Chemistry classes used to frustrate me. Trying to remember all those elements in the Periodic Table felt like trying to learn the French vocabulary. And I despised my French classes. It's little wonder, then, that I dropped both French and Chemistry around the same time to focus on Physics.
Although I might be pretty limited in the foreign language and chemical departments, I think my focus on astrophysics was a good choice. That was until I had to study spectroscopy at university and that table made an appearance in my textbooks once again. Bummer. There was no escape.
However, if I'd seen the Periodic Table organized in a fun-looking pattern like this, I may have been a little less intimidated. It's not just the fact that it looks like the design of a crop circle that makes it interesting, the diagram is actually useful.
This new-look Periodic Table is the brainchild of Mohd Abubakr from Microsoft Research in Hyderabad, India, who points out that the circular design gives a sense of the relative sizes of the atoms (i.e. hydrogen and helium are near the center of the table, as they are the smallest). By placing these small elements in the middle, it avoids the confusion about where to place hydrogen (in the halogens or alkali metals) and helium (in the 2nd group or inert gases) in the table. Although I don't remember that particular problem in my Chemistry class, as I wasn't paying that much attention.
Still, this is pretty groovy, and although there are some short-fallings with it (i.e. you can't easily rotate your computer monitor to read all the elements), the new design would certainly be an interesting new look into the relative sizes of elements.
Tags: Particle Physics
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