#Mendeleyev's Dream

[zerogate]

Dmitri Mendeleyev, at the age of twenty-six, attended the First International Chemical Congress at Karlsruhe in 1860 and was impressed by discussion there of methods for calculating atomic weight. He became concerned with the problem of order amongst the elements and made a set of sixty-three cards listing the various chemical and physical properties of each, spending most of his spare time in attempts to arrange these in ways that made scientific sense. By March 1st, 1869, he had tried and rejected hundreds of possible patterns and that afternoon, following the failure of his latest system, he fell into an exhausted sleep – and woke up with the answer.

In order to make sense of the elements, Mendeleyev realised, all he had to do was arrange them, according to their atomic weights, in eight vertical columns. As soon as he did this, they fell into natural patterns, with elements of similar properties such as acidity, hardness and melting point, all grouped together. By evening of that momentous day, he had drawn up his celebrated Periodic Table in which the relationships between various elements were made clear by their regular spacing.

Mendeleyev refined and improved the table later, and in the ensuing century it has been extended and subdivided in a number of ways to allow for new discoveries. But despite the suggestion of over 700 other versions in the interim, his pattern remains the best and most useful yet devised. The strongest test of its validity has been the way in which gaps in the table, deliberately left there by Mendeleyev, have been filled by the discovery of new elements (we now have 107), whose existence the table clearly required. Mendeleyev himself pointed out three major holes, and accurately predicted the properties of gallium, scandium and germanium, which were not actually discovered until 1875, 1879 and 1885 respectively.

Mendeleyev’s brainstorm clearly depicts an underlying pattern of nature, an order amply confirmed and explained by our new knowledge of the behaviour of electrons and protons. And it seems proper and satisfying that this insight, the basic shape of the “dream table”, should have come to him in his sleep. It is not, of course, the only great inspiration to have been arrived at in this way.

[...]

In 1865, another mental breakthrough was made by the German chemist Kekulé von Stradonitz while travelling half-asleep on a bus. He was convinced that the atoms of chemicals, particularly the complex organic molecules, were arranged in special structural forms with their own particular properties. Starting in 1858, he successfully worked out the shape of a series of carbon compounds, but one in particular continued to elude him. He was unable to make sense of benzene, a substance discovered by Michael Faraday in 1825 and in increasing use as a base for new synthetic dyes. Kekulé worried over the problem, but could find no solution until that day on the bus, when it seemed to him that he saw atoms whirling in a serpentine dance. As he watched the movement in his mind’s eye, the tail of one long atomic chain was swallowed by its own head and took on the form of a spinning ring. This architectural vision gave him the clue he needed for description of a whole group of cyclic or ring compounds that still play a crucial role in organic chemistry

[...]

There seems to be direct link between truly creative intelligence and the ability to dilute consciousness, to cut mental corners and practise unusual, lateral thinking in what amounts almost to a state of trance. All the most profound insights seem to flow from breaches in the barrier between waking thought, which tends to be conservative, and dream logic, which is essentially liberal. It cannot be purely accidental that Coleridge composed “Kubla Khan” in his sleep or that Mozart found his best musical inspiration rising like dreams, quite independent of his will.

It seems that, under conditions of dissociation, we have the chance to tune in directly to some of the world’s basic rhythms, to become aware of the pattern behind the process. To know, in the words of Keats, that “what the imagination seizes as beauty, must be truth.”

-- Lyall Watson, Beyond Supernature

[joyfultunes]

Reading Adventures!

In October, I read four books:

From Pompeii by Ingrid Rowland

This book was four stars for me. I enjoyed it, except for one very long chapter full of some objectionable material. I do love history, and natural disasters are fascinating. I learned a lot in this book, and was interested to note all the famous people that visited Pompeii at one point or another.

Mendeleyev's Dream by Paul Strathern

Meh. This book was 3.5 stars for me. I felt the author had an obvious bias that was very annoying. The teaser at the beginning and then the long detour into the entire history of chemistry was unexpected and not entirely welcome. I did get some laughs out of it, though, with some funny quotes from famous chemists.

Valiant Ambition by Nathaniel Philbrick

I loved this book. 5 stars. I almost always rate history books very highly, because I love history so much. This book follows Benedict Arnold during the early years of the Revolutionary War, and shows us his frustrations with Congress and his slow slide toward betrayal. I learned a lot. I didn't know much about him beyond his attempted betrayal of West Point. It was very amusing to learn that he was either dearly loved or bitterly hated, no in between.

The Enigma Girls by Candace Fleming

4 stars. I liked this book a lot. I love to learn about codes and ciphers. This book follows five different young ladies and their roles during World War 2 in code breaking and intelligence. I did not know about this particular bit of history before, and I read practically the entire book in one sitting. This book is written for a younger audience, but that won't take away any enjoyment from older readers.

[fumpkins]

Before there was a periodic table, there was chaos

In the following excerpt from “Mendeleyev’s Dream: The Quest for the Elements,” author Paul Strathern explains the state of chemistry in the years leading up to Dmitri Mendeleyev’s development of the modern-day periodic table.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, numerous components were being found practically every years. This abundance of brand-new components with an ever-widening variety of residential or commercial properties quickly started to provoke concerns. Exactly the number of components were there? Had the majority of them currently been found? Or would there maybe end up being many components? This quickly resulted in more extensive speculations. In some way, among all these components, there should be some type of basic order. Dalton had found that the atoms of each aspect had various weights — however undoubtedly there needed to be more to it than this? Berzelius had actually seen that components appeared to have various electrical affinities. Also, there seemed groups of various type of components with comparable residential or commercial properties — metals which withstood rust (such as gold, silver and platinum), flammable alkali metals (such as potassium and salt), colorless, odor-free gases (such as hydrogen and oxygen) etc. Was it possible that there was some type of basic pattern behind all this?

Chemistry had actually accomplished its clinical status and continuing success mainly through experiment, and such theoretical thinking was saw at best as simple speculation. Why should there be some type of order among the components? After all, there was no genuine proof for such a thing? However popular for order is a standard human quality, not least among researchers. And these speculations ultimately started to discover assistance, if just from scraps of proof.

The very first of these originated from Johan Dobereiner, the teacher of chemistry at the University of Jena. Dobereiner was the boy of a coachman, and was mainly self-educated. He handled to acquire a post as a pharmacist, and excitedly participated in the routine regional public lectures on science. In 1829 he saw that the just recently found aspect bromine had residential or commercial properties which appeared to lie midway in between picked of chlorine and iodine. Not just that, its atomic weight lay precisely midway in between picked of these 2 components.

Dobereiner started studying the list of the recognized components, taped with their residential or commercial properties and atomic weights, and ultimately found another 2 groups of components with the exact same pattern.

