This is the 150th anniversary of
the periodic table as formulated by
Dmitri Mendeleev and we at Fermilab have
brought together a number of scientists
who are going to discuss what the
periodic table has meant for them and
what it means in their everyday
scientific life now as well as its
implications for the history and
development of science.
I think the periodic table is
a really important
part of science.
So, I use the periodic table
so back in school of course when I
was doing my chemistry and now I use it
when I try to understand the behavior of
our detectors for example when we use
the silicon detectors as the trackers in
collider physics.
The periodic table
represents an incredible level of
insight on the part of human beings
towards the inner workings of the
universe around us. We were able to
take these observations -  counting,
measuring these elemental parts of the
universe, and draw insight from that in
this really unique way and organize that
insight in a way that allowed us to
predict elements that we weren't even
able to observe. And then later to
observe those and have those
observations be correct.
I try to imagine what it's like 
without having a periodic table.
We'd just have a list of all of the
elements from one to whichever number
were at at the time 116 or 118. There'd
be much less order in the elements and
they'd make much less sense. For those of
us who don't have perfect memories it
helps to see things on a chart, to see
the organization, to draw the
relationships between the different
parts. And so just in being able to know
and to use the periodic table having the
chart makes it much more useful.
The periodic table is based on chemical
characteristics, but also it's behind so
that the nuclei also have a similar
structure. And that's reason why oxygen has
the first the lightest element to have a
double magic number so that's the reason
why I like oxygen.  I don't even note
that I use periodic table while in fact
that we do we all use it
one way to another.  My favorite thing
about the periodic table is that you get
not just a lot of technical information
about the elements, you get some actual
piece of history about the elements.
Because each element has a name, and the
people who discovered the elements
generally get to name them. And most of
the elements - the vast majority were
discovered in the last 300 years or so,
and so people were doing research
finding the elements and then giving
names to them. And the names that they
picked had some sort of significance to
them and a lot of the time you can get
something about science history from
looking at the names. For example, helium.
When people were doing studies of the
Sun they found some unusual spectral
lines, and they did they deduced that
there was a new element up there and so
they named it helium after Helios
the Greek Titan of the Sun. I think the
periodic table is probably one of the
first forms of classification. It really
set the playing field for things that we
build off of now. So in the past there
you thought there was only four elements - 
you know the whole earth, wind, fire thing.
But now we know that there are elements and
we have it gives us a really good way of
defining things and characterizing
things and we build off of that.
My favorite element is something called
niobium. Niobium is hands-down the best
super conductor of all the elements and
that's why we use it in a lot of
different applications here at Fermilab.
We use it in particle accelerators to
accelerate and bend beams...
I use the periodic table as a visual 
for showing how science evolves.
We use it in detectors, for astronomy  ...
And the fun thing is to go
from the most complex
current version of the periodic table to
our simple little table which I call our
periodic table which shows the quarks
and the leptons in the order that we
finally figured out that there is a
symmetry and an order and a hierarchy
and so I make that link into complexity
back into simplicity.
We use it in our
quantum sensors ...
and in our development for quantum
computers because this material is such
a good superconductor. It is element
number 41, if you were curious, and it's
named after Niobe who was daughter of
Tantalus in Greek mythology!
The periodic table gave rise to
wondering about
little quirks in the original version of
the periodic table. When Mendeleev made
his table - he he was not the first but he
was probably the most comprehensive of
the earlier earliest workers - I think he
had 63 elements at his disposal and he
tried to array those in a way that made
sense. The elements that he had were the
ones that chemists had discovered and so
those are the ones that have chemistry
that make chemical compounds. So he
missed out a whole set of important
elements like helium and neon and so on -
the noble gases - because chemists had
never seen them.
When it really comes to
my you know consciousness that it's
indeed kind of periodic table what I'm
talking about, often comes with the
stories. So the periodic table is so rich
because it has 118 elements, and to me,
especially when I talk to students, to
school kids, I can talk about each of
these elements because behind them there
is a rich story of discovery. Sometimes,
sometimes, you know,
mistakes and so on and so forth.
I think the periodic table
is is fantastic but there's so much more
beyond the periodic table that it's not
everything. There's lots of stuff
to find and and that's such a big
portion of what we do here.
you
