Periodic Table Day + Día de la Tabla Periódica [Eng+Spa]

It's Wednesday, we are in the middle of the week, this February 7th passed without problems or problematic incidents. So it was a beautiful, calm day in my calm #life. There is nothing new to tell about my private or personal affairs… well, I may have a detail that is not so good. It happens that it is already the second day that there are small fires near home. It seems that there are people who have been burning land nearby, or perhaps they were initially burning trash. The smoke is annoying, but it is not too serious. Also, remembering what I've read about the recent fires in Chile (and how horrible the losses have been), this small problem is insignificant.

Anyway, I prefer not to delve into a topic that I cannot remedy and that does not provide a good vibe to share. So I prefer to comment on an anniversary in #History, which has to do with an anniversary of a very interesting contribution to #Science, and more specifically to chemistry. Today is 'Periodic Table Day'.

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This topic of the Periodic Table of the Elements was something I learned during my high school studies, decades ago. I found it interesting because of its history, more than because of its real usefulness in the field of #chemistry. I admit that I have been attracted, since I was a child, to knowing the origin of things. So I was curious that the story of the creation of the periodic table was related to a particular passion for card games, rather than being the thoughtful product of a higher-motivated analytical mind.

The Periodic Table is celebrated on this day, as it is the anniversary of its invention. It was on February 7, 1863, that the English chemist John Newlands published one of the first tables of elements. Although it was not one of the most popular things, he began a more detailed attempt to achieve a way to organize the classification of known chemical elements. Although it is not that it was actually the first attempt, since there were other previous ones, such as that of the famous French chemist Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier, who in 1789 had addressed these topics in his book 'Elementary treatise on chemistry'.

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There are some proposals that I found interesting when reviewing how attempts to organize the knowledge of chemical elements evolved, such as that of the English chemist John Newlands. In 1863, he published one of the first tables of elements and proposed a 'law of octaves' for elements to order and understand the elements. This seemed to draw a little inspiration from the musical theory of harmony, and I found it very fascinating. It is unfortunate that Newlands did not receive the support of the scientific community, and his work was ridiculed until many years later, when the fame of this creation already belonged to a Russian in German lands.

The Russian I am talking about is Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev, a chemistry professor who published his proposed classification table of the elements in 1869. This table achieved greater dissemination and acceptance. Mendeleev was a professor with a reputation for being a little carefree, and he was also passionate about card games. He seems to have had trouble designing his own class notes, and he helped himself by creating a series of playing cards on which he recorded the known characteristics of the elements, such as atomic mass, electron shells, and other things. When finished, he noticed that he could arrange the cards he had created following the logic of a card game, Solitaire-style.

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Well, this is a bit of a legend. I even have doubts, because it is like the issue of the falling apple and the development of the law of gravitational attraction. The point is that Mendeleev's table proposal was good enough, and was improved by other researchers in the following years. Hence, usually, when I remember a little about chemistry, I remember this professor who was fond of card games. He knew how to take advantage of his passion, which had nothing to do with his work, to give meaning and order to the known chemical elements, and he even left holes in his table for the elements that he could predict were yet to be discovered, or created, and that would fill in these blank spaces.

At such moments, I imagine this Russian professor playing cards on his desk, while he was preparing for his classes. The image makes me think that, even though I read that he had a reputation for not being the best chemist or the best teacher in his family, it was he who left the family name tied to the history of science.

The post is already a bit long for me. I say goodbye, wishing you that you are well and that we can read again another time.

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