Strontium lay midway (in atomic weight, color, residential or commercial properties, and reactivity) in between calcium and barium; and selenium might be likewise put in between sulphur and tellurium. Dobereiner called these groups triads, and started a comprehensive search of the components for more examples, however might discover no more. Dobereiner’s ‘law of triads’ appeared to use just to 9 of the fifty-four recognized components, and was dismissed by his contemporaries as simple coincidence.

Which was it, for the time being. Chemistry had actually suffered enough from incorrect theories (4 components, phlogiston, etc.). The method forward now lay through experiment.

It would be over thirty years after Dobereiner’s law of triads before another considerable effort was made to find a pattern in the components. Regrettably, this contribution was to come from a researcher whose sparkle was matched just by his waywardness.

Alexandre-Emile Beguyer de Chancourtois was born in Paris in 1820. His puppy love was geology. De Chancourtois didn’t turn his substantial skills to chemistry up until he was in his forties. In 1862 he produced a paper explaining his innovative “telluric screw,” which showed that there did undoubtedly seem some type of pattern among the components. De Chancourtois’ ‘telluric screw’ included a cylinder on which was drawn a coming down spiral line. At routine periods along this line de Chancourtois outlined each of the components according to its atomic weight. He was interested to discover that the residential or commercial properties of these components tended to duplicate when the components read off in vertical columns down the cylinder. It appeared that after every sixteen systems of atomic weight the residential or commercial properties of the coordinating components tended to show striking resemblances with those vertically above them on the cylinder. De Chancourtois’ paper was appropriately released, however sadly he picked to go back to geological terms when describing specific components, and at one phase even presented his own variation of numerology (the alchemy of mathematics, in which specific numbers have their own mystical significance). To make matters even worse, the publishers left out to consist of de Chancourtois’ illustration of the cylinder, therefore rendering the post essentially incomprehensible to all however the most consistent and educated reader.

This subject seemingly brought in a specific kind of clinical thinker inured to mock. In 1864 the young English chemist John Newlands developed his own pattern of the components, uninformed of de Chancourtois’ puzzling looks into. John Newlands was born in London in 1837, the boy of a Presbyterian minister.

Newlands found that if he noted the components in rising order of their atomic weights, in vertical lines of 7, the residential or commercial properties of the components along the matching horizontal lines were incredibly comparable. As he put it: “In other words, the eighth element starting from a given one is a kind of repetition of the first, like the eighth note in an octave of music.” He called this his “law of octaves.” In the arranged list the alkali metal salt (the sixth heaviest aspect) stood horizontally next to the really comparable potassium (13th heaviest). Also, magnesium (10th) was in line next to the comparable calcium (17th). When Newlands broadened his table to consist of all the recognized components he discovered that the halogens, chlorine (15th), bromine (29th) and Iodine (42nd), which showed finishing comparable residential or commercial properties, all fell in the exact same horizontal column. Whereas the trio of magnesium (10th), silenium (12th) and sulphur (14th), which likewise had finishing comparable residential or commercial properties, fell in the exact same vertical line. Simply put, his law of octaves likewise appeared to integrate the spread similarities kept in mind in Dobereiner’s law of triads.

Regrettably Newlands’ tabulated law of octaves likewise had its faults. The residential or commercial properties of some components, particularly those of greater atomic weight, merely didn’t tally. Nevertheless, Newlands’ law of octaves was a certain bear down any previous concepts. Undoubtedly, lots of now concern it as the very first strong proof that there was undoubtedly some detailed pattern to the components. In 1865 Newlands reported his findings to the Chemical Society in London, however his concepts showed ahead of their time. The put together worthies simply mocked his law of octaves. In the middle of the basic merrymaking, one even asked him sardonically if he had actually attempted organizing the components in alphabetical order. It would be a quarter of a century before Newlands’ accomplishment was lastly acknowledged, when the Royal Society granted him the Davy Medal in 1887.

Dobereiner had actually identified similarities in between separated groups of components. De Chancourtois had actually determined a specific pattern of persistent residential or commercial properties. Newlands had actually extended this pattern and even integrated Dobereiner’s groups. However still his law of octaves didn’t work in general. This was partially due to modern mistakes of numerous atomic weights and partially due to the fact that Newlands made no allowances for hitherto undiscovered components. However it was likewise due to the fact that the rigidness of Newlands’ octave system simply didn’t fit.

It was ending up being significantly apparent that there was some type of pattern to the components, however the response was seemingly more complicated. Chemistry seemed tantalizingly near glimpsing the plan of the very components upon which it was based. Euclid had laid the structures of geometry, Newton’s gravity had described the world in regards to physics and Darwin had represented the development of all types—could chemistry now find the trick which represented the variety of matter? Here, potentially, was the linchpin which might unify all clinical understanding.

From MENDELEYEV’S DREAM by Paul Strathern. Reprinted with consent of Pegasus Books.

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New post published on: https://livescience.tech/2019/05/12/before-there-was-a-periodic-table-there-was-chaos/

[a-typical]

In 1869, Dmitry Mendeleyev had a dream, in which all the elements of nature fell into a table. Upon awakening, he quickly began to arrange the known elements into a regular table, showing that there was a pattern to the elements. Out of the chaos of chemistry suddenly came order and predictability. The sixty or so known elements could be arranged into this simple table, but there were gaps, and Mendeleyev was able to predict the properties of these missing elements. When these elements were actually found in the laboratory, as predicted, it sealed the reputation of Mendeleyev.

The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything by Michio Kaku

[decayandfanfics]

The great book of sayings

PAIRINGS: Tomura Shigaraki x FemReader

SUMMARY: He looks at you, his scarlet eyes fixed on yours, burning a hole through your head, every bit the predator he is, but you are as tough as it gets, so, against your better judgment and any well-founded logic, you answer his silent threat, the animalistic look he gives you with nothing less than a fearless smirk, irises burrowing into his pupils.A clever girl. He thinks, finally labeling you inside his head, cursing himself in the very moment he allows his brain to think of you as more than an asset. He is sure (he knows himself enough to know) he’ll think of this moment many times from now on.A clever pretty girl.

Reader is a typical college student until she gets herself tangled with the league of villains.

WARNINGS: Unhealthy/complicated relationships, violence, Tomura being Tomura, mentions of murder, heroes’ abuse of power, smut later.

A/N: I’m trying so hard to write crusty boy here really in character. At least after AfO is taken. Any misspelled words, english is not my native language so i’m trying Helen.

_______________________________________________________

Chapter 7 / Chapter 8

Familiarity breeds contempt.

Three days became four, then five. The hours flowing between your fingers and before you know it’s been two weeks and three days already.

Not that your will ask them to go. You were pretty sure the little trembling harmony that reigns in your home is as fragile as you decide by asking the wrong question.

To say you are comfortable would be rich, at least. They are a band of murderers, meanwhile you were just a student, but you would be lying if you didn’t accept the fact that the wave of fear had subdue to become some mild annoyance.

The thing is that the famous league of villains is as human as can be. Surely, they are insane, powerful, and menacing, but they also eat, and sleep, and they watch tv and smile when they are happy.

