The author replies to Lavelle and Jensen.
Since publication of our letter about the multiple forms of periodic tables presented in the flyleaf of textbooks (1) I have received many replies similar to those of Lavelle and Jensen. To these readers and any others who were puzzled by our recommendation I offer this explanation. After seeing evidence that the flyleaf problem was not being resolved I mistakenly concluded that the prestigious (I thought) IUPAC conclusion would be accepted by all, simply in the name of standardization. I was wrong. As a consequence I now believe that our letter should have advocated the disappearance of the flyleaf periodic table. Chemists are not going to agree on which of the three versions of the periodic table to keep.
Thanks to modern publishing techniques, either in print or in digital formats, there is no longer a problem displaying long-form periodic tables. Therefore I now favor relegating the flyleaf forms to history and shifting the resulting debate to which of the long-form tables is best. There will still be arguments as to which long-form table to use, but these will be healthier arguments than the electron shift agonies of past decades. In my opinion the pedagogical discussion of any unfragmented long-form tables will be more clearly seen as a search for symmetry and order in nature than will any of the subscripted forms. Literature Cited- Clark, R. W.; White, G. D. J. Chem. Educ. 2008, 85, 497.
Editor's Note about Periodic TablesAn enormously successful way of summarizing and classifying the physical and chemical properties of the elements and many of their compounds is to display the element symbols in a format that emphasizes similarities and differences by means of graphic design—a periodic table. Notice that I said a periodic table, not the periodic table (1).
See the Editorial “Turning the (Periodic) Tables” from August 2003 (1) for further discussion about including more than just a single periodic table in teaching. Literature Cited- Moore, J. W. J. Chem. Educ. 2003, 80, 847.
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