Talk:Periodic Table

I'm not sure about this statement regarding Mendeleev's ordering of the table: In many ways this was Bad Science, as he couldn't provide any physical explanation of why there should be missing elements or why atomic weights occasionally needed swapping around. However, he stuck to his guns and redeemed himself with the Good Science of making testable predictions of what properties these missing elements ought to have if and when they were discovered. Luckily for him, his predictions were correct! The Good Science vs Bad Science thing looks trite anyway, & my understanding is that Mendeleev left gaps because there were positions on the table which fit the pattern (i.e. a certain atomic number with certain properties) but which didn't have a known element to match them at the time; so it was a reasonable hypothesis that such elements could be discovered later. I don't think luck or "Bad Science" had anything to do with. But then I really know very little about chemistry or atomic physics. Can somebody more learned verify any of this? 12:56, 21 October 2012 (UTC)
 * It's a very pop-sci description put like that. It's not necessarily Bad Science, but it was a good hypothesis (a hunch, if you really want to go that far) that turned out to be very justifiable in the end. The lack of a physical explanation for taking into account dependencies in a trend ("dark energy", anyone?) isn't necessarily Bad Science, it's just that 95% of the time that people do that it turns out to be wrong. Scarlet A.pngd hominem silverbrain.png 13:39, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

Why even?
This is just a crappy version of the Wikipedia article, is there really anything missional about the periodic table? 17:56, 7 January 2019 (UTC)