AbstractA decade before Planck's 1900 formulation of the quantum principle, Mendeléev, out of his researches on chemistry and the periodic system of the elements, recognized the general character that the new principle must have, dealing with no “deathlike inactivity,” establishing “individuality amid continuity,” and destined to “hasten the advent of true chemical mechanics.” Implicit in the Bohr‐Rutherford 1911 model of the atom was the paradox of atomic collapse. No cheap way out offered itself. Only application of the quantum principle resolved the paradox. This development led (1917) to the “chemical mechanics” envisaged in outline by Mendeléev. It may be symbolized today by an electron orbit with the shape of a double necklace, the “chemical orbit” (Robert Powers). A new crisis confronts physics today in the predicted phenomenon of gravitational collapse, both at the level of a star (“black hole physics”) and at the level of the universe itself. Again, no way out is evident except to call on the quantum principle. It leads to the conclusion that the dynamics of the universe goes on in superspace. In superspace, alternative dynamical histories of the universe (cycles of expansion and recontraction) not only dynamically couple to each other in the era of collapse, as well as one can judge, but also “coexist.” If the vision of Clifford and Einstein in updated form is taken as guide and particles are regarded as quantum states of excitation of a dynamic geometry, then it is natural to believe that each period of collapse sees the universe “reprocessed,” with the previous spectrum of particle masses extinguished and a new pattern of masses established. On this view, particle masses are as far removed from any possibility of being calculated from first principles as the “initial conditions of dynamics” themselves. For an early test of this framework of ideas nothing looks so promising as the prediction that a black hole, formed by whatever combination of baryons, photons, leptons, and other entities, is characterized by nothing but mass, charge, and angular momentum (“transcendence of the law of conservation of baryons and leptons”).