Besides, tin is a metal, as is the then last-known element of the group, lead, whereas carbon is definitely non-metallic and silicon only slightly less so there had to be some transitional element between them. It’s so much bigger than Silicon that there had to be another element in between them. Because the next know element in Mendeleev’s time was tin. The next element is Silicon, which appears, in particular, in sand and glass. It has the capacity of forming long chains of carbons atoms, or alternatively carbon rings, and they are vital in supporting life. He built his periodic table, and discovered there were holes in it: squares that ought to contain the name of an element, but for which none was known.įor instance, he worked on group 14 of the table, which starts with one of the most important elements of all, for us, since it’s the basis for all life: Carbon. Mendeleev did the same, perhaps even more forcefully.
It’s that predictive rather than simply explanatory capacity that gave Newton’s arguments such force, compared to his adversaries ’. The beauty of Newton’s theory of gravitation, long resisted by the proponents of the vortices, was that it predicted things that actually happened, from the movement of the planets (or most of them, anyway – Mercury needed Einstein to come along), to the orbit of the moon, to the action of the tides, to the falling of bodies, all in one theoretical framework. The problem is that this view of the world suggests that objects would also be pushed sideways by the spinning matter, and they clearly aren’t. They watched bodies falling at the Earth’s surface, for instance, and they came up with notions of rapidly spinning vortices of ethereal (weightless) matter that drove objects downwards, and lots of people went along with the idea because it seemed quite plausible. For a long time, scientists set themselves the goal of explaining the phenomena they observed. What I’ve always liked about Mendeleev is that he didn’t just build the periodic table, which we’ve no doubt all gazed at in long boring moments if we’ve ever had chemistry classes, he used it to do something I regard as absolutely central to the nature of the scientific method as it emerged in the eighteenth century. It was good of Google to remind us, in one of its doodles, that 8 February was Dmitri Mendeleev’s birthday (the 182nd, as it happens, but then Google makes a bit of a point of celebrating slightly odd anniversaries).
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