The Moseley Experiment

How we know what we know about the order of the elements on science’s most famous table

I’ve written about Dimi Mendeleev before — he’s probably one of my favorite famous chemists. He’s just so prototypical Russian in how he looks, and I imagine that contrasting with how brilliant he was as a scientist. I don’t even know if “Dimi” was his nickname or not, but to me, it fits. In terms of popular contributions to the science, it’s hard to beat his development of the periodic table — the most famous table in chemistry, if not all of…