Geoff Rayner-Canham: The periodic table: past present, and future
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Geoff Rayner‑Canham: The periodic table: past present, and future World Scientific Publishing, New Jersey, 2020 Eric Scerri1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
I would like to begin this review by stating that this is an absolutely wonderful book that is full of gems about the elements and the periodic table. In my own 2007 book on the periodic table I concluded that we should perhaps think of the variety of tables that have appeared as spanning a spectrum running from the most abstract and ‘perfect’ tables such as Janet’s left-step table representation, to the unruly tables that emphasize the uniqueness of elements. To illustrate the latter category, I featured an image of Rayner-Canham’s table that is also the table shown on the front cover of his new book now under review. Rayner Canham’s book is all about the individuality of elements and how so many of the commonly held trends in the periodic table are far more complicated than we normally acknowledge. The book adopts a historical approach, in each of 15 chapters, and provides ample references to the literature, including many citations to articles that have appeared in this journal incidentally. It begins by taking an unusually fundamental approach, for a chemistry book, in discussing the nuclear structure of isotopes of the elements. For example, the author gives a detailed explanation of why tellurium has a higher atomic weight than iodine even though its atomic number is one unit lower. Chapter 2 begins to review some selected atomic properties starting with the different approaches to electronegativity, the Van Arkel triangle and several related properties like ionization energy, the half-filled subshell myth and electron affinity. The author has a deep aversion to the idea that chemistry might be boring, something that he repeats several times and strives to justify throughout his book. In chapter 3 the positions of hydrogen and helium are discussed in great detail. Chapter 4 concerns a further topic that has been a personal interest, namely the question of which elements should be placed in group 3 of the periodic table (Scerri 2020). Further disputed issues are covered in chapter 5 which discusses the categorization of elements into metalloids, weak metals and normal metals, none of which have clear-cut meanings among chemists. In the remaining chapters the emphasis is on the sheer individuality of the elements and their lack of conformity to the well-known and simplified trends that are typically described in elementary books and courses in inorganic chemistry. The author’s * Eric Scerri [email protected] 1
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA
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interests shine through especially clearly when discussing transition metals where we are told that, “chemists like smooth patterns but that such behavior simply does not occur when details are examined more closely”. Another very illuminating chapter concerns the relationship between the n groups that the groups that are numbered n + 10
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