Quotes & Sayings About Periodic Table Of Elements

For his part, Mendeleev scanned Lecoq de Boisbaudran's data on gallium and told the experimentalist, with no justification, that he must have measured something wrong, because the density and weight of gallium differed from Mendeleev's predictions. This betrays a flabbergasting amount of gall, but as science philosopher-historian Eric Scerri put it, Mendeleev always "was willing to bend nature to fit his grand philosophical scheme." The only difference between Mendeleev and crackpottery is that Mendeleev was right: Lecoq de Boisbaudran soon retracted his data and published results that corroborated Mendeleev's predictions. — Sam Kean

Sure...the boy was precocious. But having been precocious himself, Lowell was never wowed by teenagers who could recite the periodic table of elements or whatever. He was on to them. Precocious was not the same as smart, much less the same as wise, and the perfect opposite of informed - since the more you prided yourself on knowing the less you listened and the less you learned. Worse, with application less glibly gifted peers often caught up with or overtook prodigies by early adulthood, and meanwhile the kid to whom everything came so effortlessly never mastered the grind of sheer hard work. — Lionel Shriver

I completely failed to see the value in memorizing the stupid periodic table of elements. — Inara Scott

Mendeleev, unlike the squeamish Meyer, had balls enough to predict that new elements would be dug up. Look harder, you chemists and geologists, he seemed to taunt, and you'll find them. — Sam Kean

Here she was at eight, with the chemistry set she'd begged for at Christmas. Her father was beside her in this one, showing her a picture of the periodic table, explaining how everything on earth, everything in the universe, even - people, starfish, cement, bicycles, and far-off planets - was made up of a combination of these elements. "Isn't it amazing to think of, Ruthie?" he'd asked. Ruthie had found the idea that we were only a series of neatly constructed puzzle pieces or building blocks vaguely unsettling - even at eight, she wanted there to be more to it than that. — Jennifer McMahon

Green chemistry is replacing our industrial chemistry with nature's recipe book. It's not easy, because life uses only a subset of the elements in the periodic table. And we use all of them, even the toxic ones. — Janine Benyus

The most stable elements, Clarice, appear in the middle of the periodic table, roughly between iron and silver.
Between iron and silver. I think that is appropriate for you. — Thomas Harris

Of all the elements in the periodic table, not a single one is indestructible. — Marty Rubin

One theme I ran into over and over while writing about the periodic table was the future of energy and the question of which element or elements will replace carbon as king. — Sam Kean

About seven years later I was given a book about the periodic table of the elements. For the first time I saw the elegance of scientific theory and its predictive power. — Sidney Altman

I wish that in order to secure his party's nomination, a presidential candidate would be required to point at the sky and name all the stars; have the periodic table of the elements memorized; rattle off the kings and queens of Spain; define the significance of the Gatling gun; joke around in Latin; interpret the symbolism in seventeenth-century Dutch painting; explain photosynthesis to a six-year-old; recite Emily Dickenson; bake a perfect popover; build a shortwave radio out of a coconut; and know all the words to Hoagy Carmichael's "Two Sleepy People", Johnny Cash's "Five Feet High and Rising", and "You Got the Silver" by the Rolling Stones ... What we need is a president who is at least twelve kinds of nerd, a nerd messiah to come along every four years, acquire the Secret Service code name Poindexter, install a Revenge of the Nerds screen saver on the Oval Office computer, and one by one decrypt our woes. — Sarah Vowell

I still have a vivid memory of my excitement when I first saw a chart of the periodic table of elements. — Joe Murray

The body tends to treat elements in the same column of the periodic table as equivalents. — Sam Kean

Scarily, cadmium is not even the worst poison among the elements. It sits above mercury, a neurotoxin. And to the right of mercury sit the most horrific mug shots on the periodic table - thallium, lead, and polonium - the nucleus of poisoner's corridor. — Sam Kean

When very large stars die, they create temperatures so high that protons begin to fuse in all sorts of exotic combinations, to form all the elements of the periodic table. If, like me, you're wearing a gold ring, it was forged in a supernova explosion. — David Christian

Periodic Wall of the Elements Q. What would happen if you made a periodic table out of cube-shaped bricks, where each brick was made of the corresponding element? — Randall Munroe

Many different elements can form isomers, but only a few elements on the periodic table, like hafnium, can form isomers that last more than fractions of a second - and might therefore be turned into weapons. — Sam Kean

[The] structural theory is of extreme simplicity. It assumes that the molecule is held together by links between one atom and the next: that every kind of atom can form a definite small number of such links: that these can be single, double or triple: that the groups may take up any position possible by rotation round the line of a single but not round that of a double link: finally that with all the elements of the first short period [of the periodic table], and with many others as well, the angles between the valencies are approximately those formed by joining the centre of a regular tetrahedron to its angular points. No assumption whatever is made as to the mechanism of the linkage. Through the whole development of organic chemistry this theory has always proved capable of providing a different structure for every different compound that can be isolated. Among the hundreds of thousands of known substances, there are never more isomeric forms than the theory permits. — Nevil Vincent Sidgwick

Everywhere in the universe, the periodic table has the same basic structure. Even if an alien civilization's table weren't plotted out in the castle-with-turrets shape we humans favor, their spiral or pyramidal or whatever-shaped periodic table would naturally pause after 118 elements. — Sam Kean

The noble gases, which reside on the East Coast of the periodic table, are its aristocrats - detached and aloof, never bothering to interact with the rabble of common elements that make up the vast majority of the world. — Sam Kean

Our star, and most stars, are made mostly of hydrogen, which is the number one element in the universe: 90% of all atomic nuclei are hydrogen, about 8% are helium, and the remaining 2% comprise all the other elements in the periodic table. All — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Vince Russo destroyed the Periodic Table as he only recognises the element of surprise. — Jim Cornette

When it comes to the periodic table, the United States really blew its chance to make a name for itself. If you look over a map of all the elements named for cities, states, countries, and continents, it's not surprising that European locales dominate the map. — Sam Kean