Periodic update…
Thanks to Theodore Gray (co-founder with Stephen Wolfram of Wolfram Research, and co-creator of the extraordinary Mathematica), a nifty set of periodic table applications and artifacts…
One can spell one’s name “periodically”…
… see a periodic table table…
…or just learn what there is to know about the elements.
As we realize that, after all, it *is* elementary, Watson, we might wish a revolutionary Happy Birthday to the Polish mathematician, physician, classical scholar, translator, artist, Catholic cleric, jurist, governor, military leader, diplomat, and economist Nicolaus Copernicus, whose avocational interest in astronomy led him to formulate a scientifically-based heliocentric cosmology that displaced the Earth from the center of the universe. He was born on this date in 1473.
In fact, Greek, Indian and Muslim thinkers had published heliocentric hypotheses centuries before Copernicus. But his publication of a scientific theory of heliocentrism– his epochal book, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres)– was the starting point of modern astronomy and of the Scientific Revolution.
