Can anyone explain me why the periodic table is relevant?

[Myuncle]

Since we can turn any living creature into elements (Hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, etc), but we can't turn carbon, oxygen and hydrogen into a living organism (without the help of another living organism), do you think the periodic table is useful?

[John Cuthber]

Since we can turn any living creature into elements (Hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, etc), but we can't turn carbon, oxygen and hydrogen into a living organism (without the help of another living organism), do you think the periodic table is useful?

Yes.

[ACG52]

Since we can turn any living creature into elements (Hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, etc), but we can't turn carbon, oxygen and hydrogen into a living organism (without the help of another living organism), do you think the periodic table is useful?

 

 

What does one thing have to do with the other?

[Greg H.]

Since we can turn any living creature into elements (Hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, etc), but we can't turn carbon, oxygen and hydrogen into a living organism (without the help of another living organism), do you think the periodic table is useful?

 

The periodic table is useful for its intended purpose. Creating lifeforms is not that purpose.

[studiot]

The periodic table is useful for its intended purpose. Creating lifeforms is not that purpose.

 

I don't know. The one that has been moulding on my wall for the past 50 years has fostered many lifeforms.

 

[mississippichem]

The periodic table is more about the atomic electron configurations of the elements. It has about zero to do with whatever it is you posted.

 

It's really more of a "peridic table of orbitals" than anything.

[Myuncle]

What does one thing have to do with the other?

 

Both things they have in common the fact that they exist and they are in front of us, and I was thinking that when a living organism turn into elements when it dies that doesn't mean that a living organism is a compound of those elements, therefore I suppose there are an infinite number of elements and we don't even know their existence....(just saying)

Edited July 1, 2012 by Myuncle

[ACG52]

Both things they have in common the fact that they exist and they are in front of us, and I was thinking that when a living organism turn into elements when it dies that doesn't mean that a living organism is a compound of those elements, therefore I suppose there are an infinite number of elements and we don't even know their existence....(just saying)

 

 

Again, your conclusion that there are an infinite number of elements (a totally incorrect conclusion) does not seem to follow from your preceeding statements.

[Fuzzwood]

Life is not something special, just a little bit more complicated than setting something on fire.

[Schrödinger's hat]

Both things they have in common the fact that they exist and they are in front of us, and I was thinking that when a living organism turn into elements when it dies that doesn't mean that a living organism is a compound of those elements, therefore I suppose there are an infinite number of elements and we don't even know their existence....(just saying)

 

Your computer is made of that same set of elements.

If I hit it with a sledgehammer, can you turn it back into a computer? Why not?

 

The thing that's missing in each case is a very precise and hard to achieve arrangement of the components. Nothing to do with what they're made of.

 

Re. Life, chemists are getting better at it. They are approaching creating an artificial cell from both a top down (get an existing cell and hijack it to produce a new cell to your design) and bottom up (starting from scratch).

 

There is a way to go yet, but here is a release about creation of something very similar to a cell membrane (the latter):

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120125132822.htm

And the Craig Venter institute who do the former:

http://www.jcvi.org/cms/research/projects/first-self-replicating-synthetic-bacterial-cell/overview/

Note that this is not an entirely new genome. It's more like they got the existing blueprints, cut as much stuff that they didn't need out, added a few bits, and then hijacked someone else's factory to build the thing.

 

Neither of these count as a fully synthetic life form in many people's books, but it is getting pretty close.

[Myuncle]

The thing that's missing in each case is a very precise and hard to achieve arrangement of the components. Nothing to do with what they're made of.

 

But if in the DNA there are a lot of new unknown elements, how can you disprove it? how can you isolate them?

[John Cuthber]

But if in the DNA there are a lot of new unknown elements, how can you disprove it? how can you isolate them?

 

We know what elements are and we know how to isolate them.

In particular, we know that the periodic table includes the whole set.

 

We also know exactly what elements are in DNA

(phosphorus, oxygen, nitrogen carbon and hydrogen if you are interested)

It's like saying "what if there are lots of invisible cats in the world?"

There are not, even if they were not visible, we would know they were there because we would hear them and keep tripping over them.

 

I think you should do a lot more reading about chemistry.

[Myuncle]

We also know exactly what elements are in DNA

(phosphorus, oxygen, nitrogen carbon and hydrogen if you are interested)

How do they isolate them, and is there enough proof to suggest that these are the only elements found in DNA?

 

 

It's like saying "what if there are lots of invisible cats in the world?"

There are not, even if they were not visible, we would know they were there because we would hear them and keep tripping over them.

 

DNA was isolated by Miescher in 1869, he discovered a microscopic substance in the pus of discarded surgical bandages, that doesn't mean that DNA didn't exist before 1869.

 

I think you should do a lot more reading about chemistry.

