At Aeon, Vanessa A. Seifert, chemist and author of Chemistry’s Metaphysics (Cambridge 2024), complains that chemistry is often dismissed as the “poor cousin of the sciences” but has “revealed natural laws that illuminate our Universe”: makes the case that laws are significant in chemistry as well as physics, especially in relation to the periodic table:

The periodic table’s value did not escape early chemists. From the very beginning, they believed that what they had achieved was not just the formulation of a useful classification but the discovery of a law, the so-called ‘periodic law’. In his paper ‘Periodic Law’ (1871), Mendeleev talked about ‘the law of periodicity … that was applicable to study the relations between the properties and the atomic weights of all of the elements’. Newlands too, in his attempt to claim priority, said that he was ‘the first to describe the periodic law, showing the existence of a simple relation between them when so arranged’. Nowadays, the periodic law refers to the fact that, when elements are positioned in terms of increasing atomic number, there is an approximate recurrence of their physical and chemical properties.

But it is not so much the periodic law that makes the table so significant. Through the periodic table, chemists uncover regularities about how different chemical elements (and sets of them) behave and interact with each other. Statements such as ‘alkali metals are soft and malleable’, ‘gold is shiny’ or ‘halogens are very reactive’ are all statements of non-accidental regularities that are represented and derivable by analysing the periodic table. As such, I believe they should be granted lawful status in the same way as physical laws are.

“Chemical laws,” January 24, 2025

Though Seifert does not make this case, the regularity seems like another example of the fine-tuning of our universe:

Chemical laws are necessary to fully appreciate the richness inherent in the transformations of inanimate matter, as well as the emergence of life itself. As such, they are no less significant than the law of gravity, the law of relativity or the laws of thermodynamics. They hold the same predictive and explanatory power as paradigmatic laws of physics and should be recognised as part of the story we tell when addressing the big questions about life and the Universe. “Chemical laws”

The periodic table certainly does seems more like a design that can be expressed as laws than like elements randomly falling into place. If so, it adds to the evidence from physics for the design of the universe.