Periodic Table |
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| What is the Periodic Table Showing? | Periodicity |
The INTERNET Database of Periodic Tables
There are thousands of periodic tables in web space, but this is the only comprehensive database of periodic tables & periodic system formulations. If you know of an interesting periodic table that is missing, please contact the database curator: Mark R. Leach Ph.D. The database holds information on periodic tables, the discovery of the elements, the elucidation of atomic weights and the discovery of atomic structure (and much, much more).
| Year: 1940 | PT id = 763, Type = formulation 3D |
Gamow [First] Ribbon Periodic Table
George Gamow is well known for his Gamow 1961 ribbon formulation. It appeared in a 1948 book: One, Two, Three... Infinity, but it first appeared in 1940 in 'The Birth and Death of the Sun' (Viking, N. Y.).
Conal Boyce writes:
"The 1940 version of the wound ribbon (in The Birth and Death of the Sun, Figure 12) appears to be the earliest. Gamow re-used it in two editions of another book, 1, 2, 3...Infinity (1948, 1953), as is. He redrew it from scratch for the 1961 edition of 1, 2, 3...Infinity, adding about a dozen new items, notably Np through No, on a new loop. (Unfortunately, in the 1961 version he introduced 4 or 5 goofy errors, including the non-existent 'Fa' for Ga, and a misplaced 'Ba' where Sr belongs, etc.) Most significantly, in another one of his 1961 publications, a book entitled The Atom and Its Nucleus, he swapped the left and right halves of the diagram (see pp. 10-11, Figure 2), so that the noble gas column could be seen as the backbone of the whole structure. He calls it out as such on page 9."
Thanks to Conal and Philip Stewart for the tip!
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| What is the Periodic Table Showing? | Periodicity |
© Mark R. Leach Ph.D. 1999 –
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