Oxygen's neighbourhood, in four takes
Short takes on one fixed result: oxygen as the query, k = 10, cosine similarity across ten physical features. They don't describe other elements or other values of k.
- 1 · The hook
Oxygen's closest matches on ten physical measurements aren't its own column. Nitrogen (0.995442) and fluorine (0.993420) come first. Tellurium, a group 16 sibling, is only 17th (0.570245), and polonium is 49th (0.049101).
- 2 · The ranking
Oxygen's top ten: N, F, Cl, H, S, Kr, Br, Ar, P, Se. Selenium, in tenth, scores 0.827454; helium just misses at 0.821370. They come from five groups: 1, 15, 16, 17 and 18. All ten also put oxygen in their own top ten.
- 3 · Read it carefully
A cosine score measures resemblance in these numbers. It isn't a probability, a percentage or a claim that two elements can stand in for each other. Five of the ten features are correlated radius measures. Gaps are filled with the median: metallic radius is missing for all 11 elements here, and molar heat for 7.
- 4 · Over to you
Group 16 sorts elements by chemistry. Physical measurements put oxygen next to nitrogen and fluorine instead. Which view is more useful for the question you're asking?
Copy buttons only copy text to your clipboard; nothing is posted anywhere. Scores come from the site's bundled matrix. Data: Bowserinator/Periodic-Table-JSON, CC BY-SA 3.0.