About the set
The Full Set is the periodic table as a collection of 118 cards. The table stays quiet so the cards can be loud: every class of element has its own colour and its own pattern, pressed into the holographic foil of its cards.
Ten classes
- Alkali metals. Soft, silvery and so eager to lose their one outer electron that they fizz in water.
- Alkaline earth metals. Two outer electrons, a little calmer than the alkalis; the stuff of bones, shells and fireworks.
- Transition metals. The broad middle of the table: hard, shiny, often coloured, the metals of tools and coins.
- Post-transition metals. Softer metals with low melting points, from aluminium foil to tin and lead.
- Halogens. One electron short of a full shell and hungry for it; they make salts with metals.
- Noble gases. Full outer shells, so they barely react. Pass a current through them and they glow.
- Lanthanides. The rare earths: strong magnets, phone screens and lasers.
- Actinides. All radioactive. Uranium and thorium occur in nature; most of the rest are made in reactors.
What is on a card
- The sample. Each element as you would meet it in a real element collection, drawn in 3D in isometric view: gold as stamped bars, caesium sealed in a glass ampoule, sodium under oil, bismuth as a stepped rainbow crystal, copper as a coil of wire, titanium as a crystal bar, lead as shot, gallium melting into a puddle, the noble gases glowing in discharge tubes in their own colours, chlorine as a green gas in a flask, radium as an old luminous watch dial. Elements that only exist a few atoms at a time show their decay, flashing faster the shorter they live. Colours and shapes are approximate.
- The atom. A nucleus with the right number of protons (red) and neutrons, and the electrons in their shells. The shells are drawn as rings for clarity; real electrons are clouds, not planets. Pick an isotope and the nucleus is rebuilt with that many neutrons.
- Rarity is how much of the element there is in the Earth's crust, by mass: Common (over 0.1% of the crust), Uncommon (10 to 1,000 ppm), Scarce (0.1 to 10 ppm), Rare (1 to 100 parts per billion), Very rare (under 1 part per billion); Trace for elements that exist only fleetingly in nature; Made by people for those that do not occur naturally at all.
- The bars compare the melting point, the density and the electronegativity (how strongly the atom pulls electrons in a bond, on the Pauling scale) across the whole table.
Sources
Atomic masses, states, melting and boiling points, densities, electronegativities, electron configurations and classes come from PubChem's periodic table (US National Library of Medicine). Masses in square brackets are for elements with no stable isotope, given for one of their isotopes. Facts, discovery credits, crustal abundances (CRC Handbook values) and isotope data were checked against the element pages of the Royal Society of Chemistry, Wikipedia's element and isotope articles, CIAAW and NIST isotopic compositions. Where the credit for a discovery is disputed, the card gives the year most often cited.
Spotted a mistake? The set is part of Whyarium, and corrections are welcome.