It’s another raw day in St. Petersburg, Russia, but the man striding down the University Embankment along the Neva River isn’t pondering how the icy wind off the Gulf of Finland chills his bones or whether Emperor Alexander II’s reforms will increase salaries for professors like him. Instead, Dmitrii Mendeleev is imagining how he could reveal the chemical underpinnings of the universe on a single page.
This year marks the 150th anniversary of Mendeleev’s invention of the periodic table of the elements in 1869, which not only foretold an internal structure to the atom and the existence of elements not yet discovered, but also hinted at the profundities of quantum mechanics.