The periodic table of the elements is one of the most powerful icons in science: a single document that captures the essence of chemistry in an elegant pattern. Indeed, nothing quite like it exists in biology or physics, or any other branch of science, for that matter. One sees periodic tables everywhere: in industrial labs, workshops, academic labs, and of course, lecture halls. It is sometimes said that chemistry has no deep ideas, unlike physics, which can boast quantum mechanics and (...) relativity, and biology, which has produced the theory of evolution. This view is mistaken, however, since there are in fact two big ideas in chemistry. They are chemical periodicity and chemical bonding, and they are deeply interconnected. The observation that certain elements prefer to combine with specific kinds of elements prompted early chemists to classify the elements in tables of chemical affinity. Later these tables would lead, somewhat indirectly, to the discovery of the periodic system, perhaps the biggest idea in the whole of chemistry. Indeed, periodic tables arose partly through the attempts by Dimitri Mendeleev and numerous others to make sense of the way in which particular elements enter into chemical bonding. (shrink)

While symbolic colour use has always played a conspicuous role in science research and education, the use of colour in historic diagrams remains a lacuna in the history of science. Investigating the colour use in diagrams often means uncovering a whole cosmology that is not otherwise explicit in the diagram itself. The periodic table is a salient and iconic example of non-mimetic colour use in science. Andreas von Antropoff's (1924) rectangular table of recurrent rainbow colours is famous, as are Alcindo (...) Flores Cabral's (1949) application of colour in his round snail form, using the RGB scheme, and Mazurs's (1967) pine tree system, consisting of warm and cold colours that he attributed to specific groups of elements—an attribution that we can relate back to humoralism and alchemy. From the first periodic tables in the 19th century, individual researchers have used different colour regimes. While standardization may play an obvious role in chemistry and its diagrams, all the more impressive is the anarchistic use of colour in the various diagrams which continue to be created. This article focuses on periodic tables in chemical journals and text books, and explores and compares the development of colour codes found in the few existing polychrome diagrams from the 1920s to the 1970s. (shrink)

The periodic table may be seen as the most successful example of inquiry in the history of science, both in terms of practical application and theoretic understanding. As such, it serves as a model for truth as it emerges from inquiry. This paper offers a sketch of a central moment in the history of chemistry that illustrates an intuitive metamathematical construction, a model of emerging truth. The MET, reflecting the structure the surrounds the periodic table, attempts to capture the salient (...) epistemological elements that warrant truth claims based on sets of models that are progressive in light of both empirical and theoretical advance seen over time. (shrink)

This volume provides the first English translation of Nietzsche's unpublished notes from the spring of 1884 through the winter of 1884-85, the period in which he was composing the fourth and final part of his favorite work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. These notebooks therefore provide special insight into Nietzsche's philosophical concept of superior humans,as well as important clues to the identities of the famous nineteenth-century European figures who inspired Nietzsche's invention of fictional characters such as "the prophet," "the sorcerer," and "the (...) ugliest human." In these notebooks, Nietzsche also further explores ideas that were introduced in the first three parts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Zarathustra's teaching about the death of God; his proclamation that it is time for humankind to overcome itself and create the superhumans; his discovery that the secret of life is the will to power; and his most profound thought--that the entire cosmos will eternally return. Readers will encounter here a wealth of material that Nietzsche would include in his next book, Beyond Good and Evil, as he engages the ideas of Kant and Schopenhauer, challenges cultural icons like Richard Wagner, and mercilessly exposes the foibles of his contemporaries, especially of his fellow Germans. Readers will also discover an extensive collection of Nietzsche's poetry. Richly annotated and accompanied by a detailed translators' afterword, this volume showcases the cosmopolitanism at work in Nietzsche's multifaceted and critical exploration of aesthetic and cultural influences that transcend national (and nationalist) notions of literature, music, and culture. (shrink)

The philosopher of chemistry Andrea Woody has recently published a wide-ranging article concerning the turn to practice in the philosophy of science. Her primary example consists of the use of different forms of representations by Lothar Meyer and Mendeleev when they presented their views on chemical periodicity. Woody believes that this distinction can cast light on various issues including why Mendeleev was able to make predictions while Meyer was not. Secondly, she claims that it can clarify the much-debated question (...) concerning the relative values of prediction and accommodation of data in the way that the periodic system was accepted. Thirdly, Woody believes that such differences in the representation of periodicity can be used to argue for the explanatory nature of the periodic table in contrast with the more traditional view that the periodic table is not explanatory. (shrink)

