Is the periodic table wrong?

Posted on

Scerri Eric Small

UCLA lecturer and author Eric Scerri quoted in British newspaper about the possibility that elements may need to be reordered.

Dr. Scerri is the author of the book 30-Second Elements: The 50 Most Significant Elements, Each Explained in Half a Minute, which has been translated and released in France, Canada, Russia, Netherlands, Australia, Taiwan, and China.

From the Daily Mail.com (by Richard Gray for MailOnline):

It has been a key part school chemistry lessons for more than a century, but now the periodic table may need to be redrawn after scientists found a rare element may be very different from originally thought.

Researchers have for the first time been able to test how much energy is required to strip an electron from an atom of the radioactive element lawrencium.

Periodic Table 0

Lawrencium, marked as Lr on the periodic table above, currently sits in a separate block from the main table.

The rare metal currently sits at the very bottom of the periodic table at the end of a group of elements known as the actinides, which sit in a separate block from the main table.

But the results of new research suggest the element may have properties similar to sodium and potassium, which may fuel arguments that it would be better placed in the main body the periodic table.

If it is redraw, it means that chemistry students could have to relearn the order of the how the elements appear.

Further in the article – 

However, Dr Eric Scerri, a chemist and historian at the University of California Los Angeles, said the results supported the push to move lawrencium into the min part of the table.

He said: ‘If the periodic table is presented in the more correct 32-column or long-format, and if one maintains the order of increasing atomic numbers throughout the table, one is inevitably led to the conclusion that Lu and Lr belong to group 3 and that La and Ac should be placed at the start of the f-block elements.’ 

Read entire article here