 

Thanks, but don't rush me.

[Greg H.]

...I was thinking that when a living organism turn into elements when it dies that doesn't mean that a living organism is a compound of those elements...

 

Actually, that's exactly what it means.

[zapatos]

Kind of off topic but I thought some might find this interesting.

 

Twenty Things You Didn't Know About the Periodic Table - by Discover Magazine

 

1. You may remember the Periodic Table of the Elements as a dreary chart on your classroom wall. If so, you never guessed its real purpose: It’s a giant cheat sheet.

 

2 The table has served chemistry students since 1869, when it was created by Dmitry Mendeleyev, a cranky professor at the University of St. Petersburg.

 

3 With a publisher’s deadline looming, Mendeleyev didn’t have time to describe all 63 then-known elements. So he turned to a data set of atomic weights meticulously gathered by others.

 

4 To determine those weights, scientists had passed currents through various solutions to break them up into their constituent atoms. Responding to a battery’s polarity, the atoms of one element would go thisaway, the atoms of another thataway. The atoms were collected in separate containers and then weighed.

 

5 From this process, chemists determined relative weights—which were all Mendeleyev needed to establish a useful ranking.

 

6 Fond of card games, he wrote the weight for each element on a separate index card and sorted them as in solitaire. Elements with similar properties formed a “suit” that he placed in columns ordered by ascending atomic weight.

 

7 Now he had a new Periodic Law (“Elements arranged according to the value of their atomic weights present a clear periodicity of properties”) that described one pattern for all 63 elements.

 

8 Where Mendeleyev’s table had blank spaces, he correctly predicted the weights and chemical behaviors of some missing elements—gallium, scandium, and germanium.

 

9 But when argon was discovered in 1894, it didn’t fit into any of Mendeleyev’s columns, so he denied its existence—as he did for helium, neon, krypton, xenon, and radon.

 

10 In 1902 he acknowledged he had not anticipated the existence of these overlooked, incredibly unreactive elements—the noble gases—which now constitute the entire eighth group of the table.

 

11 Now we sort elements by their number of protons, or “atomic number,” which determines an atom’s configuration of oppositely charged electrons and hence its chemical properties.

 

12 Noble gases (far right on the periodic table) have closed shells of electrons, which is why they are nearly inert.

 

13 Atomic love: Take a modern periodic table, cut out the complicated middle columns, and fold it once along the middle of the Group 4 elements. The groups that kiss have complementary electron structures and will combine with each other.

 

14 Sodium touches chlorine—table salt! You can predict other common compounds like potassium chloride, used in very large doses as part of a lethal injection.

 

15 The Group 4 elements (shown as IVA above) in the middle bond readily with each other and with themselves. Silicon + silicon + silicon ad infinitum links up into crystalline lattices, used to make semiconductors for computers.

 

16 Carbon atoms—also Group 4—bond in long chains, and voilà: sugars. The chemical flexibility of carbon is what makes it the key molecule of life.

 

17 Mendeleyev wrongly assumed that all elements are unchanging. But radioactive atoms have unstable nuclei, meaning they can move around the chart. For example, uranium (element 92) gradually decays into a whole series of lighter elements, ending with lead (element 82).

 

18 Beyond the edge: Atoms with atomic numbers higher than 92 do not exist naturally, but they can be created by bombarding elements with other elements or pieces of them.

 

19 The two newest members of the periodic table, still-unnamed elements 114 and 116, were officially recognized last June. Number 116 decays and disappears in milliseconds. (Three elements, 110 to 112, were also officially named earlier this month.)

 

20 Physicist Richard Feynman once predicted that number 137 defines the table’s outer limit; adding any more protons would produce an energy that could be quantified only by an imaginary number, rendering element 138 and higher impossible. Maybe.

http://discovermagazine.com/2011/nov/20-things-you-didnt-know-about-periodic-table/

[John Cuthber]

How do they isolate them, and is there enough proof to suggest that these are the only elements found in DNA?

 

 

DNA was isolated by Miescher in 1869, he discovered a microscopic substance in the pus of discarded surgical bandages, that doesn't mean that DNA didn't exist before 1869.

 

Thanks, but don't rush me.

1 It's called chemistry. I would explain it, but you don't want to be rushed.

2 No, of course not, but the date of the discovery has absolutely nothing to do with what it contains does it?

3 Well, OK, but please don't waste any more time on this mystical nonsense until you have learned some.

 

For the benefit of anyone who doesn't mind being rushed a bit.

The elements found are

phosphorus, oxygen, nitrogen carbon and hydrogen

It's easy enough to show there's nothing else.

You weigh out some DNA.

You burn it in a stream of pure oxygen.

You pass the products of combustion through a solution of hydrogen peroxide and sodium hydroxide.

