Recognize these rows and columns? You may remember a detail or two about this mighty table’s organization from a long-ago chemistry class. Elements are ordered according to their number of protons, or atomic number. Metals are mostly to the left and nonmetals to the right. The column at the far right holds the noble gases, named for their general unwillingness to interact with other elements.
When Dmitrii Mendeleev proposed his periodic table 150 years ago, no one knew what was inside an atom. Today, we know that an element’s place on the table, along with its chemical properties, has a lot to do with the element’s proton number as well as how its electrons are configured.
In one glance, you can see the elements that make up nature’s entire
repertoire of chemical substances plus how those elements relate to one another. But the elements are also individuals, with scientific idiosyncrasies and nuanced stories of discovery. A few of our favorites are on these pages.
And the table is still a work in progress. Four elements were named as recently as 2016. Boundary-busting research efforts, along with scientific mysteries, remain.
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