So here you are, getting in tune with their antics. Like how Magne likes to use your flowery shampoo because smells nice and it makes her feel pretty, or that Mr. Compress drinks his milk with honey before sleep.

So, you try your best to remember place and time, but then Toga asks you to paint her nails and asks if she can brush your hair because she wants so desperately to be your friend that something in your heart breaks a little when you remember that she’s just an abandoned child, with no other feminine figure to guide her. (Magne does what she can, but she also faces different kinds of struggle.)

Something in you began to soften to them and you simply cannot help it. Maybe is the little girl in you who wanted to be a hero but saw it impossible.

That’s how you end asking Spinner about his swords, both of you watching some tv program about forging historical weapons, and sharing about your parent’s death with Jin, who cries for you and hugs your tightly telling everyone he’s so happy to have a friend like you.

You end up buying vitamins and oranges for them because no one getting scurvy under your watch. Patching their injures and making some fast clinical examination of them, just to discover some of them are underweight, scrawny, and sharp. So, you cook for them, and made two beds in the living room because you’ve always had a soft spot for broken things and lost causes and somehow, you really want to make them feel nice, and you are no longer sure if this is about your survival or theirs.

Then is Tomura.

You can feel the attraction growing wild inside of you. How your eyes look for his figure inside the house and how you care about what he thinks of you or what he likes.

He’s not helping either, not when he insists on playing chess with you between playful back and forth, or sometimes just sits behind you in the kitchen counter to watch you cook. Silent until he’s not, asking “what’s that” when he sees you putting some spices in the pot.

He’s a curious cat. A fast learner and problem solver. Quick to intuition and creativity.

And you like the way his hair falls wet over his shoulders, clearing away from his face after he showers, looking less like a vagabond and more like a boy.

It’s awful and you know it. You can recognize a crush from a mile away and yours is there pulsing alive for everyone to watch.

The sad part is the what if.

Sometimes Toga asks things. Random things about medicine, about history, about books, and you cannot help it but to vomit everything you know about the subject because you are a scholar above everything else.

Those are the moments when Shigaraki will look at you from the corner of his ruby eyes, attentively listening and absorbing anything you say, siting quietly in a corner of the room, playing with his phone. Then he’ll hear something that catches his interest, asking you about it, his questions always interesting and more complex than Toga’s.

It saddens you to think of him as a student. His brilliance shining under the lights of proper education and love. What positive reinforcement and care could have done for him. Not that you know anything about Shigaraki, but there is no way a loving family could produce such person (not when you are more than sure that he’s clinically depressed), so your bets are on violence and abandonment.

What brilliant career could have achieved, what kind of things would he create, instead of just brutal destruction and (you suspect this one) raw self-loathing.

So, you dream of him sometimes.

You can see him wearing more than just a worn-out coat, a backpack hanging from his shoulder and his soft features clean and properly cared for. What he should look without the dry skin, the slouching and the eyebags.

You can imagine him crossing paths with you on campus, siting with you in the cafeteria, laughing youthfully, his persona free of the heavy weight of his wicked gestures, product of a life expended celebrating too much spite.

Maybe you would have meet him in other circumstances. A “friend of a friend” in some shitty party, the kind of boy that smiles when speaking, sharing some smart-ass joke, his witty speech making you laugh, making you fall.

Just like now.  

“so, how do you know a quirk is a mutation?” Toga ask while you read some article in your laptop.

“well, most of them have a base or function as a variety of some primordial quirk. Those that are mutations simple work outside the norm and tend to be very dangerous for the everyone, including the holder, because as the mutation is a completely new expression of genetics, the rest of the body is still adapting to the evolutionary crescendo. That and, well…mutants have a very distinct look because the gene that comes with the mutation, also alters the expression of other common things like melatonin production.”

“Oh! I remember that! We saw it at school…with the Mendeleyev system.”

“exactly!” You say, but Toga isn’t done with the questions and you don’t stop the conversation before-

“so, how do they look? The mutants. How do they look.”

“well, they all have silver hair and red eyes.”

They look at the corner of the kitchen and only then you realize what you’ve done.

“Congratulations, Shigaraki. You are officially a fucking freak.” Dabi says from the couch, but Shigaraki doesn’t answer his provocation. He just keeps playing in his phone, the only sign of acknowledge is an arched brow.

It rubs you wrong. As much as anybody is okay with it, you hate the words that leave his mouth.

Maybe is the fact that he’s making fun of someone’s looks, or maybe is because hearing someone being called a freak sends you back to high school when your classmates told you that you were a fucking creep with that evil quirk of yours (or maybe is the stupid crush speaking) but it makes you angry, so before you can think of it, you spat.

“blue eyes are a mutation too, so you are no one to talk about it.”

Twice laughs at the comeback, but before you could taste your little win, Dabi makes sure to answer back because he’s being dying to fight you the moment he set a foot on your apartment.

“that was bold for a quirkless little bitch.”

You laugh astonished, deciding you will not acknowledge the fact he (very wrongly) thinks you quirkless.

“A quirkless little bitch? Seriously, Dabi? Where you raised in a fucking barn that you know nothing but fuck this and bitch that?

“yeah. I know stupid cunt too.” He barks referring to you.

“Dabi, cut it out.” Shigaraki snaps to no avail.

“Hey! We agree in no insults!” Compress try to quiet the fight down, but neither of you pays attention.

“I’m sure you do. Pretty useful to describe yourself I bet.”

“you sure like to bet, like how you are betting I don’t burn you alive for being an annoying bitch.” He threatens looking at the chess game still on the kitchen table, getting quickly into your nerves.

“Guys-“Toga fails to intercede.

“Fuck off, Dabi. This might be shocking for you, but you don’t scare me.”

“now, that’s pretty fucking stupid of you.”

“Dabi, shut up!” Shigaraki growls done, but you are not paying attention to him, so you keep pushing into the fight.  

“I’m not the one insulting everyone just because I cannot deal with some fucking daddy issues.”

“YOU DON’T KNOW SHIT” he snarls before kicking the little table in your living room, breaking one of its legs.

“CUT IT OUT! I don’t have to know when it’s plainly obvious you have problems with authority.”

“you really think you are so clever, don’t you?” he states, crossing the living room, aiming to you.

“Dabi, get the fuck out!” this time Shigaraki yells.

“I know I am, asshole!”

He stops his tracks, looming over you. His eyes scanning your face before looking at Shigaraki, who suddenly stands beside you.

Dabi laughs darkly.

“stupid woman. You should know better.”

And then…he just slaps your laptop out of the table; the computer smashing open against the cemented ground.

