I wish there is a version of the element cards and table that features mainly the electronic structures. There is a separate orbitals table, but I'd rather have electron configurations in diagram form on the individual elements instead.
On a side note, the following website is an amazing visualization for all of the electron orbital shapes:
This is great! The format isn't 100% what I had in mind but the functionality is just what I needed! I think I can use it as a basis to build my own simplified presentation that I wanted.
For years I wondered why electron orbitals are shaped the way they are - for instance why does the 3d orbital have two lobes and a donut? Only after learning about spherical harmonics did it finally click from an intuitive sense.
Münster University has a great set of videos which helped me understand the how orbitals relate to harmonic modes of a sphere. Check them out:
Stone, sand, and soil for Silicon? No mention of integrated circuits, the single most impactful tech in recent history? Meanwhile, Germanium, gets the semiconductor electronics mention. Yes, Germanium is used in certain IC processes, but Silicon has orders of magnitudes more use in semiconductor electronics. Seems like an extremely odd choice to relegate Silicon to nothing more than stone, sand, and soil.
I'd prefer to see the spiral version of the Periodic Table being thoroughly discussed here on HN. It recently got a bunch of attention after Terrence Howard talked about it on Joe Rogan recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g197xdRZsW0 - 7.3 million views in the 8 days since it was published.
Keith is a doodler/amateur cartoonist, and this periodic take is in that style, so the font is deliberate. He was happy to see Fabiola Gianotti’s announcement of the discovery of the Higgs boson in Comic Sans.
Also, it’s really Comic Relief, as he wanted it to be OFL.
pdf2ps a.pdf
vim a.ps # take a look at it, maybe you see how the font is called
cat a.ps | sed 's/Comic Sans/Times/g' > b.ps # may be slightly more complex
ps2pdf b.ps
This is an absolutely obligatory read (with illustrations from XKCD) for a deeply funny look at what would happen if you tried to literally build brick wall out of each element from the periodic table... Terrifyingly hilarious.
An "ad-hominem" attack would be an attack on Mr. Howard "as a person" in order to invalidate his argument. For example: "Terrence Howard is a bad movie actor therefore his scientific ideas are wrong." (I think he's a good actor actually!)
He certainly is an interesting character. As a rough barometer, anyone who goes on Joe Rogan to present their hidden scientific truth of the universe while making an unsubstantiated claim to have "95 patents" is probably worthy of a few giggles. For a full debunking, read on...
Taking his claim "1 times 1 equals more than 1" for example, Mr. Howard may very well be perceiving non-Euclidean space that the rest of us are missing entirely. Certainly if we change the axioms of mathematics then we can jury-rig this claim to be true, but at that point the claim becomes non-falsifiable, and not particularly useful.
Similarly, the claim that "every element in the periodic table has a musical key, and that H, C, Si, Co, Rh are all in the key of E at different octaves", the "octave" seems to be an analog of the periodic table "row" (how many electron shells the atom has), and the "key" seems to be roughly-speaking the relative "column" (relative electronegativity of the valence shell) with E apparently being a "half-full" valence shell. So if we take the "weak claim" that "musical tones are a nice labelling scheme for the elements", it doesn't contribute any new secret knowledge that isn't already well-understood by mainstream chemistry and represented in the standard Periodic Table. On the other hand, if we go with the "strong claim" that elements actually have musical tones, certainly there is no evidence of this in terms of atomic vibrations, photon emission/absorption spectra, etc. More likely Mr. Howard has some form of synesthesia--but again, just because one insists that "the number 4 is green", or that "the month of August tastes like tomatoes" does not make it so.
TBH I think he just confused the freq emited by the Hydrogen Line with the idea that every element has it's own frequency. Which you could actually calculate but is not something analog to the material but also to the conditions it is in.
Now when he speaks of tones in terms of frequencies he isn't crazy at all. You could find out the tone of say the Hydrogen Line by diving it until you are capable of finding out which tone it could match (if you could) - it's funny cause I was kind of thinking of this discovering electromagnetic astronomy when this video came out
Now I had some fun laughing of the b* he could throw, but I'm not entirely sure everybody is as smart at they think they are when they make fun of him.
Russell may have indeed derived the concept of "tone" from absorption spectral lines which were known since the 1800's, however, there are many obvious logical gaps/flaws, e.g.:
- There are multiple absorption lines per element--sometimes more than 100--not a single line one could call the "tone".
- The lines don't follow any periodicity/doubling/harmonic rule, nor do they regularly ascend/descend in frequency as atomic number increases.
- The lines are light-range THz (nm) rather than acoustic-range Hz. (Howard said explicitly "Hydrogen is 41.5 Hz" but Russell seems to use relative Do-Re-Mi scale rather than a numeric Hz value.)
Howard's/Russell's "tone" seems to be a more New Age-y "intrinsic vibration of matter" which is not actually measurable with any existing instrument. It may have been inspired by the concept of "wave-particle duality" considering that Russell's book was published the same year Schrödinger was working out his wave equations. But more likely, it is a continuation of a much older human tendency to use music and "perfect harmonics" to describe the observed physical world, dating back to Pythagoras' cosmology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musica_universalis.
If you actually read Russell's work, there are some major "shoe-horning" problems--he invents lots of imaginary elements around Hydrogen and Helium in order to create 8-tone octaves for each, such as "Alphanon", "Hydron", "Luminon", and "Carbogen". For rows 2 and 3, he then runs into the problem that the row has 8 elements (valence shell has 8-electrons), but there are only 7 unique solfeggio notes per octave (do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti)--his solution is to not assign solfeggio notes to the noble gases at all, so for example Sodium is "do" and Chlorine is "ti", while Neon and Argon are... nothing. In rows 4+ he subdivides his "mi"s and "so"s. It is pretty clear that had Mendeleev not first invented the Periodic Table, Russell wouldn't have had his musical epiphany.
Platinum for Labware? Really? The world would look very different without Platinum or Platinum group metals. Start with the Oswald Process (Nitric acid, fertilizer), car catalysts, hydration of carbons, cracking, catalysts for a gazillion chemical reactions.
“Catalyst, pollution control, petroleum cracking, and processing fats” are already listed for platinum. There’s an attempt to not make a lot of duplicate uses, and palladium already has pollution control illustrated. Also some uses are harder to illustrate than others.
I'm sorry but this seems incredibly stupid to me. Bicycles for scandium? What? Only some bicycles use that, and then it's only one component among many. Thinking of a bicycle in relation to scandium is not useful or instructive in any way and tells you literally nothing about scandium. The same goes for most of this somewhat ridiculous graphic.
That’s carbon dioxide you’re thinking of. And it’s not a symbol of environmental death, it’s people who emit excess amounts of it. But that’s not a very good symbol for an ecological process, though it’s a fine one for representing carbon.
On a side note, the following website is an amazing visualization for all of the electron orbital shapes:
https://winter.group.shef.ac.uk/orbitron/
Click on the individual orbital entries, and at the top of each page there is a "Dots!" tab that lets you interact with density clouds in 3D.