Lewis Dot Diagrams

2005/02/14m
Yippee! I've finally implemented the Lewis Dot Diagrams. There was some confusion in my mind as to whether or not Hund's principal should be invoked in displaying dot diagrams. I managed to locate books that taught it in conflicting manners. I finally opted to apply it having the electrons fill the dot positions in as distant a position from one another as possible, but if someone provides me a substantially convincing argument against, I may well be swayed in a different direction.

Normally people will only implement Lewis dot diagrams for the s and p block elements, but since I have "absolute" data from the Chemical Rubber Company's (CRC) Handbook of Chemistry and Physics (HCP) regarding the electron configuration of neutral atoms in the ground state (ECNAGS), I decided to implement it for all cases. This leads to some interesting phenomena. I imagined that no element would have all s and p electrons filled except the noble gases. But palladium, Pd, is a notable exception. I'm curious if someone much more knowledgeable than myself knows whether it is as stable as the noble gases. Also, the d block elements are not consistent like the f block elements are. Usually, they have one or two Lewis electrons only. Interestingly, the three elements that have such excellent thermal and electrical conductivity: Cu, Ag, Au; all have only one Lewis electron. Aluminum, the other noteworthy conductor does not follow suit. It has three just like the others in its group.

The ECNAGS table (see above) from the 81st edition of the CRC HCP does not have information for elements 105-109. Apparently, neither does the current, 85th edition. It seems that CRC culls it's info from the government anyway, physics.nist.gov, which, in turn gets its info from a handful of other sources that they list. Much of the info for this table therefore is from speculative calculations rather than experimental results. I don't know how electron configuration is verified experimentally, so I defer to CRC's expertise. As it now stands, the Lewis Electron coloring for elements 105-109 is incorrect.

Unrelatedly, I've given the two mini-graphs their own element highlight capability, minor though it is. It consists of a small partially transparent blue rectangle at the base of the vertical bars. As with the periodic table's highlight, it can be disabled on the config menu screen.

Also, my humble periodic table has attracted the attention of university chemistry professors in India, the Philippines, and Turkey. I'm always pleased that this application finds favor and I appreciate all the constructive criticism. Thank you.