![]() The problem is that this view of the world suggests that objects would also be pushed sideways by the spinning matter, and they clearly aren’t. They watched bodies falling at the Earth’s surface, for instance, and they came up with notions of rapidly spinning vortices of ethereal (weightless) matter that drove objects downwards, and lots of people went along with the idea because it seemed quite plausible. For a long time, scientists set themselves the goal of explaining the phenomena they observed. ![]() What I’ve always liked about Mendeleev is that he didn’t just build the periodic table, which we’ve no doubt all gazed at in long boring moments if we’ve ever had chemistry classes, he used it to do something I regard as absolutely central to the nature of the scientific method as it emerged in the eighteenth century. It was good of Google to remind us, in one of its doodles, that 8 February was Dmitri Mendeleev’s birthday (the 182nd, as it happens, but then Google makes a bit of a point of celebrating slightly odd anniversaries).
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