2025-02-07

National Periodic Table Day 2025

Periodic Table of the Elements    
There was a time when I became enamored with the periodic table and felt compelled to learn the elements — to the point that I thought it should be included in everyone's education. Well ... though that timeframe was protracted I came to my senses long before the avent of The Big Bang Theory having given in up somwhere in the early 1980s for medical pursuits.

The periodic table aka the periodic table of the elements is an ordered arrangement of the chemical elements into rows which represent periods and columns which represent groups. They depict 'Periodic Law' which states when the elements are arranged in order of their atomic numbers an approximate recurrence of their properties may be observed.

Today we have National Periodic Table Day. It happens each Febrary 7 since 2016 under the auspices of one Mr David T Steineker of the Jefferson County Public School in Kentucky for reasons which remain largely unpublished. The chart remains the original idea of Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev, the Russian Chemist who used periodic law to correct some then accepted properties of some elements and also predict three such as the valence and atomic weight of uranium and three elements which remained undiscovered.

Here here to our chemical scientists who have led the way and to Mr David T Steineker for supporting the chart which puts it all together.