The basis of the Periodic Table is discussed. Electronic configuration recurs in only 21 out of the 32 groups. A better basis is derived by considering the highest classical valency (v) exhibited by an element and a new measure, the highest valency in carbonyl compounds (v*). This leads to a table based on the number of outer electrons possessed by an atom (N) and the number of electrons required for it to achieve an inert (noble) gas configuration (N*). Periodicity (...) of these is nearly complete. The new basis helps to settle the question of the best form of table and related issues. (shrink)

Logicians commonly speak in a relatively undifferentiated way about pre-euler diagrams. The thesis of this paper, however, is that there were three periods in the early modern era in which euler-type diagrams (line diagrams as well as circle diagrams) were expansively used. Expansive periods are characterized by continuity, and regressive periods by discontinuity: While on the one hand an ongoing awareness of the use of euler-type diagrams occurred within an expansive period, after a subsequent phase of regression the entire knowledge (...) about the systematic application and the history of euler-type diagrams was lost. I will argue that the first expansive period lasted from Vives (1531) to Alsted (1614). The second period began around 1660 with Weigel and ended in 1712 with lange. The third period of expansion started around 1760 with the works of Ploucquet, euler and lambert. Finally, it is shown that euler-type diagrams became popular in the debate about intuition which took place in the 1790s between leibnizians and Kantians. The article is thus limited to the historical periodization between 1530 and 1800. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Volume 45, Issue 1-2, Page 112-134, June 2022.

Analyzing and modeling interconnections between crucial factors of human development, rates of growth thereof and elasticity of the growth rates, the authors have defined specific periods of the development and have made a forecast for the dynamics of the human resources development. Those periods have been defined more exactly and arranged as follows: the first one – «Before Christ»; the second one – «Early Medieval» (1–1100 a.d.); the third one – «Advanced Medieval» (1101–1625); the forth one – «Pioneer’s Modernization» (1626–1970); (...) the fifth one – «Industrialization» (1871–2030) and the sixth one – «Informational society» – after 2030. The results received enable to make forecasts of the global factors dynamics, to find out unified solutions in socio-economic sphere, to define tendencies in social development and to build up unified strategic approaches for modeling global influence on human resources. (shrink)

In this essay I intend to flesh out and discuss what I consider to be the groundbreaking contribution by the German historian and theorist of history Reinhart Koselleck to postwar historiography: his theory of historical times. I begin by discussing the view, so prominent in the Anglophone context, that Koselleck's idea of the plurality of historical times can be grasped only in terms of a plurality of historical periods in chronological succession, and hence, that Koselleck's theory of historical times is (...) in reality a theory of periodization. Against this interpretation, to be found in works by Kathleen Davis, Peter Osborne, and Lynn Hunt, among others, I will argue that not only is Koselleck's theory of historical times, or, with a more phenomenlogical turn of phrase, his theory of multiple temporalities, not a theory of periodization, it is, furthermore, a theory developed to defy periodization. Hence, at the core of Koselleck's work is the attempt to replace the idea of linear, homogeneous time with a more complex, heterogeneous, and multilayered notion of temporality. In this essay I will demonstrate how this shift is achieved by means of three dichotomies: between natural and historical, extralinguistic and intralinguistic, and diachronic and synchronic time. (shrink)

This paper explores the development of the chemical table as a tool designed for chemical information visualization. It uses a historical context to investigate the purpose of chemical tables and charts, analyzing them from the perspective of theory of tables, cartography, and design. It suggests reasons why the two-dimensional periodic table remains the de facto standard for chemical information display.

