Science’s Glaring Oversight
By John Phillip Jaeger
Orderliness.
It is the foundation of our world, our universe, and discovering the orderliness and profound fortuitous interdependencies has been the objective of scientists since the ancients. It is the height of irony that scientists the world over have, for 150 years, overlooked the disorderly name of science’s greatest, best known icon, the *Periodic Table of the Elements.*
https://ptable.comOrigin
In 1869, Dmitri Mendeleev introduced his “Periodic System” of organizing the fifty-six elements then known. Since his discovery, his original name for it was distorted and has remained so ever since.
Conformity
Through force of habit, and conformity, both of which are inimical to science, hundreds of millions of scientists, professors, teachers and technicians have turned blind eyes to the grammatical and scientific error implicit in “The Table.” It is this: Adjectives modify the noun immediately following.
Hence we do not say “The black man’s eye,” but “The man’s black eye.” Every scientific paper that is published is rigorously examined and corrected for grammar. Not so “The Table.”
Periodicity
It is the elements which are periodic, not the table.
The correct term is
The Table of Periodic Elements.
It is inexcusable that this glaring scientific error has been overlooked for perhaps 150 years, because “that’s the way we’ve always done it”. Scholars are currently discussing reorganization options for the Table. There could be no better time to change its formal name for grammatical and scientific accuracy.
“Heavier than air human flight is impossible.” – Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society, 1895
"Science advances one funeral at a time." - Max Planck, Nobel Laureate in Physics
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” – George Bernard Shaw,
Man and SupermanCall me unreasonable.
