Saturday, January 9, 2016

Finding the right Periodic Table

One of the challenges of teaching chemistry is finding the right periodic table to use.  There are a plethora of different periodic tables out there, but they have way too much information on them for beginning chemistry students to use or even understand.  Some of them are worse than trying to find which way to go after exiting off the George Washington Bridge - there are too many billboards!  On the other hand, you can get simple tables but they don't have enough information to be useful.  Since the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), chemistry's version of  the IOC, just gave their blessing to the last four elements discovered, or more appropriately, produced in a particle accelerator within the past decade, I figured it was a good time to update the periodic table I made several years ago.  I was unable to find one that worked for what I was teaching so I used Word to make my own Periodic Table (GOOD THING I LIKE REALLY TEDIOUS JOBS).

The updated Periodic Table includes: 1) recognizing the elements 113, 115, 117, and 118 are real; 2) names for element 114, now Flerovium (Fl), and element 116, now Livermorium (Lv); and updating the atomic masses to one or two decimal places (although not as accurate, it is much simpler).

NOTE: Because you wanted to know what they are named after...
Flerovium is named after Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions, Russia, where the element was discovered in 1998.

Livermorium is named after the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, USA, where the element was discovered in 2000.

Link to the PDF Version can be downloaded from under the Resources page my Google SitePT Blocks (2016).

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