“We are not claiming that our version is in any way ‘more correct’ than the traditional table,” the authors wrote.
The upside-down version aimed to show the value of a fresh perspective. The mathematician and musician Tom Lehrer set it to music (by Gilbert and Sullivan), and the Italian chemist, writer and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi used it as the basis for an idiosyncratic memoir (“The Periodic Table”). The Internet Database of Periodic Tables lists more than 1,000 versions, including a table of elemental scarcity, as well as cupcake, clock, Lego and haiku variations, as well as some more technical adaptations. Mainz added, “If you want to communicate with an alien race, put up a periodic table, because that arrangement is universal no matter where you are.” Girolami said, “I can tell you lots of things about it - whether it’s a metal or not, whether it is abundant on earth or not - simply by noting its location in the periodic table.”ĭr. “If you tell me an element is in a certain place,” Dr. Together with Carmen Giunta, a chemist at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, they organized a 150th anniversary symposium, held this week during the American Chemical Society’s national meeting in San Diego.
Both are inorganic chemists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Much like if I look at a map of the United States, and I’m in Maine, I can tell that the temperatures there are going to be lower than if I were in Florida,” Gregory Girolami said in a joint interview with his wife, Vera Mainz.