Chapter 9

[foreverlostinliterature]

1/8 Book Deals

Hey guys, I’m back with some book deals! Life may be stressful, but at least it’s nice to know that there are always books on sale for us to enjoy. I would personally recommend Jady City if you haven’t read it--it’s seriously great! Be sure to have a look if you need something to read and have a great day, everyone! :)

Today’s Deals:

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NOTE:  I am categorizing these book deals posts under the tag #bookdeals, so if you don’t want to see them then just block that tag and you should be good. I am an Amazon affiliate in addition to a Book Depository affiliate and will receive a small (but very much needed!)  commission on any purchase made through these links.

[allbestnet]

Guardian Essential Library

Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

The Annals by Tacitus

The Armada by Garrett Mattingly

Aubrey's brief lives by John Aubrey

The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X

Beethoven's Letters by Ludwig van Beethoven

Bully for Brontosaurus by Stephen Jay Gould

C: Because Cowards Get Cancer Too... by John Diamond

Candide by Voltaire

The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven by Charles Rosen

Climbing Mount Improbable by Richard Dawkins

The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography by Simon Singh

Collected Poems by Edward Thomas

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx

The Complete Poems by Christina Rossetti

The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson

The complete poems, 1927–1979 by Elizabeth Bishop

Cosmos by Carl Sagan

The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton

Danube by Claudio Magris

Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville

Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen

Diaries by Alan Clark

Doctor Faustus : The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn As Told by a Friend by Thomas Mann

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

Don Quixote's Delusions: Travels in Castilian Spain by Miranda France

The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA by James D. Watson

Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage by Richard Holmes

E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation by David Bodanis

Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane

Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey

English Society in the Eighteenth Century by Roy Porter

Eothen by Alexander William Kinglake

Essays on Music by Theodor Adorno

Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse by Alexander Pushkin

Experience by Martin Amis

The Face of Battle by John Keegan

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton

The Glenn Gould Reader by Glenn Gould

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux

Henry James: A Life by Leon Edel

A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov

If Not Now, When? by Primo Levi

If This Is a Man and The Truce by Primo Levi

In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

In Siberia by Colin Thubron

In Xanadu: A Quest by William Dalrymple

The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens by Claire Tomalin

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes

The Life of Charlotte Brontë by Elizabeth Gaskell

The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. by James Boswell

The Lives of the Artists by Giorgio Vasari

Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for Mathematical Truth by Paul Hoffman

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II by Fernand Braudel

Memories and Commentaries: New One-Volume Edition by Igor Stravinsky

Mendeleyev's Dream: The Quest for the Elements by Paul Strathern

Middlemarch by George Eliot

The Naked Civil Servant by Quentin Crisp

Old Glory : A Voyage Down the Mississippi by Jonathan Raban

On the Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Orlando by Virginia Woolf

Orwell and Politics (Penguin Modern Classics) by George Orwell

Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens

The Painter of Modern Life by Charles Baudelaire

Persuasion by Jane Austen

The Poetry of Robert Frost by Robert Frost

Politics by Aristotle

The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

The Prelude by William Wordsworth

The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli

The Quest for Corvo : An Experiment in Biography by A. J. A. Symons

Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy by John Updike

Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke

The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Selected Writings [Oxford World's Classics] by William Hazlitt

The Social Contract and Discourses by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The Sonnets by William Shakespeare

The Story of Art by E. H. Gombrich

Sun Dancing by Geoffrey Moorhouse

Survival In Auschwitz by Primo Levi

Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain

The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal by Jared M. Diamond

Thomas Hardy: The Complete Poems by Thomas Hardy

A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Trilobite! Eyewitness to Evolution by Richard Fortey

Troilus and Cressida; A Love Poem in Five Books by Geoffrey Chaucer

Ulysses by James Joyce

The Waning of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga

The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot

Ways of Seeing by John Berger

[andreybogoslowsky69]

The genius is the works of paradox” -Alexander #Pushkin Russian poet 1820. #Mendeleyev often sad periodic table came to him in a dream. A. #Einstein was 16 he questioned nature of space-time, like no one else at that time. They are all dead now, and I don’t feel good myself either🤣😂😮😢😂 #Tesla 1916

[lati-will]

Science & The Paranormal – The Question Of Consciousness

With so many people (many indeed being iconic scientific and historical figures) experiencing what they are supposedly not meant to, according to materialistic thought, the reasonable individual might be forgiven for wondering if there is something more to consciousness than our present “scientific” paradigms would have us believe. Can we go further than questioning the assumed legitimacy of orthodox materialistic theories which reduce consciousness to a mere epiphenomenon (by-product) of physical matter (the brain) and even—heaven forbid—suggest that they are not merely incomplete, but actually types of superstitions in themselves?

Etymologically, the word consciousness derives from the words scire (to know) and cum or con (with). Consciousness is “to know with.” So if you, the persona, recognize (to know or be aware of), who are you recognizing with? Is there more to consciousness than the Freudian ego and unconscious?

Mathematical physicist Roger Penrose has written:

A scientific world-view which does not profoundly come to terms with the problem of conscious minds can have no serious pretensions of [sic] completeness…I would maintain that there is yet no physical, biological, or computational theory that comes very close to explaining our consciousness or intelligence.[i]

Indeed, in the past (and even today?) some scientists had taken the absurd position that consciousness is an illusion. This, while providing a nonsensical reason to ignore the problem of consciousness, obviously fails to sate the curious inquirer’s queries regarding how we got here and what we are doing here as conscious beings. Materialistic philosophy as we know it—derived from the mechanistic worldview—had, more or less since the dawning of the Age of Reason in the 1700s, steadfastly maintained that what we call experience arises solely as a by-product of the brain’s internal workings. No brain, no consciousness.

But is it really that simple? What about functions of consciousness that appear to transcend the cranial boundaries of our heads? The Age of Reason said that these forces had only ever existed in man’s imagination; only reason could show man the truth about the universe. “The trouble was,” according to Colin Wilson, “that man became a thinking pygmy, and the world of the rationalists was a daylight place in which boredom, triviality and ordinariness were ultimate truths.”[ii]

The Age of Reason glorified the rationalist, who, enamoured of his endless linear cogitations, was blinded to faculties of consciousness that actually transcended them: faculties that would have allowed him not to merely philosophize about deeper levels of reality, but actually access them. “This is the great tragedy of modern man,” wrote occultist, philosopher, and composer Dane Rudhyar. “His much acclaimed scientific spirit frees him of the compulsions of subrational and subconscious states of mind, only to bind him to an empty rationalism and a quantitative analytical intellect, both of which actually entomb him in a sarcophagus filled with only the mimicry of life. This sarcophagus is the ‘megalopolis’—the monstrous city.”[iii]

