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Periodic Table of the Elements, in Pictures and Words (2005)
- lordgrenville 2y agoGreat idea, and I'd love to buy it - if only it weren't in Comic Sans!
- lupire 2y agoDownload the PDF and change the font.
- lordgrenville 2y agoChange the font of a PDF without the source? Sure buddy, just give me a research team and five years. Edit: Whoops, apparently this is trivial. TIL.
- nilstycho 2y agoKeith 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. https://elements.wlonk.com/Dev/MakingDerivativeWorks.htm https://elements.wlonk.com/Dev/MakingDerivativeWorks.htm
- mixmastamyk 2y agoDoesn’t seem to be Comic Sans, it’s a bit more regular. Some other comic-like font perhaps.
- gregd 2y agoThese are actually amazing. I'm such a visual learner and these would have helped my high school years so much!
- eleveriven 2y agoSame here. Visual learning is the answer for me
- smitty1e 2y agoCarbon has a bird and phosphorus a skeleton? Maybe switch those, given the recent efforts to turn carbon into some symbol of environmental death.
- saagarjha 2y agoThat’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.
- xeonmc 2y agoI 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: https://winter.group.shef.ac.uk/orbitron/ 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.
- nilstycho 2y agoYou might be interested in the orbitals laser crystal sculptures that he designed with Bathsheba. https://bathsheba.com/crystal/orbitals/ https://bathsheba.com/crystal/orbitals/
- Loughla 2y agoThat's super cool. My science spouse would love to have one of those to knock off their desk at work.
- BenoitP 2y agoThere's the Stowe Janey Scerri Table. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Stowe-Janet-Scerri_PeriodicTable.svg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Stowe-Janet-Scerri_Peri...
- enslavedrobot 2y agoIt blew my mind when I found out orbitals can be thought of as harmonic modes of a sphere. Sad that it took until 4th year quantum chemistry to find that out.
- JeremyHerrman 2y agoSame here! Spherical harmonics finally explained why the 3d orbital has the donut shape. Why isn't this taught in high school?!
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- mo_42 2y agoVery nice. Printed it will be a gift for (your) children. I wish I had gotten something like this.
- dudeinjapan 2y agoI prefer Terrence Howard’s version. This table doesn’t even label the musical key of each element.
- dosssman 2y ago/s
- loceng 2y agoDidn't think ad hominem was allowed on HN. E.g. debunk specific claims of his rather than baselessly mocking him or his presentation of the periodic table.
- dudeinjapan 2y agoAn "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.
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- robblbobbl 2y agoCool guide
- Beijinger 2y agoSpark Plugs for Iridium? Never hear or it. But they seem to exit: https://www.autozone.com/diy/spark-plugs/iridium-vs-platinum-spark-plugs-whats-the-difference https://www.autozone.com/diy/spark-plugs/iridium-vs-platinum... 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.
- nilstycho 2y ago“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.
- Beijinger 2y agoDude, I hold patents for platinum catalyst. We were talking about Iridium (a Platinum Group Metal, I know)
- nocoiner 2y agoSuch a world is horrific to imagine. Perhaps the only thing worse would be a world without zinc.
- littlestymaar 2y agoI'm pretty sure I'd regret oxygen faster than Zinc or Platinum but YMMV
- schneehertz 2y agoA platinum crucible is a laboratory container used to contain chemical compounds when subjected to extremely high temperatures.
- lovegrenoble 2y agoRussian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev could be quite proud of his periodic table of elements in pictures )
- dev_tty01 2y agoStone, 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.
- jenadine 2y ago"Air" for Oxygen, and "Protein" for Nitrogen? Shouldn't it be the other way around?
- littlestymaar 2y agoNot “the other way around”, but proteins are mostly made out of carbon so you could shift those two to the left.
- windowshopping 2y agoI'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.
- Loughla 2y agoSome things can be fun as well as slightly informational. Not everything is a research project.
- loceng 2y agoI'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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g197xdRZsW0 - 7.3 million views in the 8 days since it was published. Here's a YouTube Short of specific clip showing the spiral version of periodic table: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/L-_eKRxRm-c https://www.youtube.com/shorts/L-_eKRxRm-c
- JeremyHerrman 2y agoFor 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: Spherical Harmonics: https://youtu.be/Ziz7t1HHwBw https://youtu.be/Ziz7t1HHwBw More info & videos: https://www.quantumreflections.net https://www.quantumreflections.net
- Daub 2y agoFor anyone interested in this kind of thing, I wholeheartedly endorse the iOS app The Elemnts by Theodore Gray. A bit old now, but a masterpiece of appealing UI design. https://apps.apple.com/vn/app/the-elements-by-theodore-gray/id364147847 https://apps.apple.com/vn/app/the-elements-by-theodore-gray/... Comes complete with Tom Lehres elemnst song https://youtu.be/U2cfju6GTNs?si=CIVJm66sqzM_p-Wq https://youtu.be/U2cfju6GTNs?si=CIVJm66sqzM_p-Wq
- southernplaces7 2y agoThis 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. "Do Not Build The Seventh Row.." https://englishatlc.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/randall-munroe-periodic-wall-of-elements.pdf https://englishatlc.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/randall-m...