A reader has alerted me to the fact that Charles Janet came up with the same so-called "left-step" periodic arrangement of chemical elements that I found in 1972 already in the year 1928 . Indeed, there is a recent article referenced at the Wikipedia article on Janet referencing "Stewart, Philip (April 2010). "Charles Janet: unrecognized genius of the Periodic System". Foundations of Chemistry 12: 5–15. DOI:10.1007/s10698-008-9062-5".
As written at the Wikipedia:
"In 1927 [Janet] turned his attention to the periodic table and wrote a series of six articles in French, which were privately printed and never widely circulated."Even a French biography of him online currently does not have the table as far as I can tell. Biographie synthétique de Charles Janet. I do not speak French to this day so even if I had done any kind of deep research back in those days in 1972, prior to the Internet, the likelihood I would have found Janet's work in the USA is small.
Indeed, back in 1972 I would not have imagined that someone had come up with the same arrangement as I had found and thus I really had no reason to look for previous discoverers since I would have assumed that if someone had had the same idea, it would be well known. I myself sent off a letter to the Scientific American about my "discovery" of the revised periodic table but they paid no attention to it.
Accordingly, as it was just a hobby anyway, I went on with my life and only put up my discovery on the Internet at LexiLine in 2000 when I started my first website online, and when, to my knowledge, there was nothing at all online about alternative models of the Periodic Table, as far as I know. Amazingly, no one, prior to today, has ever paid any attention to my revised period table or commented about it.
That attitude in science epitomizes one of the reasons that I left the study of Biology, Physics and Chemistry in high school and college, by the way, and went on to law and legal studies, leaving the sciences as a hobby.
I was good in the sciences in pre-college studies, already earning college credits in Chemistry in high school, for example, and was sent off as a young student to a science fair where they presented an electron microscope that showed we had 46 chromosomes instead of 48. I dutifully reported on that development in class upon returning to school, whereupon the teacher said to the class immediately afterward that this information was fine but that 48 would be the correct answer for the final exam in that class and for any other test purposes until it was changed in her Biology textbook. That is a true story. That was it for me for Biology. Who wanted to live in the past?
My experience in Physics in high school was much the same. I came up with an algorithm for a complicated class assignment involving the calculation of total resistance in a circuit and my solution was correct, taking half the paper that the accepted method required. Rather than the teacher showing interest in the algorithm, the teacher tried to ridicule the solution in class, unsuccessfully, as I defended the clear logic of it, but that was it for me for Physics. Too much inertia.
And then I had an excessively long hours-long Chemistry lab early on Saturday mornings -- not in my circadian rhythm at all -- where the emphasis was on writing nice-looking lab reports and playing with moles and valences and the like rather than on examining the basic theoretical questions that were of interest to me. That was it for Chemistry. Too many vials.
So the study of law (jurisprudence) it was, where the emphasis was on the reasoning behind the laws and on problem solutions, rather than on repetition of what people already knew (excepted here in law are bar exams and similar, which primarily test knowledge memorized through law review courses and not through Socratic law study, and it is mostly knowledge that any idiot can look up and seldom needs in law practice). But to return to the periodic table ....
I am in fact quite pleased to find that someone in fact came up with the same periodic table arrangement as I did, because it does seem to me to be quite logical "in the broad view" to view the chemical elements this way.
Hence, it is gratifying to see "like minds" out there and I will definitely be doing some study of Charles Janet in the future, although it is clear from his alternative tables that he did not really understand what he had found.
The reader -- already cited above -- writes that a certain L.M. Simmons had the same arrangement idea in 1947 (A modification of the periodic table, but that publication even today is not accessible to me online because I am not an ACS member -- that's science! ... sadly). That same reader also notes that Edward Mazurs "publicized" the "left-step arrangement" in 1957, but in fact it was a "private printing" titled Types of Graphic Representation of the Periodic System of Chemical Elements, to which I could not possibly have had access. A revised accessible edition was first published in 1974 as Graphic Representations of the Periodic System During One Hundred Years.
I find online now that there is even a detailed article at the Wikipedia on Alternative periodic tables. See also Periodic Tables by David V. Black. where Black notes that Mazurs collected all sorts of alternative periodic tables and -- to my great astonishment -- was a fellow Latvian as a Professor at the University of Riga. As Black writes, and this is the important thing:
"Mazurs came to the conclusion – and so have I – that a left-step table works best....".I am not now going to research all the myriad other alternative tables presented in the interim, but wish to point out that apparently none of these previous researchers realized the significance of the "left-step" revised periodic arrangement in showing how the underlying principle is gravitational for the elements as a whole, rather than viewing each element individually or in some "category", as chemists are wont to do, based on their "properties". I was not interested in chemical properties. I was interested in the underlying principle of physics that governed chemical element formation. All periodic tables -- even if useful -- that depart from the underlying gravitational principle are in my opinion not fully accurate.
A most recent article from July 20, 2011 at ChemistryViews.org in At Last A Definitive Periodic Table? (DOI: 10.1002/chemv.201000107) by David Bradley reports essentially that some observers currently still virtually reduce the 1, 4, 9, 16 sequence to mere "numerology", talking about odd numbers and all sorts of irrelevant extraneous things, thus showing that chemists and physicists are still unable to get away from their familiar world of electron shells, rather than trying to find the "basic" force of nature underlying those shells.
In other words, even though there have been predecessors to my own arrangement of the periodic table as far back as the year 1928, scientists still do not "get" what the periodic table revised in this way means.
The principle of chemical element formation is the same as the acceleration of an object in a vacuum, except that we have no "distance" (in the accelerative sense) but rather instead increasing "mass" -- well, that is the same as the idea of the relation between the Higgs Field and mass, and therefore, the Higgs Field is no different than this basic GRAVITATIONAL PRINCIPLE, which the Higgs Boson Theory ignores completely.
Physicists and chemists in explaining the inner workings of the elements do not stick to the gravitational principle but create artificial constructs such as "the weak force" or "the strong force", which in my opinion merely shows that they do not understand how to measure gravity at the atomic and subatomic level.
I.e. the elements in my opinion are created according to the gravitational principle internally, and it is up to Physics and Chemistry down the road to put their concepts of strong and weak forces into that basic gravitational system -- and this also applies to the Higgs Field and the Higgs Boson. If there is a Higgs Field, that Higgs Field is gravity.
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