But something stirs in the bowels of the concrete jungle. An international online survey of paranormal experiences had met with an overwhelming response, according to Australian researchers in 2006. The survey, on phenomena that cannot be explained using the current “laws” of science, is by researchers at Monash University in Melbourne. A recent (for the time) Gallup poll revealed that 75% of Americans hold at least one paranormal belief, and a UK newspaper poll showed that 60% of Britons accept the existence of the paranormal, say the researchers. According to the researchers, the survey is not about beliefs or whether parapsychological phenomena exist, rather it is about what people have experienced and the impact it has had on their lives.Some 2,000 people had made contact via the internet within six weeks of the survey beginning. A whopping 96% of respondents claim to have had at least one brush with the paranormal. The exercise seeks to gauge the frequency, effect, and age of onset of unexplained phenomena such as premonitions, out-of-body and near-death episodes, telepathy, and apparitions. Results as of 2006 showed that 70% of respondents believe an unexplained event changed their lives, mostly in a positive way. Some 70% also claim to have seen, heard, or been touched by an animal or person that wasn’t there, 80% report having had a premonition, and almost 50% recalled a previous life.[iv] In May 2000, the New York Times Sunday Magazine published results of a poll conducted by Blum & Weprin Associates; a huge 81% said they believed in life after death.[v]

Virtually all of these beliefs hint at (and require in order to be true) the existence of other realms or dimensions in which consciousness can operate. A 2005 poll taken by the Scottish paranormal society showed that more people are likely to believe in ghosts and the paranormal than have faith in any organized religion. A Gallup survey taken in 2005 showed that about three in four Americans profess at least one paranormal belief.[vi] This is a massive amount of “paranormal” experience and belief—all of it depending on the existence of other levels of reality, without which such experience can only be labeled as delusion and fantasy.

Did you know that the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) has now been amended so that genuinely psychic people are no longer considered “disordered”?[vii]

Intuition and Creativity

Srinivasa Ramanujan (below, left), born in India, 1887–1920, has been called the strangest man in all of mathematics, probably in the entire history of science. Working in isolation from his peers, this genius was single-handedly able to re-derive a hundred years’ worth of Western mathematics. As Michio Kaku reports in Hyperspace, the tragedy of his life is that much of his work was wasted rediscovering known mathematics.[viii] Most interesting to us, Ramanujan said that the goddess Namakkal inspired him in his dreams; in other words, the source of his creative genius was this other realm within his sleep, rather than ordinary waking consciousness.

Is there a link between this other realm of sleep and paranormal phenomena? At a glance, such a presumption appears to be a stretch, but the reservation of judgment is highly recommended at this point. Carl Jung (below) once said: “The images and ideas that dreams contain cannot possibly be explained solely in terms of memory. They express new thoughts that have never yet reached the threshold of consciousness.”[ix]

Ramanujan appears to provide an excellent example of the type of non-ordinary information access that the Russian paranormal researchers might call hypercommunication, and he isn’t alone among specialists, pioneers, giants of science, and so-called regular people. In fact, pioneer psychiatrist and consciousness researcher Stanislav Grof found that during LSD experiences his own patients were capable of accessing the “collective unconscious,” obtaining very specific, accurate, and detailed knowledge. In the LSD training program for scientists, relevant insights occurred in fields as diverse as cosmogenesis, the nature of space and time, subatomic physics, ethology, animal psychology, history, anthropology, and many more.[x]

Ramanujan, assuming he really did receive detailed formulas in his dreams via the subconscious, provides perhaps some indication of just how accurate and detailed this knowledge can be. As we will see, these insights that defy the Freudian and Newtonian-Cartesian (reductionist) worldview/s abound in the literature. In 1862 the chemist Friedrich August von Kekule famously arrived at the solution for the chemical formula for benzene in a dream wherein he saw the benzene ring in the form of a snake biting its tail—an archetypal symbol in itself—the Ouroburos. In a supreme historical irony, Descartes’ principles of what ultimately became the mechanist philosophy originated from a dream on the eve of St. Martin’s day of 1619 in which the “Angel of Truth” explained to him that mathematics was the key to unlocking the secrets of Nature![xi]

Similarly, Nikola Tesla constructed the electric generator…after the complete design of it appeared to him in great detail in a vision. The design for the experiment leading to the Nobel Prize–winning discovery of the chemical transmission of nerve impulses occurred to the physiologist Otto Leowi while he was asleep. Albert Einstein discovered the basic principles of his special theory of relativity in an unusual state of mind; according to his description, most of the insights came to him in the form of kinaesthetic sensations.[xii]

Einstein had said:

“The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them.”[xiii]

Many of the great scientists have said very similar things. From out of nowhere a revelatory vision or understanding hits them, as if suddenly downloaded into their minds from some esoteric conceptual repository. It is interesting that many people find in lucid dreams that they can learn skills that translate directly into real waking life or they can solve problems in the conscious dream state that in the physical world had stumped them, and moreover, these solutions actually work.[xiv] Francis Crick was under the influence of LSD in 1953 at the moment when he perceived the double helix shape and unraveled the structure of DNA.[xv] The chemist D. I. Mendeleyev saw his entire periodic table of elements one night in a dream. And of course, many of history’s greatest and most successful musical artists came up with their best material under the influence of one drug or another.

Oprah Winfrey says, “My business skills have come from being guided by my inner self—my intuition.”[xvi] She’s not alone among the financially abundant. Researchers have tested CEOs of successful corporations for their ability to see the future, such as by predicting a string of numbers they would be shown later. They found that the CEOs who are good at this are usually those who are also highly successful in running their corporations, while CEOs who did not have this ability tend to have mediocre success rates in their corporations. “In one study,” says Dr. Larry Dossey, “experimenters were able to predict in advance the most successful corporate balance sheets by how well the CEOs did on tests that measured their ability to predict the future, such as a string of numbers they’d be shown later.”[xvii]

In 1982 the St. Louis Business Journal tested how a psychic would fare against professional stockbrokers over a six-month period, and reported that the psychic, who had no formal training in stockmarket trading or analysis, outperformed 18 of 19 professional stockbrokers. During the testing period, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 8% but the psychic’s stocks went up an average of 17.2%, while the sole broker who beat her achieved 17.4%.[xviii] Physicist and psi researcher Russel Targ’s research group Delphi Associates succeeded in psychically forecasting for nine consecutive weeks the fluctuations in the silver commodity futures markets, earning them a tidy $120,000.[xix]

Psi* techniques are playing an increasingly important role on Wall Street, according to Dean Radin’s sources.[xx] In 1987 Richard S. Broughton, scientist and former president of the Parapsychological Association, pointed to the need-serving nature of psi and the competitive advantage it often provides in the struggle for survival—Darwinists rejoice.[xxi]

Many scientists have had profound interests in fields beyond the reach of the science of their day. For instance, Isaac Newton was an obsessive alchemist[xxii] and Freemason in search of the way to transform consciousness, Thomas Edison built machines to try to facilitate communication with the dead, and Marie Curie attended séances. The list of such eminent scientists with keen interests in the paranormal goes on and on. Is it a credible suggestion that they all were merely deluded into pursuing these areas by cunning charlatans or irrational, wishful thinking? Even Freud, whose attitude towards the occult was originally negative, changed his tune as he matured and learned more about it, suggesting, in a 1949 paper called Psychoanalysis and Telepathy, a union between psychoanalysts and occultists: “[O]ne might expect a mutual sympathy between the two…[A]n alliance of, and collaboration between, psychoanalysis and occultists would seem to be both plausible and promising.”[xxiii]

