The theory of theories and the model of models

Chris Loft 2004

I have been dreaming Mendelev's dream . . . I have been dealing out his cards in the night . . . I have been looking for patterns of periodicy in the elements . . . I have been rearranging the patterns and the cards and putting the sequence back into its natural order . . . I have been dreaming of my grandmother's Russian blintzes, and borscht and brandy cake . . . I have been dreaming of cold winter nights . . . seeing the breath steam from my nostrils . . . but it is too cold to write . . . too cold to hold a pen . . . too cold to think . . . combing my fingers through my tangled dark hair . . . trudging through the cold white snow . . . dealing out the cards . . . each one representing an element . . . looking for patterns . . . in the cards . . . in the snow flakes . . .

In the beginning was the word . . . and the word was matter. In the beginning was the word . . . and the word was life . . . life created from matter . . . inorganic into organic life . . . created from cold energy. In the beginning was the big bang and out of the big bang the elements were uttered into existence . . . one by one until they were too heavy to bear their own weight . . torn apart by the inevitable power of an ever increasing negative charge spinning around an exponential bursting positive repulsion . . . and there was nothing else . . . matter and the energy it radiated into space and time . . . and space is just the absence of matter.

The elements are the words . . . the statement, the message, the code, the computer program . . . a naturally ordered, periodic sequence of matter, accreted from reflected light, condensed by-products of a phase transition inside a rapidly cooled vacuum . . . remnants of a primeaval creative flash of energy. Everything we could ever wish to know about matter is embodied in the regular periodicy of the elements. It is such a pity that we have chosen to take the regular periodicy away and constrain it into a western, calendar-style table.

Billions of years ago the first elements were born, first there was hydrogen, deutrium, triton . . . and then there was helium . . . this was enough to begin . . . then there was lithium . . . and there could be no stopping until the whole process had unfolded . . . a holy trinity of hydrogen, deutrium and triton which in turn built another trinity of hydrogen, helium, lithium . . . building to the trinity of gas, liquid and solid . . . and living things and metal things . . . and all number of things . . . but there were no witnesses to this unfolding theory, this conceptual model is long gone and we are the only ones who can remember, because the story has never been told this way before.