ABSTRACT
The Periodic Arch (PA) is one of many modern visual displays that have been developed to augment the traditional Periodic Table (PT) of the chemical elements. The motivation for all these developments has been that the traditional PT, which is all rows and columns, seems to defy nature, which seems to want more flexibility than that. The PA answers to these difficulties by inverting the PT and making it into nested arches around and over its founding element, hydrogen. The idea of a PT goes back to Mendeleyev, who studied the behaviors of chemical elements, and realized that as atomic number increases, behaviors repeat. He put the elements into a table, in which the elements aligned in a column behave similarly. The periodic arches above and around hydrogen can be divided into local neighborhoods corresponding to traditional categories: noble gasses, non-metals, and several functionally distinct families of metals that together constitute the great preponderance of all elements.