What about those modern-day scientists and professionals who have experiences in the “paranormal” realm? Brian Weiss, psychiatrist, hypnotherapist, and author, wrote:

The respected chairman of a major clinical department at my hospital is a man who is admired internationally for his expertise. He talks to his deceased father, who has several times protected him from serious danger. Another professor has dreams that provide the missing steps or solutions to his complex research experiments. The dreams are invariably correct. Another well-known doctor usually knows who is calling him on the phone before he answers it…[xxiv]

If these insights come from only one man, imagine what else we might be missing out on if we keep our heads in the sand while new paradigms form around us…

* Psi (pronounced “sigh”) is a term for parapsychological (occult) phenomena derived from the Greek, psi, twenty‐third letter of the Greek alphabet; from the Greek psyche, “mind, soul.” First used in a parapsychological context by biologist B.P. Wiesner, it was first used in print by British psychologist Robert Thouless in 1942.

By: Brendan D. Murphy

[ntrending]

Before there was a periodic table, there was chaos

New Post has been published on https://nexcraft.co/before-there-was-a-periodic-table-there-was-chaos/

Before there was a periodic table, there was chaos

In the following excerpt from “Mendeleyev’s Dream: The Quest for the Elements,” author Paul Strathern describes the state of chemistry in the years leading up to Dmitri Mendeleyev’s invention of the modern periodic table.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, several elements were being discovered almost every decade. This profusion of new elements with an ever-widening range of properties soon began to provoke questions. Precisely how many elements were there? Had most of them already been discovered? Or would there perhaps turn out to be innumerable elements? This soon led to more profound speculations. Somehow, amongst all these elements, there must be some kind of fundamental order. Dalton had discovered that the atoms of each element had different weights — but surely there had to be more to it than this? Berzelius had noticed that elements appeared to have different electrical affinities. Likewise, there appeared to be groups of different kinds of elements with similar properties — metals which resisted corrosion (such as gold, silver and platinum), combustible alkali metals (such as potassium and sodium), colorless, odorless gases (such as hydrogen and oxygen) and so forth. Was it possible that there was some kind of fundamental pattern behind all this?

Chemistry had achieved its scientific status and continuing success largely through experiment, and such theoretical thinking was viewed at best as mere speculation. Why should there be some kind of order amongst the elements? After all, there was no real evidence for such a thing? But the rage for order is a basic human trait, not least amongst scientists. And these speculations eventually began to find support, if only from scraps of evidence.

The first of these came from Johan Dobereiner, the professor of chemistry at the University of Jena. Dobereiner was the son of a coachman, and was largely self-educated. He managed to obtain a post as a pharmacist, and eagerly attended the regular local public lectures on science. In 1829 he noticed that the recently discovered element bromine had properties which seemed to lie midway between chose of chlorine and iodine. Not only that, its atomic weight lay exactly halfway between chose of these two elements.

Dobereiner began studying the list of the known elements, recorded with their properties and atomic weights, and eventually discovered another two groups of elements with the same pattern.

Strontium lay halfway (in atomic weight, color, properties, and reactivity) between calcium and barium; and selenium could be similarly placed between sulphur and tellurium. Dobereiner named these groups triads, and began an extensive search of the elements for further examples, but could find no more. Dobereiner’s ‘law of triads’ appeared to apply only to nine of the fifty-four known elements, and was dismissed by his contemporaries as mere coincidence.

And that was it, for the time being. Chemistry had suffered enough from mistaken theories (four elements, phlogiston, etc.). The way forward now lay through experiment.

It would be over thirty years after Dobereiner’s law of triads before another significant attempt was made to discover a pattern in the elements. Unfortunately, this contribution was to come from a scientist whose brilliance was matched only by his waywardness.

Alexandre-Emile Beguyer de Chancourtois was born in Paris in 1820. His first love was geology. De Chancourtois didn’t turn his considerable talents to chemistry until he was in his forties. In 1862 he produced a paper describing his ingenious “telluric screw,” which demonstrated that there did indeed appear to be some kind of pattern amongst the elements. De Chancourtois’ ‘telluric screw’ consisted of a cylinder on which was drawn a descending spiral line. At regular intervals along this line de Chancourtois plotted each of the elements according to its atomic weight. He was intrigued to find that the properties of these elements tended to repeat when the elements were read off in vertical columns down the cylinder. It seemed that after every sixteen units of atomic weight the properties of the matching elements tended to exhibit striking similarities with those vertically above them on the cylinder. De Chancourtois’ paper was duly published, but unfortunately he chose to revert to geological terms when referring to certain elements, and at one stage even introduced his own version of numerology (the alchemy of mathematics, in which certain numbers have their own esoteric significance). To make matters even worse, the publishers omitted to include de Chancourtois’ illustration of the cylinder, thus rendering the article virtually incomprehensible to all but the most persistent and informed reader.

This subject evidently attracted a certain type of scientific thinker inured to ridicule. In 1864 the young English chemist John Newlands came up with his own pattern of the elements, unaware of de Chancourtois’ cryptic researches. John Newlands was born in London in 1837, the son of a Presbyterian minister.

Newlands discovered that if he listed the elements in ascending order of their atomic weights, in vertical lines of seven, the properties of the elements along the corresponding horizontal lines were remarkably similar. As he put it: “In other words, the eighth element starting from a given one is a kind of repetition of the first, like the eighth note in an octave of music.” He named this his “law of octaves.” In the tabulated list the alkali metal sodium (the 6th heaviest element) stood horizontally beside the very similar potassium (13th heaviest). Likewise, magnesium (10th) was in line beside the similar calcium (17th). When Newlands expanded his table to include all the known elements he found that the halogens, chlorine (15th), bromine (29th) and Iodine (42nd), which exhibited graduating similar properties, all fell in the same horizontal column. Whereas the trio of magnesium (10th), silenium (12th) and sulphur (14th), which also had graduating similar properties, fell in the same vertical line. In other words, his law of octaves also seemed to incorporate the scattered resemblances noted in Dobereiner’s law of triads.

Unfortunately Newlands’ tabulated law of octaves also had its faults. The properties of some elements, especially those of higher atomic weight, simply didn’t tally. Even so, Newlands’ law of octaves was a definite advance on any previous ideas. Indeed, many now regard it as the first solid evidence that there was indeed some comprehensive pattern to the elements. In 1865 Newlands reported his findings to the Chemical Society in London, but his ideas proved ahead of their time. The assembled worthies merely ridiculed his law of octaves. Amidst the general merriment, one even asked him sarcastically if he had tried arranging the elements in alphabetical order. It would be a quarter of a century before Newlands’ achievement was finally recognized, when the Royal Society awarded him the Davy Medal in 1887.

