Why do people accept the modern periodic table? What evidence is there to support the periodic table.?

“I began to look about and write down the elements with their atomic weights and typical properties, analogous elements and like atomic weights on separate cards, and this soon convinced me that the properties of elements are in periodic dependence upon their atomic weights.”

--Mendeleev, Principles of Chemistry, 1905, Vol. II

In 1925/26 Schrodinger put forward his famous wave equation.

"This paper has been universally celebrated as one of the most important achievements of the twentieth century, and created a revolution in quantum mechanics, and indeed of all physics and chemistry."

I call it the Holy Grail of Chemistry. It put a theoretical understanding to the Periodic Table. The three quantum numbers that arise naturally from the solutions to the WE along with the spin quantum number of Dirac explain exactly the occurrence of the elements and except for the few a "few minor details" (see below) also explains their chemistry (need for a relativity correction for heavy elements: again by that guy Dirac).

The wave equation has been tested in a multitude of ways over the past 85 years and has withstood those tests such the chemists now accept wave mechanics as an axiom: an accepted truth.

"The fundamental laws necessary for the mathematical treatment of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty lies only in the fact that application of these laws leads to equations that are too complex to be solved."

Paul Dirac

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Schr%C3%B6dinge...

Uhhh. Years of empirical research?

White men don't know how to fight.