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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.

Use the drop menus below to search & select from the more than 1300 Period Tables in the database: 

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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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© Mark R. Leach Ph.D. 1999 –


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