Abstract

RICH, Ronald L.  and  LAING, Michael. Can the periodic table be improved?. Educ. quím [online]. 2011, vol.22, n.2, pp.162-165. ISSN 0187-893X.

Nature is clever in that no single and simple periodic chart can reveal all of the important relationships among the chemical elements. For some uses, however, we can maximize these revelations by giving up some simplicity, and we wish herewith to present what we may hope is an appealing way of doing precisely that. The purposes are both to promote teaching by calling attention to a novel periodic scheme, and to facilitate the discovery and use of similarities that may otherwise escape notice in research, writing and the development of materials. We begin with a very brief look at the history of such charts, as developed for example in The New Encyclopædia Britannica (1991). We do not attempt to review or even list all of the vast recent literature on periodicity, but Mazurs (a) (1974) gives a very useful earlier review.

Keywords : chemical periodicity; chemical relationships; history of periodicity; new periodic chart.