PERIODIC TABLE

Step inside the elements

Compare all 118 elements as 3D columns, click one to dive into its atom, heat a sample until it melts and watch its real-world demo.

Element
Fe26
Iron
Ionisation
763kJ/mol
Ionisation energy
Rank
34thof 102
among measured
tr
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Height
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Setting up the scene…

Find an element

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↑↓ move↵ pickCtrl+K/ open

How the periodic table lab works

Every element is a column standing in its real place in the table, and its height shows the property you pick. The same pattern comes back in every row, which is why it is called the periodic table. Click a column to select it, click it again (or press Enter) to dive into its atom; from there you can heat a sample of it and watch its real-world demo.

The four views

Table: all 118 elements as 3D columns coloured by category. The selected element's value, its rank and a live sentence explaining *why* it has that value sit at the top; hovering a column previews it without selecting it. The screen on the back wall plots the property against atomic number, with its cursor on the selected element.
Atom: the nucleus, the electron cloud, the shells and the element's emission spectrum. Click the nucleus, a shell or a row of the configuration ladder to inspect it; make ions and isotopes.
Sample: a few hundred of its particles in a glass box. Drag the thermometer or use the temperature slider to watch the solid melt and the liquid boil.
Demo: a short experiment showing one thing the element is known for. Space runs it again.
Next view
Previous / next element (in every view)
Dive into the selected element's atom (table)
Back to the table (first closes an open panel or explore card; in the atom it first returns to the whole atom)

The ten heights

Ionisation energy: the energy needed to pull off the outermost electron (kJ/mol). It peaks at the noble gases and bottoms out at the alkali metals; it rises across a row and falls down a group.
Size (atomic radius): how far from the nucleus the outermost electrons are most often found (pm). Atoms shrink across a row, because the growing nuclear charge pulls the same shell in, and grow down a group as each row adds a shell.
Pull (electronegativity): how strongly an atom draws shared electrons in a bond (Pauling scale). Fluorine is top; most noble gases don't bond, so they have no value.
Melting and Boiling: the temperatures where it changes state at 1 atm (K). They show how strongly the particles are bound: giant covalent networks and the metals in the middle of the d block are highest, single-atom noble gases and small molecules lowest.
Density: the mass of one cm³ (g/cm³); gases are about a thousand times thinner than solids.
Mass: the average mass of one atom (u). It grows with the proton number, but not perfectly regularly.
Affinity (electron affinity): the energy given out when a gas atom catches one extra electron (kJ/mol). It peaks at the halogens, and the top is chlorine, not fluorine, whose small shell is crowded. Some atoms, such as the noble gases, beryllium, magnesium and nitrogen, can't hold an extra electron at all: their value is below zero and their columns sit on the floor.
Abundance: milligrams in every kilogram of Earth's crust (mg/kg, the same as grams per tonne of rock). The scale is logarithmic: each step up the column means ten times more. Oxygen and silicon make up three quarters of the crust; most iron sank into the core, and most radioactive elements survive only as traces.
Discovery: the year the element was recognised; the taller the column, the more recent the discovery. The 11 elements known since antiquity are the shortest columns, and tennessine at the top was made in 2010. The columns tell the story of how elements were found: alchemy, gases, electrolysis, the spectroscope, liquid air, radioactivity and particle accelerators.
Elements without a value show a low glass stub with a grey lid and "–"; values that are only calculated (predicted) are glass columns too, printed "(predicted)" and left out of the ranking.
Ionisation energy
Size (atomic radius)
Pull (electronegativity)
Melting point
Boiling point
Density
Atomic mass
Electron affinity
Abundance in Earth's crust (log scale)
Discovery year

Reading the atom

The nucleus holds the protons (warm colour) and the neutrons of the commonest isotope (light colour). Every dot around it is a place where one of its electrons could turn up: the cloud shows that electrons don't circle like planets, only where they are likely to be found. Colours give the subshell type: s is a sphere, p dumbbells along three axes, d mostly four-leaf clovers, f shapes with six or eight lobes. Thin rings mark where each inner shell is densest, the bright ring is the atomic radius and the dashed ring a 100 pm scale.
Electrons usually fill in the order 1s→2s→2p→3s→3p→4s→3d→…1s \to 2s \to 2p \to 3s \to 3p \to 4s \to 3d \to \dots (the n+ℓn + \ell rule). Some elements, such as chromium, copper, palladium, gadolinium and uranium, break it; the explanation says which electron moved where and why. The configuration always comes from measured data, never from the rule.
Inspect: clicking the nucleus adds a proton and moves on to the next element; N or the Nucleus button zooms into the nucleus (protons, neutrons, mass number); the chevrons step to the neighbours and the element block below takes you back to the table; click a shell or a row of the ladder to show that subshell on its own; switch between the cloud and the shell (Bohr) model; add and remove electrons in ion mode; change the neutron count with the isotope stepper. The gas tube beside it glows with the element's own light, and the spectrum card shows its visible lines.
Cloud ⇄ shell (Bohr) model
Add / remove an electron (ion)
Zoom into the nucleus / back to the whole atom

