Periods

The word according to Otto Theodor Benfey 

Last week to the Royal Institution to hear about the periodic table from one Eric Scerri, a chemist, author and personage. To be found at reference 1. Started out in Malta and is now to be found at the University of California at Los Angeles. I read at reference 2 that he is one of 4,300 members of faculty - which I take to be their word for academic staff, as opposed to menials likes bedders and porters. Altogether, there must be enough employees to rate a serious establishments function (in civil service old-speak), that is to say premises, personnel, payroll and IT. The head of which, in UK academic old-speak, would have been the bursar. But I get ahead of myself.

Talk at home of serious wind and rain, but we pressed ahead anyway, and after some delay en-route we found that Vauxhall tube station was just shutting as we got there. I suppose we were lucky that the shutting did not happen when we were down there, as I think I might get in to difficulties if I were to be stuck on an underground train for half an hour or more.

Took an 88 bus which got us to Piccadilly and we made it to the large canopy over the entrance to what was Simpson's and is now Waterstone's just before we had a downpour. Very heavy, maybe ten minutes of it. After which we caught another bus for the stop or two to Albemarle Street, still in plenty of time to take a beverage at the Goat.

On into the lecture theatre, the downstairs of which was about two thirds full. One of those occasions which was compèred by the bouncy but thin blonde who had helped collect tickets at the door. Not one of those graced by the director or some other eminence.

Scerri turned out to be an experienced and smooth talker, but for me he pitched his material in the wrong place, omitting the basic business of protons, neutrons, electrons and their shells which I had not thought to revise (the article at reference 4 might have been a good place) and which makes the story - and there clearly was a story - hang together, which gives the rows and columns their meaning. In fairness to him, I think a lot of his audience were chemists of one sort or another. Notwithstanding all of which, there were three takeaways.

First, like many discoveries which get tied to the name of one person, the invention of the periodic table was a protracted business, with lots of stuff going on before Dmitri Mendeleev got going, and with lots of stuff going on after. People are still arguing about it.

Second, one of the things they argue about it the best way to draw the diagram, with Scerri showing us some of the stronger candidates. The snap above is one from Wikipedia which he did not use - and which I do not recall seeing before today.

Third, the periodic table really is periodic, repeating itself in a slightly tricky way; a rather important property which I had somehow lost sight of. So if you draw the table properly this results in lots of triads, groups of three elements making a block in a column of the table, groups in which the middle elements are in some sense the average of their two outer elements.

Out to find that the tube was up and running again, but trains from Vauxhall not in terribly good shape. Stopped off at the Half Way House to review our options and ended up getting a taxi from Raynes Park, which set us back, as I recall, £25. So not to disastrous split in half.

PS: click to enlarge did not seem to work properly with the image offered by Wikipedia, yielding an unsightly and unhelpful black background. Other versions offered by Bing seem defective in one way or another, so that offered here is the Wikipedia image passed through Microsoft's newish Snip & Sketch tool.

Reference 1: http://ericscerri.com/.

Reference 2: http://www.ucla.edu/.

Reference 3: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/search?q=periodic+table. My interest in the periodic table surfacing from time to time, here in the period 2012-2106.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodic_table.