[Lex Computer & Tech Group/LCTG] XKCD for the Chemists among us

[Robert Primak]

 For those not familiar with the reasons for the current arrangement of the Periodic Table of the Elements, let me point out a few items:
Helium was originally thought to be nonreactive and to have its "shell" full of electrons. Hence, a Noble Gas. More recently it has been determined that helium can react with other elements, but only under extreme conditions. Other "noble gases" do form compounds much more frequently than helium. And the Column 2 elements other than He do form certain salts which are very similar chemically to one another. He does not form such salts.
Again, the Lanthanides and Actinides have extremely similar properties, and all are Inner-Transition elements. Their electronic structures feature very closely-spaced energy-levels, sometimes overlapping, for their electrons. The probability cloud models for the Inner-Transition elements can get very complex. And so can their chemistry. They are indeed in a world unto themselves. But including them horizontally inside the Periodic Chart makes it unwieldy wide, so their rows were separated and place arbitrarily below the main Table. Mendeleev did not know of the Inner-Transition elements, so this was not an issue for him in creating the Periodic Table. 
As for naming of the elements, especially the more recently discovered or created ones, there is already some controversy. Russian Periodic Tables use different names for some elements from the ones used in the US and Europe, and there are arguments still going on about renaming some of the elements.
The remarkable predictive utility of the Periodic Table is what has made this format so enduring, including among chemists. (I have a B.S. in Chemistry, BTW.) To mess with its structure would degrade its utility in more than a few ways. This is not about geometric elegance or linguistic or political correctness. It is about the scientific value of a model which is, after all, just one representation of a large amount of data gathered and organized over more than a century and a half. (Has anyone looked through the CRC Handbook lately? Me neither.) Its history is almost as interesting as the many things the Table can tell us about the elements it presents and organized.
Fun fact -- Technetium  was discovered (created) partly because there was a hole in the Periodic Table where an element ought to have been. To this day, I don't know if physicists have fully explained why an element of this structure would not exist in nature. Does someone else in our group have the explanation or a reference to it? 
Anyway, it is the predictive usefulness of the Table, as well as its capacity to organize a lot of experimental data, which have made it such an enduring icon of science. That is why no one has yet made popular any serious revisions since the introduction of the Inner-Transition rows. 
But members of this group probably already know much if not all of this. 
The comments sections listed as "explanations" make many of the same observations I have made before looking at the "explanations". 
-- Bob Primak 

    On Thursday, June 30, 2022 at 07:52:12 AM EDT, Steve Isenberg <smisenberg at gmail.com> wrote:  
 
 He offers his opinion and corrections for the Periodic Table of the Elements.  Makes sense to me.
from https://xkcd.com/2639/

Explanation at https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2639:_Periodic_Table_Changes
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