|
The 170th Anniversary of Dmitry Mendeleev has been recently commemorated. This great compatriot of ours developed the Periodic Table of chemical elements. His name sits next to Lomonosov’s in the line of the most illustrious Russian scientists and inventors. Lomonosov, Mendeleev, Pavlov, Kurchatov, Korolev. I believe he should be singled out as one of a kind in terms of the world scientific achievements.
The Russians don’t waste their time on trifles. A number of theories were put together to explain the phenomenon. Some point at the vastness of Russia, others blame a six-month winter, or a lack of roads and so on. Anyway, quite a few Russians seemed to be more inclined to challenge the global issues and leave the trivialities behind. One Konstanstin Tsialkovsky, a teacher from the Russian provincial town of Kaluga, could have been better off designing a hearing aid (he needed one for himself quite desperately). Instead, he began writing about interplanetary space flights and people moving for other planets.
Alexander Vernadsky, an excellent specialist in geochemistry, could have studied rocks all his life. But he ended up elaborating a theory of sensible stratum, a noosphere, of the planet Earth. Vasily Chizhevsky held out the solar activity as the root of all events that occurred on Earth. In other words, we’re after something really big, let them foreigners deal in petty things as we keep ourselves busy creating some global theories – most likely quite preposterous – on the basis of a bare minimum of experimental data.
Yet true wonders occasionally happen, provided that a suitable man of genius is involved. Like Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev who created his great Periodic Table. It’s not all a customary topic of discussion, though one thing is clear as a day from my point of view: the table was absolutely impossible to produce using only the data available at the time.
Let’s take a look at the table drawn by the author himself. Around 60 chemical elements with their atomic weights had been known by the time (by now the number has nearly doubled). The idea to arrange the elements according their atomic weights as the latter increase seems only natural and rather banal. The task of spotting their periodic natural properties in the arrangement was a little more difficult. Yet a lot of work had been done in that department before Mendeleev got down to business. “The rule of octets” (each eighth element has very similar properties) was already in place, as well as “the rule of triads” (a middle element in every three elements with similar properties has a mean atomic weight). However, nobody was able to build a system for all the elements even by making use of those natural characteristics. According to researchers, some properties of numerous elements were either determined incorrectly or still remained to be identified, and some mistakes were made while measuring atomic weights of certain elements.
Since the days of his youth, Mendeleev had held enormous respect for Isaac Newton. But the inventor of the Periodic Table was a great chemist, not a physicist. That’s way he used the elements’ chemical properties as a basis for his table. He decided to arrange the chemically similar elements one beneath another in correspondence with their increasing atomic weights. But the arrangement didn’t work. Beryllium wreaks havoc on the whole picture right from the first line of the table while carbon turns into an identical twin brother of aluminum, and titanium soon happens to be another fake twin brother. Both incidents look like complete nonsense when it comes to chemical properties. Seems like the right time for stopping the search for the principles of formation of a periodic table. Some prominent men of science of that period quit searching as a result.
Mendeelev reportedly saw a concept of the table in his dream. Might as well be.
At least the way he used for removing the obstacle doesn’t look logical at all. He might have been given an “extrasensory revelation”, a very popular subject to talk about nowadays. Mendeleev simply changed beryllium’s atomic weight and left a blank slot in between calcium and titanium, thus predicting the discovery of scandium.
The scientist did the same to nearly one thirds of all the elements known by that time, and that’s the most amazing thing about it. For instance, he changed the atomic weight of uranium from universally accepted 60 to 240, a fourfold increase! He also swapped the locations of cobalt and nickel, tellurium and iodine. He forecast three new elements in a row, changed the atomic weights of dozen elements, and also brought out the law which says that “the properties of elements are in periodic dependence to their atomic weights” by publishing the first version of his table in 1869. Nothing of the kind! Nothing depended on those atomic weights. The great chemist was surely playing tricks. By then he must have figured it out. The point is that the properties of elements are in periodic dependence to... their respective numbers assigned to them by Mendeelev in his table. It was Menedeleev who gave orders to the elements to make a formation of his own making, and Nature succumbed to his instructions.
We can only speculate on how on earth it could happen. And what about Andrei Bely, a poet, who wrote about an atomic explosion 30 years prior to Hiroshima?
The world history of science lists just a handful of predictions with similar historic impact. Perhaps Leonardo da Vinci would count. Incidentally, Mendeleev can be likened to da Vinci by universality of his talents. He managed to score success in a great variety of scientific pursuits.
Mendeleev’s great act of creation evolved in a truly scientific theory only upon the discovery of scandium, gallium, germanium, and precious gases, including argon that fitted just fine in the table preceding potassium, though the atomic weight of the former is greater. Years later a physicist called Mosley provided an explanation with regard to the numbers assigned to the elements in the table. According to him, a number signifies an atomic nucleus, and the properties of elements are in periodic dependence to a nuclear charge which equals a number in the Periodic Table.
There’s a theory that says that the world is unknowable and the researcher invariably influences the result of an experiment. A thermometer immersed in the boiling water for taking temperatures produces a cooling of water to 1/1000 degree. Therefore there’re many coexisting universes with different properties. And our Universe that comprises about 114 elements was designed by Dmitry Mendeleev.
He was born to the family of a school director in Tobolsk, a fourteenth child. He was a school teacher himself for a few years in Odessa after graduating from the St. Petersburg Teachers College. He also taught chemistry at the St. Petersburg University.
He lived up to 73 years of age. Wrote 500 articles on chemistry, physical chemistry, technology, physics, economics and geodesics. He organized the Board of Weights and Measures and became its first director. He was a university professor; resigned in protest to restrictions imposed on the university’s autonomy; was elected a member of 90 foreign Academies of Sciences and got a blackball from the Russian one. The panel of academicians found that his studies weren’t fundamental enough and far too related to practical needs He was built suitcases and saw clothes for himself as a hobby. He believed that ready-made clothes weren’t comfortable enough. Not only did he write an article on distilling that was included in the Brokhaus and Ephron encyclopedia, he also prepared an article on vareniki, a sort of dumplings stuffed with berry or cottage cheese. Modesty was the worst human trait in his opinion. He was good at securing state funds for his laboratory. He observed a solar eclipse flying in a balloon. He put forth a theory of non-organic origin of oil and metal hydrides. Geologists and chemists are beginning to look into it following a hundred years of academic indifference. He was 35 when he made the Periodic Table.
Dmitry Mendeleev was given a precious scale made from pure aluminum as a present for one of his anniversaries. At the time no electrochemical production method of that cheap metal was available, though there’re references to the method in Mendeleev’s studies. American scientists successfully synthesized 101th element and dubbed it “mendelevium”. There’s a mineral called after Mendeleev, a volcano and an undersea ridge named after the scientist. And Mendeleev’s Crater is located on the other side of the Moon.
by Peter Obraztsov, Candidate of Chemical Sciences
комментарии к статье (0)
|
15:23 09 февраля 2010