Crystals, heat and states

In a solid the particles are locked in the element's real crystal structure (body-centred cubic, face-centred cubic, hexagonal close-packed, diamond, molecular…) and vibrate. By Lindemann's rule the vibration is about 0.1T/Tm0.1\sqrt{T/T_m} of the gap between neighbours: at the melting point it reaches a tenth of the gap and the crystal falls apart. In a liquid the particles cling together but slide; in a gas they fly and collide.
The particles' average speed follows from temperature and mass: v=3RTMv = \sqrt{\frac{3RT}{M}} with R=8.314R = 8.314 J/(mol·K) and MM the molar mass in kg/mol (for H, N, O, F, Cl, Br and I the two-atom molecule, for phosphorus P₄ and for sulfur S₈: these particles move as a whole). At the same temperature lighter particles are faster.
Carbon and arsenic don't melt at normal pressure; they turn straight into gas (sublimation), and helium never freezes, not even at absolute zero, and turns superfluid below 2.17 K. Above about 800 K every solid and liquid glows, from dull red to white. Kelvin and Celsius: T(K)=t(°C)+273.15T(\text{K}) = t(°\text{C}) + 273.15.
The temperature slider runs from 1 K to 6000 K on a log scale; the blue mark is the melting point, the orange one the boiling (or sublimation) point. You can also drag the thermometer up and down; click a particle to see its neighbours and its speed.
Back to room temperature (293 K)

The demos

Every element has a demo: the hydrogen balloon, glowing signs for the noble gases, the alkali metals in water (more violent down the group), flame colours, for many metals a 10 cm cube (1 L) on a digital scale beside a 1 L carton of water, a bulb filament, metals pulled to a magnet, boiling liquid nitrogen and liquid oxygen held between magnet poles, the halogens' coloured vapours, magnesium's blinding burn, a silicon wafer, white phosphorus glowing in the dark, diamond and graphite, gallium melting in a palm, mercury drops, bismuth crystals, europium and terbium glowing under UV, the decay chains of radioactive elements, and the accelerator collisions that made the heaviest ones. Two extra readouts and a short explanation go with each demo. Demos replay on their own (the loop button in the control card turns that off); Space or "Run again" starts one from the top.

How accurate is it?

The numbers are real measurements: ionisation energies, electron configurations and spectral lines from the NIST Atomic Spectra Database; melting and boiling points, density and electronegativity from PubChem (cross-checked against the CRC Handbook); atomic weights from CIAAW 2024; electron affinities from the measurement reviews (Hotop and Lineberger, Andersen and co-workers, NIST); crust abundances from the CRC Handbook; discovery years and discoverers from the timeline of element discoveries (for 104 on, the IUPAC/IUPAP joint working group); isotopes and half-lives from the IAEA chart of nuclides; atomic radii are the values Clementi and co-workers calculated in 1967, which stop at radon (86). Configurations from element 104 on and some values of the heaviest elements (such as the densities of 104–118, the melting points of astatine and francium and some electron affinities) are calculations, not measurements: the table draws them as glass columns and the explanation says so.
Some things are squeezed to fit. The nucleus is drawn about 2500 times too big: at true scale it would be invisible (the nucleus card prints its real width). The cloud is dots sampled from where the electron is likely to be (hydrogen-like radial parts with Slater's effective nuclear charges, real angular shapes for s, p, d and f); it is not a snapshot of one moment. The sample box shows a few hundred particles instead of the trillions in a real piece, magnified about 130–310 million times (the scale bar says by how much). Atoms in metals are drawn at about 60 % of the distance between their centres (real atoms would touch), so the rows and layers of the crystal can be seen. Gas particles keep their size, so a real gas is about a thousand times emptier than the box. On-screen speeds are squeezed so they stay readable, while the chip shows the true vrmsv_{rms}. A few crystals are simplified and tagged "simplified" (boron, white phosphorus, fluorine); H₂ and N₂ are drawn a little long so both atoms show. A hot solid's colour is computed from Planck's law and the CIE 1931 colour-matching functions. Crystal structures come from Donohue (1974), Wyckoff and later measurements. All temperatures are at 1 atm, and each element keeps its room-temperature crystal (some, like iron, switch structure before they melt). Demo times are shortened; the decay chains and half-lives (IAEA) and the beam and target nuclei that made the synthetic elements (IUPAC/IUPAP reports) are real. Where a source gives a predicted range, the middle of the range is used; the sources are listed in elements.ts and extra.ts.

Explore

Search: find an element by its English or Turkish name, symbol, atomic number, family or a superlative such as "densest" or "biggest atom" (accents and Turkish letters optional).
File: everything about the selected element on one card: configuration, oxidation states, all ten properties and their ranks, states, its light, the story of its discovery, isotopes, crustal abundance, uses and hazard.
Compare: put two elements side by side; their atoms are drawn to the same scale, and for each property it says who is ahead and what kind of bond they would form. The second element gets a pink ring on the table.
Family: the element's group, period or block lights up on the table, with a card on how the family behaves.
History: a timeline played from 1650 to 2016; elements not yet found wait under frosted-glass covers.
Trends: glowing arrows on the table show how the value changes along a period and down a group.
Search for an element (⌘K on a Mac)
Element file
Compare
Family
Discovery timeline (table)
Trend arrows (table)

Camera and other keys

Drag to turn the camera, right-drag to pan, scroll to zoom; walk through the hall with W A S D, and sink or rise with Q and E. The cinematic tour at the start stops on any key or click. The lab's general keys are listed at the very bottom.
Sample: colder / hotter (15 % a press) · Atom: one neutron fewer / more (isotope)
Bring the camera back to the view's framing
3D labels on / off
Forward, left, back, right through the hall
Down / up

Keyboard and mouse

Cinematic camera on / off
Sound on / off
Open / close the Learn · Missions · Practice panel
This window
Turn the camera
Zoom in / out (pinch on a touch screen)