Revision sequences were introduced in 1982 by Herzberger and Gupta as a mathematical tool in formalising their respective theories of truth. Since then, revision has developed in a method of analysis of theoretical concepts with several applications in other areas of logic and philosophy. Revision sequences are usually formalised as ordinal-length sequences of objects of some sort. A common idea of revision process is shared by all revision theories but specific proposals can differ in the so-called limit rule, namely the (...) way they handle the limit stages of the process. The limit rules proposed by Herzberger and by Belnap show different mathematical properties, called periodicity and reflexivity, respectively. In this paper we isolate a notion of cofinally dependent limit rule, encompassing both Herzberger’s and Belnap’s ones, to study periodicity and reflexivity in a common framework and to contrast them both from a philosophical and from a mathematical point of view. We establish the equivalence of weak versions of these properties with the revision-theoretic notion of recurring hypothesis and draw from this fact some observations about the problem of choosing the “right” limit rule when performing a revision-theoretic analysis. (shrink)

In case of that human civilization was viewed as an integrated organism, the Periodic Table of the Civilizations (PTOC in short) has been formulated and recommended based on the development level and periodicity of core elements of human civilization. It divides the frontier process of the human civilization from the birth of humankind to the end of twenty-first century into 4 periods and 16 stages, and in which four periods include that of primitive culture, agricultural civilization, industrial civilization and (...) knowledge civilization orderly, and each period includes four stages, that is, start, developing, maturing and transition stages sequentially. There are three approaches for the arrangements of the PTOC, that is, simple, vertical and horizontal tables. The big period of earth civilization refers to that from the primitive culture to the knowledge civilization, and then big period of space civilization will begin with the astronautic civilization. The first modernization witnesses the great changes and transformation from the traditional agricultural to the modern industrial civilization, and then second modernization from the modern industrial to the higher modern knowledge civilization. The periodic table, coordinate system and roadmap of human civilization and world modernization have been formulated to describe the relationship between them. (shrink)

A totally ordered group G is essentially periodic if for every definable non-trivial convex subgroup H of G every definable subset of G is equal to a finite union of cosets of subgroups of G on some interval containing an end segment of H; it is coset-minimal if all definable subsets are equal to a finite union of cosets, intersected with intervals. We study definable sets and functions in such groups, and relate them to the quasi-o-minimal groups introduced in Belegradek (...) et al. . Main results: An essentially periodic group G is abelian; if G is discrete, then definable functions in one variable are ultimately piecewise linear. A group such that every model elementarily equivalent to it is coset-minimal is quasi-o-minimal , and its definable functions in one variable are piecewise linear. (shrink)

Since its original publication in Chinese in the 1930s, this work has been accepted by Chinese scholars as the most important contribution to the study of their country's philosophy. In 1952 the book was published by Princeton University Press in an English translation by the distinguished scholar of Chinese history, Derk Bodde, "the dedicated translator of Fung Yu-lan's huge history of Chinese philosophy" (New York Times Book Review). Available for the first time in paperback, it remains the most complete work (...) on the subject in any language. Volume I covers the period of the philosophers, from the beginnings to around 100 B.C., a philosophical period as remarkable as that of ancient Greece. Volume II discusses a period lesser known in the West--the period of classical learning, from the second century B.C. to the twentieth century. (shrink)

Many sensory processing regions of the central brain undergo critical periods of experience‐dependent plasticity. During this time ethologically relevant information shapes circuit structure and function. The mechanisms that control critical period timing and duration are poorly understood, and this is of special importance for those later periods of development, which often give rise to complex cognitive functions such as social behavior. Here, we review recent findings in Drosophila, an organism that has some unique experimental advantages, and introduce novel views for (...) manipulating plasticity in the post‐embryonic brain. Critical periods in larval and young adult flies resemble classic vertebrate models with distinct onset and termination, display clear connections with complex behaviors, and provide opportunities to control the time course of plasticity. These findings may extend our knowledge about mechanisms underlying extension and reopening of critical periods, a concept that has great relevance to many human neurodevelopmental disorders. (shrink)

Starting from six kinds of periodicity of words we define six sets of words which are primitive in different senses and we investigate their relationships. We show that only three of the sets are external Marcus contextual languages with choice but none of them is an external contextual language without choice or an internal contextual language. For the time complexity of deciding any of our sets by one-tape Turing machines, n2 is a lower bound and this is optimal in (...) two cases. The notions of roots and degrees of words and languages, which are strongly connected to periodicity and primitivity, are also considered, and we show that there can be an arbitrarily large gap between the complexity of a language and that of its roots. (shrink)

We study the formalization within sybsystems of second-order arithmetic of theorems concerning periodic points in dynamical systems on the real line. We show that Sharkovsky's theorem is provable in WKL0. We show that, with an additional assumption, Sharkovsky's theorem is provable in RCA0. We show that the existence for all n of n-fold iterates of continuous mappings of the closed unit interval into itself is equivalent to the disjunction of Σ02 induction and weak König's lemma.

