Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Back when Dimitri Mendeleyev came up with his famous Periodic Table of elements, only atomic weights were known, not atomic numbers. And yet, when Mendeleyev arranged the elements in increasing order of atomic weights, writes Paul Strathern in Mendeleyev’s Dream : “(He found) their properties repeated in a series of periodic intervals.” But there were anomalies: -        The elements with similar properties didn’t always fall in increasing order of atomic weights. But: “Mendeleyev questioned the atomic weight of the element, suggesting that it had been calculated incorrectly.” -        In some cases, no element seemed to fit the “next” slot. Undeterred: “Where no element fit the pattern, he left a gap. He predicted that these gaps would one day be filled by elements which had not yet been discovered.” He went even further by predicting the properties of such yet to be discovered elements. Not everyone was...

I never thought that there could be humour associated with the story behind any element in the periodic table. Until I read the story behind one of the rarest elements . So no matter how much you disliked chemistry at school, this is a story you should still know. And as a bonus, have fun reading about it. The element with such a story is so rare that you would only find one ounce of it on the entire earth! Add to that, it is extremely radioactive (half-life of 8 hours; its nickname could well be “Now you see me, now you don’t.”).  I am sure you don’t have the first clue which element I am talking about, so I will spare you the embarrassment of trying to guess: it’s astatine (At). Ok, if it’s that rare and that short lived, how do we even know it exists? Because the periodic table says so! Scientists knew of elements with atomic numbers 84 and 86, so they “knew” that there had to be one with atomic number 85! But since they couldn’t find it, they started trying to create...

We have a tendency to classify things into categories. It helps organize information and find things easily. Most of us are aware of one or the other classification scheme in areas like music, sciences or literature. One of the most famous classification systems is the Dewey Decimal Classification system (DDC) used in libraries all over the world. But is it “fair”? Look at how it divides the religion space. 70% of the religion space is reserved for Christianity. Islam and Hinduism are clubbed with “associated” religions (like Bahai and Buddhism) and get less than 2% of the religion space (even though, put together, they are followed by more than one third of the world’s population!) So was Dewey biased? Maybe, maybe not. His system was devised to optimize shelf space for books. No prizes for guessing which religion had the most books in the land Dewey lived in… So you realize classification systems are devised with an aim in mind (like optimizing shelf space). If you have a different ...