that time. The gaps were filled up as the elements were subsequently discovered, making the Periodic Table almost like an oracle's prediction chart.
As for scientific credit not going to the deserving or going to fictitous characters to assuage national pride, I wrote this some time ago at my own site in the context of science, politics and propaganda.
"When I was in ninth grade, a couple of new physics and chemistry books were introduced in our school - for a very short time. They were published in the USSR and the government of India wanted a few selected high schools to evaluate them for possible future use in Indian classrooms. From a scientific point of view, there was nothing wrong with the text books (written in English) - they were accurate and adequate. The problem was in their historical narrative. Many of the basic principles of physics and chemistry that we were familiar with, including Boyle's law, Newton's laws and Avogadro's Number were said to have been discovered by mysterious Russians (with names) around the same time (or a bit earlier) that Boyle, Newton and Avogadro formulated them. Interestingly enough, there was no similar competitor for Mendeleyev, the designer of the Periodic Table who of course was Russian. My teachers were perturbed enough by the ridiculous communist propaganda in science textbooks that they rejected the books."
Posted by: Ruchira Paul | Jan 11, 2007 10:57:09 AM
It is not uncommon that more than one scientist made discoveries which are credited to only one in the media. This merely proves that one cannot trust information just because it is in print. I was not aware of others challenging Mendeleyev, a brilliant Soviet scientist, who should have received the Nobel Prize for this discovery, but no less than four individuals, two medical doctors and two dentists, are credited with the discovery of anesthesia. The controversy is so intense it still exists to this day. While Albert Einstein is credited with the discovery of special relativity, others also contributed like Lorentz and Poincare. V. Fock, in his book on relativity, is not impressed with Einstein. Even with the quark theory itself, others also had the idea, but Gell-Mann usually is given the public kudos.
It is also interesting how the propaganda machine of "science" can also disregard seminal discoveries on vitally important matters, like cancer, as with the discoveries of the prime cause of cancer decades ago by the genius level scientist Otto Warburg, M.D., Ph.D., in Germany; namely, respiratory impairment to living cells, based on experiments and facts, while the orthodoxy falsely and without adequate scientific proof, claims mutated genes cause cancer. A whole chapter in the recent book "The Hidden Story of Cancer" by Brian Peskin E.E. and Amid Habib, M.D., Pinnacle Press, Houston, 2006, demolishes the myth that cancer is genetically caused, yet women are fooled into having their breast(s) removed at great risk and expense because of these quack recommendations of the cancer generals of the U.S., who should be criminally prosecuted for scientific misconduct, criminal fraud and crimes against humanity.
Posted by: Winfield J. Abbe | Jan 13, 2007 8:58:59 AM
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