• Question: How important do you think the periodic table is?

    Asked by molineux to Adam, Joanna, Louise S, Louise W, Marcus on 16 Nov 2012.
    • Photo: Louise Stanley

      Louise Stanley answered on 16 Nov 2012:

      Hi,

      It is important because it means you don’t actually have to remember what each element does.

      All you have to do is remember what each group does (the columns) and remember that the elements at the left hand end of each row (the “periods”) are metals and they get less metallic as you move to the right (towards the noble gases).

      Then so long as you can remember which group the element you are interested in comes from you can say what it will do!

      For example Sodium (Na) is in group 1. If you drop pure sodium into water it reacts very strongly (look on you tube for examples!) to produce hydrogen gas and sodium hydroxide. Using the periodic table you can predict that all other elements in group 1 will do the same. And they do!

    • Photo: Louise Walkin

      Louise Walkin answered on 17 Nov 2012:

      Yes, it is very important! We need to know what the metals are and the non-metals. We also need to know their relationship to one another. It is also useful when discovering new elements. It also explains the chemical behaviour of the elements in relation to one another. Then you can predict what might happen in an experiment! 🙂

    • Photo: Adam Paige

      Adam Paige answered on 19 Nov 2012:

      It was amazingly important when predicted by Mendeleev. He realised how elements fit this table despite the fact that we didnt know all the elements then. So he saw there were gaps – elements that must exist but they didnt then know. Later scientists proved his theory by finding those missing elements and showing they had exactly the chemical properties that Mendeleev said they would.

      Also, the way elements are grouped in Mendeleev’s periodic table gave physicists a big clue as to what makes an element. We now know that this arrangement occurs because of the electron properties of these elements – what we refer to as electron orbitals. I find it incredible that this big clue to the complex quantum physics of electron orbital theory explaining the physcial chemical properties of atomic matter came purely from noticing some patterns in the behaviour of a few elements and drawing a table to group those similar elements together.

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