Posts Tagged ‘periodic table of elements’
“Elementary, my dear Watson”*…
From Keith Enevoldsen, “The Periodic Table of the Elements, in Pictures and Words“: a periodic table with a drawing of one of the element’s main human uses or natural occurrences. Larger (and zoomable) version here.
There’s another, textual (and more informationally- rich) version here.
* widely attributed to, but never actuallly “said,” by Sherlock Holmes in any of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories
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As we untangle taxonomy, we might send “eureka”-filled birthday greetings to Hieronymous Theodor Richter; he was born on this date in 1824. In 1863, he co-discovered indium (with Ferdinand Reich).
Perpetual Notion Machine…
The principle of explosion (ex falso sequitur quodlibet*), a law of classical logic, asserts that “anything follows from a contradiction”– that’s to say, once a contradiction has been asserted, any proposition (or of course, its opposite) can be inferred from it. Symbolically, that’s:
Readers may be relieved to know that two different models of paraconsistent logic allow for contradiction without explosion.
* “from falsehood/contradiction follows what pleases”
As we revisit our debate strategies, we might recall that it was on this date in 1869 that Dmitri Mendeleev presented the first periodic table of elements to the Russian Chemical Society. Mendeleev’s chart captured the known elements of the day, and allowed him to predict the properties of elements yet to be discovered.
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