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Turning the periodic table upside down

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The periodic table is immensely powerful for rationalizing many different properties of the chemical elements, but would turning it on its head make some important aspects easier to understand and give everyone a new perspective on chemistry?

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Fig. 1: The inverted periodic table is obtained by rotating the conventional one by 180° about a horizontal axis.
Fig. 2: Heat maps indicating the areas looked at for longest time by naïve participants during a three-second presentation of each of the unlettered periodic tables.

Data availability

The scripts used to run the experiment during the current study, the stimuli and data generated are available in the Open Science Framework repository: https://osf.io/wzak8/?view_only=7240a7cdcc3746c2a20a078fe5d08821.

Editor’s note: This article has been peer-reviewed.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank E. Scerri of UCLA for his advice and encouragement.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The School of Chemistry, The University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

    Martyn Poliakoff & Samantha L. Y. Tang

  2. Department of Psychological Sciences, The University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

    Alexis D. J. Makin

  3. Division of Neuroscience and Experimental Psychology, School of Biological Sciences, Faculty of Biological, Medical and Human Sciences, The University of Manchester, Manchester Academic Health Science Centre, Manchester, UK

    Ellen Poliakoff

Authors
  1. Martyn Poliakoff
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  2. Alexis D. J. Makin
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  3. Samantha L. Y. Tang
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  4. Ellen Poliakoff
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Contributions

M.P. made the original proposal of inverting the periodic table; S.T. designed the inverted version of the table; A.M. and E.P. designed the psychology experiment; A.M. collected the data; A.M. and E.P. processed and interpreted the data. All authors contributed to the final manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Martyn Poliakoff, Alexis D. J. Makin or Ellen Poliakoff.

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A printable high-resolution version of the inverted periodic table

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Poliakoff, M., Makin, A.D.J., Tang, S.L.Y. et al. Turning the periodic table upside down. Nat. Chem. 11, 391–393 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41557-019-0253-6

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