Gallery: Artistic Alchemy
 

chemical elements Series 

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Their names are an assortment of the familiar--like Oxygen, Hydrogen, and Carbon; the unfamiliar and almost unpronounceable--like Praseodymium, Ytterbium, and Ununoctium; and those that are rhythmically poetic and much fun to pronounce-- like Beryllium, Rutherfordium, and Rubidium. To an artist, some suggest a color, like Cobalt, Carbon, Manganese, Copper, Silver, Platinum, Titanium, and Gold.  But as it turns out, most of the now 118 identified elements are colorless or silvery white.  Regardless of name or color the elements in the Periodic Table represent a complex and systematic ordering of the Earth’s chemicals, both those that are primordial (or naturally occurring) and those that have been synthesized.   Most of us recognize the elements, as chemists do, by their unique combinations of alphabetical abbreviation and atomic number (the number of protons in their nuclei).  Thus, N-7 is Nitrogen because it has 7 protons; Na-11 is sodium, with 11 protons; Mn-25 is Manganese, with its 25 protons, and so on.  It is this unique assemblage of letters and numbers, each representing an element that initially attracted me to the Periodic Table. 

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The degree to which the elements are systematically organized is truly awesome.  The atomic number ordering, from 1 (Hydrogen) to 118 (Ununoctium) is most familiar, of course, but the Table also groups elements into Families (columns) and Periods (rows) and within these, by recurring chemical properties such as atomic radius, ionization energy, and electronegativity.  These in turn increase and decrease at regular intervals, moving up and down and from left to right within the columns and rows.  Altogether  there are four different ways to group the elements and six different periodic trends to gradate within groups, all intertwined and related in a single table.  The degree of patterning is impressive.  One comes away from viewing these intricately organized relationships with the conclusion that there is order in the universe.  At the same time, there is just enough variation and exceptions to recognized patterns to make for scientific controversies and continued exploration. 

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