Abstract
One of the biggest puzzles of 19th-century chemistry was a piece of work by a Russian chemist named Dmitri Mendeleev, who found some strange but systematic repeated behavior among the elements that he arranged in a table called the periodic table of elements. The periodic table is shown in Figure 10.1. The table exhibits a spectacular periodicity (or repetition) of the properties of atomic elements when arranged in order of increasing atomic number, which is the number of electrons in the neutral atom. All elements having similar properties are put in the same column. The rows of the table define the periods. Thus, the first period has two elements, the second and third have eight, the fourth and fifth have 18, and the sixth has 32. It is believed that the seventh period is not complete. This is due to the fact that the atomic nuclei of elements heavier than 92 are increasingly unstable, so much so that it is increasingly difficult for nature to produce them.
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© 2001 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Goswami, A. (2001). Atoms and Chemistry. In: The Physicists’ View of Nature. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-0527-3_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-0527-3_10
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