Abstract:When, in 1899, the close friend and colleague of Marie and Pierre Curie, André Louis Debierne, announced the discovery of actinium, he could not imagine that this element would become the first of a group of key elements for understanding atomic structure. A theoretical basis, an initially empirical periodic table, for the systematic study of the atom had been laid down many years earlier by Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev in 1869. It turned out to be a tool that could be used to predict what Mendeleev discerned as… Show more
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