Saturday, August 29, 2009

An Elementary Guide to Minerals


An Elementary Guide to Minerals
The early Greeks thought that all material on Earth was constructed of a combination of four basic elements: earth, water, air and fire.

Century later, alchemists looking for the formula for precious metals such as gold, decided that the essential elements were sulfur, salt and mercury.

In 1669 a group of German chemists isolated phosphorus the first minerals element to be accurately identified.

The classic guide to chemical elements is the periodic table, a chart division in 1869 by Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev (1834-1907), for whom mendelevium was name.

The table was revised by British physicist Henry Moseley (1887-1915), who came up with the concept of atomic numbers, numbers based on the number of protons (positively charge particles) in an elemental atom.

The periodic table is a clean, crisp way of characterizing the elements, and if you are now or ever were a chemistry, physics or premed student, you can testify first hand to the of memorizing the information it provides.
An Elementary Guide to Minerals

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