Editing 2975: Classical Periodic Table

{{comic
| number    = 2975
| date      = August 21, 2024
| title     = Classical Periodic Table
| image     = classical_periodic_table_2x.png
| imagesize = 740x530px
| noexpand  = true
| titletext = Personally I think mercury is more of a 'wet earth' hybrid element.
}}

==Explanation==
An element is a basic atomic building block of the physical world. Ancient civilizations  believed in a small number of broad elements. The most famous are the {{w|classical element|classical (Hellenistic) elements}} of earth, fire, air, water, and sometimes a fifth element such as "void", "ether", or "quintessence". The Chinese {{w|Wuxing (Chinese philosophy)|wuxing}} system was a bit different, dropping air and adding elements for wood and metal. Such elemental theories fell out of favor as alchemists and later scientists began to discover what we now recognize as the atomic model, and today 118 elements are recognized and organized into the {{w|Periodic Table of Elements}}.

Here, Randall has taken a modern periodic table and merged and color-coded the modern elements to represent the four classical elements, leaving only the edges and boundaries between dissimilar regions. Gaseous elements such as hydrogen are colored light blue for "air". Bromine and mercury, the two elements that remain liquid at room temperature and pressure, are colored dark blue for "water". Radioactive elements along the bottom of the table whose isotopes have only extremely short half-lives are red for "fire", with the rest of the chart filled in brown for "earth". The "earth" region includes many elements which are radioactive but have isotopes whose half-lives are greater than 1 day.  (All elements also have radioactive isotopes with much shorter half-lives, but most of the universe's supply of any given element will tend to be its longest-lived isotope, since others rapidly decay.)

The title text says that mercury should be classified as "wet earth". While it's a liquid, it has a very high surface tension so even large drops will stick together and may seem almost like a gel. Additionally, as evidenced by a {{w|Pseudoscience|very trustworthy source}}[https://what-if.xkcd.com/50/], mercury (at room temperature) is functionally a solid for many fluid purposes, including boating.
===Table Sections===
{| class=wikitable
! scope="col" | Section in Randall’s Table
! scope="col" | Symbol
! scope="col" | Periodic table groups
! scope="col" | Elements contained
! scope="col" | Explanation
|-
| Air || A || All noble gases and most reactive nonmetals || Hydrogen, Helium, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Fluorine, Neon, Chlorine, Argon, Krypton, Xenon, Radon || These elements are a gas at room temperature, so they are grouped into "air".
|-
| Water || W || One metal and one nonmetal || Bromine, Mercury || These elements are liquid at room temperature, so they are grouped into “water”.
|-
| Fire || F || One alkali metal and many synthetic metals || Astatine, Francium, Nobelium, Lawrencium, Rutherfordium, Dubnium, Seaborgium, Bohrium, Hassium, Meitnerium, Darmstadtium, Roentgenium, Copernicium, Nihonium, Flerovium, Moscovium, Livermorium, Tennessine, Oganesson || These are all highly radioactive metals (with perhaps an exception for astatine and oganesson, which may be metalloids or nonmetals) with the most stable isotope having a half-life less than one day and a tendency to violently decompose, hence they are classified as "fire". Any unshielded exposure to them tends to include severe burns, be they radiation or otherwise.
|-
| Earth || E || Most metals and metalloids || All other elements || Most of the periodic table consists of solid metals (and a few solid metalloids and nonmetals) which collectively make up most of the planet "{{w|Earth}}" and the life-forms living on it (in combination with each other and several of the marked non-earth elements).
|}

In actual chemistry, the symbol "W" is used for tungsten (from the germanic "Wolfram", taken from the traditional name of the ore-stone that tungsten was originally found in; "Tungsten" is of swedish origin) and "F" is the symbol for fluorine (its latin-derived name was coined for how its common minerals were used to help other smelted ores to 'flow', by lowering the melting point of the mixture). There are no chemical elements currently given the letters "A" or "E", although there are a number of two-character symbols that start with these (and also "F", but none for "W"). Argon, erbium and einsteinium were at certain times (and places) symbolically just their initial letters alone, however, in juxtoposition to "Wo" once having been used for wolfram.

The classical elements (and, as early chemistry developed, some of the earliest known current periodic-table elements) were often given pictorial symbols as a shorthand/code as befit the select, exclusive and secretive nature of that time's alchemical arts. Just one of these representations used a figurative set of triangles: upward-pointing for air and fire, downward-pointing for earth and water, with air and earth having a line across, to give 🜁, 🜂, 🜃 and 🜄.

This comic is similar to [[2913: Periodic Table Regions]], which also groups elements using unconventional methods. The classical elements have been a topic of previous comics, such as [[965: Elements]]

==Transcript==
:[Header:]
:Classical Periodic Table

:[A diagram in the shape of the periodic table of elements is split into labeled colored regions.  Each region is labeled with a large letter over a word in smaller letters. The colored regions are discontinuous with respect to the elements they cover.]

:[The regions and colors are as follows:]
:* A: Air: light blue: Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Fluorine, Chlorine, and the noble gases.
:* W: Water: dark blue: Bromine and Mercury.
:* F: Fire: red-orange: Astatine, Francium, and everything from Nobelium onwards (radioactive).
:* E: Earth: brown: everything else, covers majority of the diagram.

==Trivia== 

* In Randall's first What-If book, it is explained that a 1-liter (sides of 10 cm / ~3.94 inches) cube of Astatine, which cannot exist under standard conditions, would "immediately turn into a column of superheated gas" which would destroy roughly a city block.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Chemistry]]
[[Category:Periodic table]]