(No abstract is available for this citation).

This paper discusses the contents and roles of the bulletin Giat, a community-based periodical published in Jakarta by a Koto Gadang foundation to support development in Koto Gadang, West Sumatra. Giat played a role as a communication medium linking people from Koto Gadang who lived outside their home area to their original villages. In describing and analysing the bulletin, I explore its content and focus on its collecting of funds for the clean water pipeline project in Koto Gadang and on (...) its distribution of information, especially information about Minangkabau customary law, culture, literature, and the women’s movement. The bulletin also facilitated the sharing of family news among people from Koto Gadang in the village and the rantau. Giat became a medium for maintaining interpersonal connections and accommodated initiatives to develop the village. It is shown that, as a community-based publication, Giat played a role in developing village infrastructure as well as its social and cultural fields. (shrink)

In the context of a distributive lattice we specify the sort of mappings that could be generally called ''negations'' and study their behavior under iteration. We show that there are periodic and nonperiodic ones. Natural periodic negations exist with periods 2, 3, and 4 and pace 2, as well as natural nonperiodic ones, arising from the interaction of interior and quasi interior mappings with the pseudocomplement. For any n and any even , negations of period n and pace s can (...) also be constructed, but in a rather ad hoc and trivial way. (shrink)

This article discusses the mathematizing of the chemical periodic system as a grid, which leads to a quadratic function or “binódica function” formed by pairs of periods or binodos. We describe the periodic law as an increasing function of the principal quantum number. It works subject to the dialectical laws that generate; first: gradual quantitative changes:, with “duplication” of periods:. Second: radical quantitative changes:, with the emergence of new quantum transitions, growth and a change in the format of the binodos. (...) We use analytical and graphic methods to mathematize Mendeleev’s law, making the size of the binodos and the continuous series depend on the number of the binode, which is the same quantum number. Likewise, we show a graphic representation, in 2D, of a continuous and self-similar spiral function of the elements, in a geometric growth pattern. (shrink)

In this essay, we aim to provide an overview of the periodic table’s origins and history, and of the elements which conspired to make it chemistry’s most recognisable icon. We pay attention to Mendeleev’s role in the development of a system for organising the elements and chemical knowledge while facilitating the teaching of chemistry. We look at how the reception of the table in different chemical communities was dependent on the local scientific, cultural and political context, but argue that its (...) eventual universal acceptance is due to its unique ability to accommodate possessed knowledge while enabling novel predictions. Furthermore, we argue that its capacity to unify apparently disconnected phenomena under a simple framework facilitates our understanding of periodicity, making the table an icon of aesthetic value, and an object of philosophical inquiry. Finally, we briefly explore the table’s iconicity throughout its representations in pop art and science fiction. (shrink)

Periodization is rooted in historical theory. It reflects our priorities, our values, and our understanding of the forces of continuity and change. Yet periodization is also subject to practical constraints. For pedagogical reasons, world historians must seek reasonable symmetry between major historical eras despite huge discrepancies in the availability of historical data for separate time periods and for different areas of the world.Political issues arise in periodization. Should world history provide integrated treatment of the evolution of civilization, focusing upon the (...) most developed societies ? Or should it provide equal time to cultures outside the evolutionary mainstream ? If integration is to be preferred--as this article advocates--it is incumbent upon integrationists to provide some overarching theory of change to demonstrate how the destinies of the world's peoples have been linked through the millennia.Although the article attempts to demonstrate how comprehensive theories of change can facilitate the formulation of world history periodization, it does not minimize the difficulty of developing a universally operative organic theory of change. It examines several theoretical orientations, but principal attention is given to world-systems analysis, the most fully refined and well articulated body of theory currently commended as a vehicle for structuring world history.Acknowledging that no body of theory currently achieves a satisfactory universal integration of world history and that this situation may prevail in the future, the author recommends, for the present, an eclectic periodization of four epochs divided at roughly 1000 B.C.E., 400-600 C.E., and circa. 1492. (shrink)

Volume 14 of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche presents the very first translation into English of the philosopher's unpublished notebooks from the period in which he began working on what he considered his best known and most important work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

This is another volume in the first English-language translation of the Colli/Montinari German edition of Nietzsche's complete works. This volume contains notebook fragments, written while Nietzsche was working on Human, All Too Human I.

