One of the difficulties of depicting a round earth on a flat map has been the long perceived distances between points at opposite sides of a world map, when in fact those points are very near to each other.
Did you realize that the same difficulty has occurred in chemistry? In 1869 a Russian chemist named Dmitri Mendeleev created the periodic table of the elements, arranging elements in order according to their atomic number, and in rows according to his theory about concentric clouds of orbiting electrons.
The table has been very useful to understand shared characteristics of elements that are located close to each other, for example in the same column in neighboring rows. But like our flat maps of the world, the two-dimensional periodic table is distorted.
Now, Philip Stewart, and ecologist at the University of Oxford in England, has designed a new periodic table with the shape of an elliptical spiral. Click here for an image and brief explanation. For a fuller explanation and to order a poster, click here.
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