Pimp my periodic table
Surely the most successful image to communicate a scientific concept is the the periodic table—science's equivalent of the London underground map. Now the table has been turned into a spiral (via 3quarksdaily). Gone are the familiar rows and columns, replaced instead with a continuous sweeping curve resembling a spiral galaxy, an aesthetic allusion to our heavenly origins.
Creator of the chemical galaxy, Oxford ecologist Philip Stewart was inspired by Edgar Longman’s 1951 spiral form of the table: "I realized that the atoms that make up a galaxy can be arranged in just the same form as the galaxy itself."
In his conversation with Slate’s Jon Lackman, Stewart explains that the old table was ready for a makeover:
The old table arose and survived because we live in a world of boxes. We're used to them. But I think the human brain is actually more comfortable with curves. The old, square forms were very convenient for old-style industry. But until a few thousand years ago, humans lived happily in a world without rectangles.All this talk of boxes reminded me of Roald Hoffman’s rebut of chemical reductionism in The Same and Not the Same:
The world out there is refractory to reduction, and if we insist that it must be reducible, all that we do is put ourselves into a box. The box is the limited class of problems that are susceptible to a reductionist understanding. It’s a small box.Like Hoffman, Stewart is helping show the humanity of chemistry by encouraging us to step out of the box.
