Friday, October 27, 2006

Periodic Table - 118, long form, other versions

With the (re)discovery of element 118 announced recently, it gave me an opportunity to update my periodic table. It turned out I did the update exactly one year after I posted my version. What a coincidence!

A year ago I wrote about some non-standardness in treating what is in the lanthanide and actinide series. With this update, I resolved that issue by referring to the pattern of the elements in the long form of the periodic table. The most common form of the table (also the form of my table) puts the lanthanide and actinide series separated from the main table. But really these two series fit into the regular pattern of the table, as shown below in the "long form" of the table.

long form of periodic table

In this arrangement, one sees that the series are from La-Yb and Ac-No, and the elements Lu and Lr that are often part of the series are in fact the start of the next block.

I was also curious about other English-Chinese periodic tables. A search on the phrase "english chinese periodic table" turns up only my version. That was a little less than what I expected. After all, with billions of web pages in existence, there must be other science enthusiasts out there who have made other version. As the new saying goes, if you first don't succeed, try other keywords. A search on "chinese english periodic table" finds one by Dr. Kia-Boon Wong.
http://www.esaurus.org/chemical_element.htm

Another good version is by Michael Dayah.
http://www.dayah.com/periodic/?lang=zh_tw