One kind of atom, all the way through
Why Is There a Table of Everything?
An element is a substance made of only one kind of atom, and there are only 118 of them known.
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Step 1 of 5
An element cannot be split into anything simpler.
Gold is gold all the way down — cut it as small as you like and every piece is still gold atoms. There is no recipe for gold, because it is not made of anything else.
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Step 2 of 5
There are 118, and about 90 turn up in nature.
The rest have only ever been made a few atoms at a time in laboratories, and most vanish again within seconds.
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Step 3 of 5
They were lined up because they repeat.
Sort the elements by size and their behaviour comes round again and again. Start a new row each time the pattern restarts and the similar ones stack into columns.
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Step 4 of 5
A column is a family.
The far-left column are soft metals that fizz in water. The far-right column are gases so unbothered that they will not react with anything at all.
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Step 5 of 5
You are made of surprisingly few of them.
Just four elements — oxygen, carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen — make up about 96% of your body. The other ninety are the last few percent.
Hydrogen alone is about 90% of every atom in the universe. The table is long, but nearly all of space is the first tile on it.
The short version
An element is a substance made of a single kind of atom, and the periodic table lines them up so the families fall into columns.
Try it yourself
Look at the little symbols on a vitamin packet — Fe, Zn, Ca. Each one is a tile from the table, and your body genuinely needs a pinch of it.
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