The sulphur is converted to sodium sulphate. Then you add barium chloride and dilute hydrochloric acid.

The sulphur is converted to barium sulphate.

You filter that off and weigh it.

Then yo do the same thing with a known mass of sulphur.

Form the ratio of the masses of barium sulphate produced, you can calculate the ratio of the amounts of sulphur.

You know how much there was in the second experiment and so you can calculate how much there was in the first one (with the DNA).

So you can work out the percentage in DNA. Of course, it's zero but I'm illustrating the general idea here

You do something similar using a solution of barium hydroxide which forms barium carbonate.

And, by weighing that, you can find how much carbon there was.

You can do similar things with hydrogen (weighed as water absorbed onto phosphorous pentoxide)

The nitrogen is measured by Dumas' method(Which you can look up here)

Finally you measure the oxygen- that's the trickiest one. Hydrogenation to give water is one way to do it- isotopic dilution is another.

 

Anyway.

When you have finished you know how much P ,S, H, O, and N are present in a known mass of DNA.

When you add them up they weigh the same as the DNA did.

So there's no room for anything else.

So we know there's nothing else.

 

It's a pity Myuncle doesn't want to learn that sort of thing.

Edited July 4, 2012 by John Cuthber

[Myuncle]

1 It's called chemistry. I would explain it, but you don't want to be rushed.

2 No, of course not, but the date of the discovery has absolutely nothing to do with what it contains does it?

3 Well, OK, but please don't waste any more time on this mystical nonsense until you have learned some.

 

For the benefit of anyone who doesn't mind being rushed a bit.

The elements found are

phosphorus, oxygen, nitrogen carbon and hydrogen

It's easy enough to show there's nothing else.

You weigh out some DNA.

You burn it in a stream of pure oxygen.

You pass the products of combustion through a solution of hydrogen peroxide and sodium hydroxide.

The sulphur is converted to sodium sulphate. Then you add barium chloride and dilute hydrochloric acid.

The sulphur is converted to barium sulphate.

You filter that off and weigh it.

Then yo do the same thing with a known mass of sulphur.

Form the ratio of the masses of barium sulphate produced, you can calculate the ratio of the amounts of sulphur.

You know how much there was in the second experiment and so you can calculate how much there was in the first one (with the DNA).

So you can work out the percentage in DNA. Of course, it's zero but I'm illustrating the general idea here

You do something similar using a solution of barium hydroxide which forms barium carbonate.

And, by weighing that, you can find how much carbon there was.

You can do similar things with hydrogen (weighed as water absorbed onto phosphorous pentoxide)

The nitrogen is measured by Dumas' method(Which you can look up here)

Finally you measure the oxygen- that's the trickiest one. Hydrogenation to give water is one way to do it- isotopic dilution is another.

 

Anyway.

When you have finished you know how much P ,S, H, O, and N are present in a known mass of DNA.

When you add them up they weigh the same as the DNA did.

So there's no room for anything else.

So we know there's nothing else.

 

It's a pity Myuncle doesn't want to learn that sort of thing.

 

 

Why mystical nonsense? I am here to learn, you can teach whatever you want without patronizing. Don't you have any doubts at all? What if all the unknown elements disappear during the combustion process?

[Greg H.]

What if all the unknown elements disappear during the combustion process?

 

Then there would be a weight discrepancy between the original sample and the constituent elements left over afterwards. Nature, unlike mankind, does not try to fool you, or obfuscate itself. It may be difficult to understand or to believe, and it may not make much sense once you do understand it, but it's not deliberately concealing itself from scientific inquiry.

[John Cuthber]

Why mystical nonsense? I am here to learn, you can teach whatever you want without patronizing. Don't you have any doubts at all? What if all the unknown elements disappear during the combustion process?

 

Since the defining properties of chemical elements include the impossibility of creating or destroying their atoms in any chemical process, no, I don't have any doubts.

 

You seem not to realise that, if you started reading a decent textbook, you would learn a lot more and a lot faster.

Have you tried it?

[Myuncle]

Since the defining properties of chemical elements include the impossibility of creating or destroying their atoms in any chemical process, no, I don't have any doubts.

 

You seem not to realise that, if you started reading a decent textbook, you would learn a lot more and a lot faster.

Have you tried it?

 

No, I had to read textbooks in secondary school, now for me reading it's just a hobby. If we know the elements of orange juice, why the natural and the artificial juices taste so different?

[Fuzzwood]

Because orange juice is not just one compound. How is reading that textbook going?

[John Cuthber]

" If we know the elements of orange juice, why the natural and the artificial juices taste so different? "

because a better fake would be more expensive.

Also, the elements are not the whole story.

There's the question of their arrangement into compounds and the relative proportion of those compounds.