Dmitri Mendeleev

Yeah, I know the song.

Uh, so, the periodic table, that's, um, it's got lots of elements, um, uh, it was founded by Mendeleev, oh yes, uh, Mendeleev, um, who's some Russian dude, um, uh, who was supposedly sleeping on a train one day, uh, and then he was like, hold on, and So he had this puzzle where he put the elements in order, because the original order they had was based on atomic weight.

But then he was like, hold on a second, I should swap a couple random elements and arrange them in rows of eight.

And then he was like, wait, that works.

And he was like, yeah, I know, I left them there.

And then they were later filled and they were like, oh, damn, he's right.

So, yeah, he got the 101st element named after him, Mendeleevium.

And a fun thing about the periodic table is attempting to spell your name.

Albert Einstein came up with a theory of relativity in a dream.

Even the periodic table where we did a prior episode on how to memorize technical information like the periodic table, chemist Dmitri Mendeleev actually came up with the periodic table in a dream.

He's quoted as saying, I saw in a dream a table where all the elements fell into place as required.

Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper.

So our fractal universe, the hypothesis, predicts that we will find new structures.

And just like Mendeleev's periodic table, the idea is we could actually predict what those will be based off of the recurring pattern.

So let's sit with what this means and consider it a little bit more.

So first, you have six exact 10 to the 24th matches that suggest there is a universal geometric law.

Like a theorist.

They compare it to the, uh, Russian chemist Mendeleev, who famously predicted the existence and exact properties of entirely missing elements on the periodic table purely through deep reasoning and mathematical patterns without having to discover them physically first.

But then there is the second path, and this is the twist in the essay.

They call it a civilization of width.

Because the science tells us that it is exactly these sorts of behaviors we need in order to have breakthroughs.

Whether it's Dimitri Mendeleev waking up from a nap and having the periodic table in his head, or Werner Heisenberg walking home from dinner with Niels Bohr across a park and suddenly discovering the uncertainty principle.

The stories about this process are seemingly endless.

Now at this point, some of you might be saying to yourselves, well, I'm just not a creative type.