Dobereiner had spotted resemblances between isolated groups of elements. De Chancourtois had discerned a certain pattern of recurrent properties. Newlands had extended this pattern and even incorporated Dobereiner’s groups. But still his law of octaves didn’t work overall. This was partly due to contemporary miscalculations of various atomic weights and partly because Newlands made no allowances for hitherto undiscovered elements. But it was also because the rigidity of Newlands’ octave system just didn’t fit.

It was becoming increasingly obvious that there was some kind of pattern to the elements, but the answer was evidently more complex. Chemistry appeared to be tantalizingly close to glimpsing the blueprint of the very elements upon which it was based. Euclid had laid the foundations of geometry, Newton’s gravity had explained the world in terms of physics and Darwin had accounted for the evolution of all species—could chemistry now discover the secret which accounted for the diversity of matter? Here, possibly, was the linchpin which could unite all scientific knowledge.

From MENDELEYEV’S DREAM by Paul Strathern. Reprinted with permission of Pegasus Books.

Written By Paul Strathern

[iamflypped01-blog]

12 Amazing facts about Dreams that you might not know

Everybody tends to dream at some point or the other, be it bewildering, interesting, happening, mind-boggling, hell scary, night mares etc.

Well here is a list of 12 Amazing facts about Dreams that you might not know!

1. You can’t read while dreaming nor tell the time

The studies show that when a person is dreaming, he cannot read, nor tell the time. If you are unsure whether you are dreaming or not, then try to read in your sleep or try to tell the time. Every time you will witness different time on the clock, with no hands moving as confessed by the lucid dreamers.

2. Inventions inspired by the dreams

Dreams are also responsible for the inspiration of some of the greatest inventions of mankind, which includes:

The idea for Google -Larry Page

Alternating current generator -Tesla

DNA’s double helix spiral form -James Watson

The sewing machine -Elias Howe

Periodic table -Dimitri Mendeleyev and the list goes on!

3. Sleep Paralysis

One of the most deadly effects of the heart-shrieking night mares is the susceptibility to sleep paralysis. It is said to be one of the most deadliest experiences, where due to paralysis, you are not able to move and on the other hand you feel some evil presence with you in your room. It doesn’t seem like a dream but seems 100% real. It is a package of emotions consisting of fear, terror and anxiety!

4. REM Sleep disorder

In the state of the Rapid-eye movement (REM), the body is normally paralyzed and sometimes in very rare cases, people even act out loud in their dreams which results into breaking of the arms, legs, furniture or in one extreme case even a house was burnt down.

5. Sexual dream

The scientifically-coined “nocturnal penile tumescence” is a very well documented phenomenon. In laymen’s words, it simply results in the stiffness, while you asleep. The studies revealed that the men get upto 20 erections per dream.

6. Increased brain activity

In contrast to our belief that the brain becomes serene and peaceful during sleep, it tends to be more active during the sleep, than while we are awake.

7. Pets dream too

Our beloved pets enjoy this hallucinating ride too! They are sometimes seen as moving their legs and paws and humming or making noises. Well, they are actually dreaming.

8. You always dream-you just forget it

The study shows that every one dreams but only 60% tend to remember it!

9. Blind people dream too

The people, who were not blind by birth, see images in their dreams but the people who were born blind by birth, surprisingly, also tend to dream. Their dreams are as piercing and interesting, just like ours, but they include the senses besides sight.

10. Dreams tend to be negative

Dreams tend to be more negative, rather than always being positive. The three emotions encountered while dreaming are anger, sadness and fear.

11. Gender Differences

It is seen that almost 70% of men tend to see other men in their dreams; while on the other hand, women see women and men both equally in their dreams. Both experience sexual dreams.

12. Not all dream colorful

It is known that almost 12% of the people’s dreams tend to be black and white, rather than being colorful!

[fumpkins]

Before there was a periodic table, there was chaos

In the following excerpt from “Mendeleyev’s Dream: The Quest for the Elements,” author Paul Strathern describes the state of chemistry in the years leading up to Dmitri Mendeleyev’s invention of the modern periodic table.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, several elements were being discovered almost every decade. This profusion of new elements with an ever-widening range of properties soon began to provoke questions. Precisely how many elements were there? Had most of them already been discovered? Or would there perhaps turn out to be innumerable elements? This soon led to more profound speculations. Somehow, amongst all these elements, there must be some kind of fundamental order. Dalton had discovered that the atoms of each element had different weights — but surely there had to be more to it than this? Berzelius had noticed that elements appeared to have different electrical affinities. Likewise, there appeared to be groups of different kinds of elements with similar properties — metals which resisted corrosion (such as gold, silver and platinum), combustible alkali metals (such as potassium and sodium), colorless, odorless gases (such as hydrogen and oxygen) and so forth. Was it possible that there was some kind of fundamental pattern behind all this?

Chemistry had achieved its scientific status and continuing success largely through experiment, and such theoretical thinking was viewed at best as mere speculation. Why should there be some kind of order amongst the elements? After all, there was no real evidence for such a thing? But the rage for order is a basic human trait, not least amongst scientists. And these speculations eventually began to find support, if only from scraps of evidence.

The first of these came from Johan Dobereiner, the professor of chemistry at the University of Jena. Dobereiner was the son of a coachman, and was largely self-educated. He managed to obtain a post as a pharmacist, and eagerly attended the regular local public lectures on science. In 1829 he noticed that the recently discovered element bromine had properties which seemed to lie midway between chose of chlorine and iodine. Not only that, its atomic weight lay exactly halfway between chose of these two elements.

Dobereiner began studying the list of the known elements, recorded with their properties and atomic weights, and eventually discovered another two groups of elements with the same pattern.

Strontium lay halfway (in atomic weight, color, properties, and reactivity) between calcium and barium; and selenium could be similarly placed between sulphur and tellurium. Dobereiner named these groups triads, and began an extensive search of the elements for further examples, but could find no more. Dobereiner’s ‘law of triads’ appeared to apply only to nine of the fifty-four known elements, and was dismissed by his contemporaries as mere coincidence.

And that was it, for the time being. Chemistry had suffered enough from mistaken theories (four elements, phlogiston, etc.). The way forward now lay through experiment.

It would be over thirty years after Dobereiner’s law of triads before another significant attempt was made to discover a pattern in the elements. Unfortunately, this contribution was to come from a scientist whose brilliance was matched only by his waywardness.

