Periodic Table

When was the last time you studied the Periodic Table after the secondary school chemistry lesson? Or, frankly, any at all?

Hardly, if not because of the recent chaos about iodine and plutonium.

Once hailed as the "Law of Octaves," the elements were arranged by their atomic weight to repeat their patterns at every eighth place along a scale, like the octaves on a piano keyboard. The idea turned out to be widely mocked, and withered. It was not until 1869 when Dimitri Ivanovich Mendeleyev, a Russian chemist born in the far west of Siberia, came up with a novel way of organizing every atom in the universe. He nodded off while playing the card game solitaire (wherein cards are arranged by suit horizontally and by number vertically) one evening, and then woke up with a similar concept of organizing the atoms. The atoms simply line up in repeating groups of seven. In this sense, the Periodic Table shows one set of relationship when read up and down, and another when read side to side. Simple, and yet elegant.

Like most of the brilliant ideas, this one dawned on Mendeleyev after waking from his sleep. This type of sleep-enhanced inspiration is not new, and certainly not mine. My mentor also talked about his feelings of inspiration after sleep in his blog yesterday. And, yes, I should now take a nap.