G8 – A Method to the Madness: The Periodic Table 800-900L -02

The storm is raging outside when suddenly the power goes out. Your father heads to the hallway closet. There he grabs the battery-powered lantern and a deck of playing cards. He sets the lantern on the kitchen table and quickly starts to shuffle the cards. “Okay everyone,” he yells out, “it’s time to play cards.” Dad takes his card playing seriously. He plays for high stakes, like who takes out the garbage for a week. You had planned on getting your Science homework finished, but that was before the power went out. No matter, playing cards is almost like doing Science. That should count for something.

A common deck of playing cards has much more to do with Science than most would ever imagine. You probably already know there are four suits of cards: clubs, diamonds, hearts, and spades. Do you know what they represent? These four suits are meant to represent the struggle between opposing forces, such as the seasons, or the cardinal directions. Even the number of cards in each suit has a scientific relationship. The thirteen cards, one through ten, plus the Jack, Queen, and King represent the 13 lunar months.

Most card games are designed for the player to look for patterns, which is what scientists do. To be good at cards requires the player to know what all the possible patterns are and which are most likely to turn up in your set of cards. One of the best at looking for patterns in Science was Dmitri Mendeleev. You may think of his problem much like a deck of playing cards. How many ways can you organize the cards? You can group them by suit, by number, face cards and number cards, red cards and black cards, etc. This list of possibilities is very large but nothing like the challenge Dmitri Mendeleev wanted to conquer.