It is important for any scientist to have a working knowledge of the periodic table (and those chemical symbols allow a certain flexibility in constructing a crossword that tries to restrict itself to scientific ideas!). The table is one of the major representations within science and has a beauty of shape and meaning — a meaning that goes beyond the chemical properties of the elements. After all, these elements are the only ones that make up all the materials we have in the universe and which we physicists investigate.
What we could do is compare these particular elements (iron, germanium…) in terms of any of their uses or properties, but I’d like to do it in a way based on an idea by Peter Atkins in his extraordinarily imaginative book The Periodic Kingdom (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995). Here Atkins thinks of the periodic table as a landmass or kingdom and then considers and compares the properties of different ‘areas’ of the kingdom in much the same way that a geographer or geologist would do, but he looks at the physical and chemical properties and how they change over the landscape.
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