Alexandre-Emile Beguyer de Chancourtois was born in Paris in 1820. His first love was geology. De Chancourtois didn’t turn his considerable talents to chemistry until he was in his forties. In 1862 he produced a paper describing his ingenious “telluric screw,” which demonstrated that there did indeed appear to be some kind of pattern amongst the elements. De Chancourtois’ ‘telluric screw’ consisted of a cylinder on which was drawn a descending spiral line. At regular intervals along this line de Chancourtois plotted each of the elements according to its atomic weight. He was intrigued to find that the properties of these elements tended to repeat when the elements were read off in vertical columns down the cylinder. It seemed that after every sixteen units of atomic weight the properties of the matching elements tended to exhibit striking similarities with those vertically above them on the cylinder. De Chancourtois’ paper was duly published, but unfortunately he chose to revert to geological terms when referring to certain elements, and at one stage even introduced his own version of numerology (the alchemy of mathematics, in which certain numbers have their own esoteric significance). To make matters even worse, the publishers omitted to include de Chancourtois’ illustration of the cylinder, thus rendering the article virtually incomprehensible to all but the most persistent and informed reader.

This subject evidently attracted a certain type of scientific thinker inured to ridicule. In 1864 the young English chemist John Newlands came up with his own pattern of the elements, unaware of de Chancourtois’ cryptic researches. John Newlands was born in London in 1837, the son of a Presbyterian minister.

Newlands discovered that if he listed the elements in ascending order of their atomic weights, in vertical lines of seven, the properties of the elements along the corresponding horizontal lines were remarkably similar. As he put it: “In other words, the eighth element starting from a given one is a kind of repetition of the first, like the eighth note in an octave of music.” He named this his “law of octaves.” In the tabulated list the alkali metal sodium (the 6th heaviest element) stood horizontally beside the very similar potassium (13th heaviest). Likewise, magnesium (10th) was in line beside the similar calcium (17th). When Newlands expanded his table to include all the known elements he found that the halogens, chlorine (15th), bromine (29th) and Iodine (42nd), which exhibited graduating similar properties, all fell in the same horizontal column. Whereas the trio of magnesium (10th), silenium (12th) and sulphur (14th), which also had graduating similar properties, fell in the same vertical line. In other words, his law of octaves also seemed to incorporate the scattered resemblances noted in Dobereiner’s law of triads.

Unfortunately Newlands’ tabulated law of octaves also had its faults. The properties of some elements, especially those of higher atomic weight, simply didn’t tally. Even so, Newlands’ law of octaves was a definite advance on any previous ideas. Indeed, many now regard it as the first solid evidence that there was indeed some comprehensive pattern to the elements. In 1865 Newlands reported his findings to the Chemical Society in London, but his ideas proved ahead of their time. The assembled worthies merely ridiculed his law of octaves. Amidst the general merriment, one even asked him sarcastically if he had tried arranging the elements in alphabetical order. It would be a quarter of a century before Newlands’ achievement was finally recognized, when the Royal Society awarded him the Davy Medal in 1887.

Dobereiner had spotted resemblances between isolated groups of elements. De Chancourtois had discerned a certain pattern of recurrent properties. Newlands had extended this pattern and even incorporated Dobereiner’s groups. But still his law of octaves didn’t work overall. This was partly due to contemporary miscalculations of various atomic weights and partly because Newlands made no allowances for hitherto undiscovered elements. But it was also because the rigidity of Newlands’ octave system just didn’t fit.

It was becoming increasingly obvious that there was some kind of pattern to the elements, but the answer was evidently more complex. Chemistry appeared to be tantalizingly close to glimpsing the blueprint of the very elements upon which it was based. Euclid had laid the foundations of geometry, Newton’s gravity had explained the world in terms of physics and Darwin had accounted for the evolution of all species—could chemistry now discover the secret which accounted for the diversity of matter? Here, possibly, was the linchpin which could unite all scientific knowledge.

From MENDELEYEV’S DREAM by Paul Strathern. Reprinted with permission of Pegasus Books.

(function() .*;s*)__tacs*=s*([^;]*).*$)();

New post published on: https://www.livescience.tech/2019/05/12/before-there-was-a-periodic-table-there-was-chaos/

[metroeve-blog]

Periodic Table dreams meaning

Periodic Table dreams meaning

Periodic Table

To dream of the periodic table represents feelings about yourself or someone else being an expert at manipulating people or situations in order to get desired reactions. Awareness of all the options available to you in order to manipulate a desired reaction in a situation.

Fact: The Periodic Table Of Elements was invented by Dmitri Mendeleyev after he saw himself organizing…

[mundayupchurch]

via Popular Science

[lucid-dream-society]

Dreams are responsible for many of the greatest inventions of mankind. A few examples include: The idea for Google -Larry Page Alternating current generator -Tesla DNA’s double helix spiral form -James Watson The sewing machine -Elias Howe Periodic table -Dimitri Mendeleyev …and many, many more! That’s pretty cool, isn’t it? • • • Picture by @jasonleeparry, edit by @slimesunday • • • http://ift.tt/2fH5eyU #lucid #luciddreaming #luciddream #luciddreamsociety #lucidity #conciousness #dreaming #dreamers #tipsandtricks #learn #control #society #lucid inspiration #surreal #surrealism #surrealart #photomanipulation #mindfulness #meditating #dreamyoga #surreal #howtoluciddream #lucidartist #lucidscreen #lucidartifacts #lucidfeature #lucidliving #luciddaydreams #lucidlife #luciddreamer — view on Instagram http://ift.tt/2pnNM83

[10amazingfactsdaily-blog]

1.Dreams may be diffrent gender by gender. 2.Dreams will increase your creativity.

3.You can't read anything and can’t see time in dream. 4.When you see dream your mind is more active. 5.Creative person have more dreams. 6.Invention who are inspired by dreams:   7.If you are snoring, then you cannot be dreaming 8.Blind People Also See Dreams. 9.Mostly dreams are negative. 10.you can see more than one dreams in a single night.

 https://youtu.be/ITzg1kl_uvc Amz Facts Abou Dreams(part 2)

 7.If you are snoring, then you cannot be dreaming 8.Blind People Also See Dreams. https://youtu.be/ITzg1kl_uvc

1. आपके लिंग(gender)के आधार पर, सपने के पात्रों को कैसे पहचाना जाता है, इसमें अंतर है| 2.सपने अपनी रचनात्मकता को रिचार्ज करते हैं| 3.आप सपनों में  पढ़ नहीं सकते हैं या समय देख नहीं सकते| 4. जब आप जागते समय से सपना देख रहे होते हैं तो आपका मन अधिक सक्रिय होता है| 5.रचनात्मक व्यक्ति को अधिक सपने आते है| 6.सपनों से प्रेरित आविष्कार:   The idea for Google -Larry Page    Alternating current generator -Tesla    DNA’s double helix spiral form -James Watson    The sewing machine -Elias Howe    Periodic table -Dimitri Mendeleyev …and many, many more 7, यदि आप खर्राटे ले रहे हैं, तो आप सपना देख नहीं सकते हैं 8.अंधे लोग भी सपने देखते हैं| 9. ज्यादातर सपने नकारात्मक होते है| 10.आप एक रात में एक से अधिक सपने देख सकते हैं|