Periodic orbit quantization requires an analytic continuation of non-convergent semiclassical trace formulae. We propose two different methods for semiclassical quantization. The first method is based upon the harmonic inversion of semiclassical recurrence functions. A band-limited periodic orbit signal is obtained by analytical frequency windowing of the periodic orbit sum. The frequencies of the periodic orbit signal are the semiclassical eigenvalues, and are determined by either linear predictor, Padé approximant, or signal diagonalization. The second method is based upon the direct application (...) of the Padé approximant to the periodic orbit sum. The Padé approximant allows the resummation of the, typically exponentially, divergent periodic orbit terms. Both techniques do not depend on the existence of a symbolic dynamics, and can be applied to bound as well as to open systems. Numerical results are presented for two different systems with chaotic and regular classical dynamics, viz. the three-disk scattering system and the circle billiard. (shrink)

Infants possess only rudimentary face-processing skills, evidence from patients treated for congenital cataract and from monkeys deprived of face input for several months postnatally indicates that this early experience plays a key role in the ultimate development of expert face processing. This article provides evidence that early visual deprivation disrupts some but not all aspects of face processing and that the deficits caused by early visual deprivation are face-specific, but that it is visual deprivation rather than the lack of input (...) from faces per se that causes the deficits to occur. The evidence is placed from visually deprived monkeys and humans into a broader context showing the role of biased experience on the development of expert face processing. (shrink)

In the same way that it is possible - by a loosely specified class of more or less well accepted statements - to know the referent of an ordinary proper name, we can understand a name like "the Renaissance." But names of events and periods have an indeterminacy not shared by names of men; with holistic names, the criteria of identity for the kind of thing are fluid, while the analogous criteria for being a man are not. Despite this indeterminacy, (...) the conceptualization of events and periods is useful in historical inquiry, where general statements about events, periods, and institutions can be reconciled with statements about particular facts, and with the evidence. Holistic terms cannot reasonably be prohibited on philosophical grounds; their legitimate use is a problem historians must judge case by case. (shrink)

In 1887–1894, Richard Dedekind explored a number of ideas within the project of placing mappings at the very center of pure mathematics. We review two such initiatives: the introduction in 1894 of groups into Galois theory intrinsically via field automorphisms, and a new attempt to define the continuum via maps from ℕ to ℕ in 1891. These represented the culmination of Dedekind’s efforts to reconceive pure mathematics within a theory of sets and maps and throw new light onto the nature (...) of his structuralism and its specificity in relation to the work of other mathematicians. (shrink)

The psychoanalytical case history was in many ways the pivot point of John Forrester’s reflections on case-based reasoning. Yet the Freudian case is not without its own textual forebears. This article closely analyses texts from two earlier case-writing traditions in order to elucidate some of the negotiations by which the case history as a textual form came to articulate the mode of reasoning that we now call ‘thinking in cases’. It reads Eugène Azam’s 1876 observation of Félida X and her (...) ‘double personality’—the case that brought both Azam and Félida to prominence in late 19th-century French science—against a medico-surgical case penned by the Bordeaux physician in the same decade. While the stylistics of Azam’s medical case mirror its epistemic underpinnings in the ‘vertical’ logics of positivist science, the multiple narratives interwoven in Félida’s case grant both Azam and his patient the role of knowledge-making actors in the text. This narrative transformation chimes with the way Azam reasons ‘horizontally’ from particulars to Félida’s singular condition, but sits in tension with his choice to structure the observation along a ‘vertical’ axis. Between the two, we glimpse the emergence of the psychological observation as a mode of writing and thus of thinking in cases. (shrink)