Mineral-, metal- and mine-rich Sweden was a leading powerhouse of Chemistry in the mid- eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries with, still most in the world, 20 of the then known elements discovered by Swedes (n = 12), and another telling world record presented by the mineral gadolinite found in 1882 in the village of Ytterby on an island in the Stockholm archipelago, from which eight elements were originally identified; in increasing atom number order, and first isolation in parenthesis, nr 21 Scandium (Nilson 1879), 39 Yttrium (Wöhler 1838), 64 Gadolinium (de Marignac 1880), 65 Terbium (Mosander 1843), 67 Holmium (Cleve 1878), 68 Erbium (Mosander 1843), 69 Thulium (Cleve 1879) and 70 Ytterbium (von Welsbach 1906).
The shining star in this Eldorado was Jöns Jacob Berzelius (1779-1848), “the father of modern Chemistry”. He was initially trained and worked as a physician, which widened his scope, and from his enormous production here only will be mentioned that he discovered four elements; determined all then known atomic weights and innumerable other chemical properties and conditions; developed the subject of Electrochemistry; coined the terms ”allotrope”, ”catalysis”, ”polymer”, ”isomer”, ”protein” and others; and formulated the still valid distinction between ”organic” and ”inorganic” Chemistry.
Fundamentally, he also invented the unambiguous system of chemical notation still used today, i.e. the first letter(s) of the Latin name of the atoms with a numerical suffix of the amount of them in the compound, e.g. CaCO3, calcium carbonate, containing one Calcium, one Carbon and three Oxygen atoms. No other factors are involved, so the consequence would be that the layering between the atoms is dependent upon their sizes and proportions, i.e. stoichiometric, which was Berzelius’ main hypothesis. But nobody knew the fabric of an atom, and he also, somewhat prophetically, suggested that electric forces might be involved to bind the atoms together. However, in the mid-19th century, Kekulé in Germany, Frankland in Great Britain and others developed the theory of "combining power", in which compounds were joined owing to an attraction between positive and negative poles, and from there the ‘valence’ concept has mushroomed to a plethora of localized varieties which have taken over the whole body from the real atoms in a tail-wags-the-dog way. A “network”, a “skeletal”, a “ball-and-stick” chemical formula is a phantom figure of an artificial structure and reduces the true atom build to a point or a mere intersection. It is high time to return to the stoichiometry of the atoms themselves!
Since many years I have been studying an alternative to the Standard Model, following the original differential Lie algebra as outlined in his Norwegian Ph.D. Thesis Over en Classe geometriske Transformationer at Christiania (now Oslo) University in 1871.1,2 I could spend days praising the geniality and innovation of this work. However, the main point here is that it has no direct connections with his continuous groups or root space classifications that the Standard Model has been tied up with to annoying near-fit, but that it is a tangential line congruence algebra that together with the Bohr Aufbau system allows a precise reproduction of the periodic table and its molecular combinations.3-5 Regrettably, though, no one understood Lie ́s thesis: it got excellent marks but soon went into oblivion in the faculty archives. 100 years later I went there and got a photo copy of it (now one can get it electronically), and 1984 I together with professor R.M. Santilli translated it into English (internet open access available at hadronicpress.com/lie.pdf ).2
The aim of this communication is to review and discuss the findings from their chemical model and formula implications. Now that we have the natural figures of all atoms the phantom diagrams of their inferred force lines should be replaced by their real structure.