Henry Bent
New Ideas calls to mind Aristotle’s synopsis of the Iliad and the Odyssey: Woman abducted. Long war. One guy has a hard time getting home. End of story. The rest is episodes. Similarly here: Chemical capture of the Left-Step Periodic Table. One element finds a new home: The noblest of the noble gases is not a Noble Gas. End of story. The rest is novel consequences of the Noble Gas Conclusion. Among them: overlooked Rules of Triads, Block Sizes, and Full Shells; overlooked block-to-block trends and a correspondence between elements’ ordinal numbers in their Groups and orbital’s radial quantum numbers; and recognition that Pauli’s explanation of Periodicity’s 'magic numbers' (2, 8, 18, . . .) got the right answer (the Pauli Exclusion Principle) for the wrong reason. New Ideas ends with suggestions for streamlining the teaching of 'the mole concept', chemical bonding, and thermodynamics in order to provide room in the chemistry curriculum for a more thorough treatment of Periodic System Systematics.
