Four New Names Officially Added to the Periodic Table of Elements
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Wow.
I don't think it's that they're lazy or incompetent - it's just hard to have the sort of scale required for the levels of certainty you can get from firing a bazillion calcium ions at something for months.
The damage is that there isn't an "Accepted body of knowledge" that everyone knows to be true. Perhaps this isn't even possible.
Also, many datasets (think financial data or census data) are much bigger.
The chance (probability) of an observation arising from random events is not the same as the chance (probability) random events explain the observation. In the first case (which is usual) you are assuming the random event model is true.
Maybe if we could create a parallel universe at a specific point, and have one side try one thing and the other side do another, but there are huge ethical concerns from that as well.
Most social science experiments do not initially handle random samples.
The famous ones like the Milgram experiments and others conducted by the same researcher do. If I have my facts correct, he used to mail out letters to people randomly chosen from the phonebook to ask them to participate in his study, then travel to their locales to study them. The Milgram experiment itself was redone multiple times, using different population segments---students, random people in the city, all women, all men, etc.
As an anecdote of how poorly correlated a social experiment can be to real life---in my university, econ & social science students were required to take at least 10 experiments per semester. Often we would go there, realize the material tested was identical to what we had studied in class then behave like 'rational market actors' in order to get the best result (econ experiments used small sums of real money, so you'd be paid at the end based on performance). This isn't anything like how a random person would have behaved.
It's a specific case of the cumulative binomial distribution which is what you might look up if you want to know about the case where the probability of people liking X in general isn't 50% but something else, or the number of samples isn't 21, or the number of sampled people liking X isn't 0.
We should be greateful the research team didn't decide to stop at the 3 month, 29 day mark.
Incidentally, if the compound itself does in the end turn out to be useful, it'll be for the same reason - it'd likely be used as some intermediate in a wider-scope reaction. As is the case for many, many (almost all, realistically) otherwise-"useless" chemicals.
And there is only one way to figure this out.
You say that as if it was short! Do you realize W and Z bosons have half-lives of the order of 10^-25 seconds? ;-)
What comes next will be interesting. Will it be a plain row? Or will there be another block like the p-block and f-block (the g-block)?
It might not be possible to find out, because the elements might not live long enough to stop being ions and fill their shells.
Or maybe we'll find an element in the island of stability somewhere there and we'll use that to find out.
One might argue that a neutron star is a counterexample that comes into play when you include gravitation. It's sort of a really big nucleus, with gravity as the dominant attractive force and degeneracy pressure as the dominant repulsive force.
(I'm embarrassed to say that I don't remember offhand how to estimate the ratios involved, but I do remember my PhD candidacy exam committee looking pretty happy with me for deriving it on the fly during my oral. A few days later, one of them commented to a group of us who'd just finished the exam, "Congratulations: at this moment, you know more physics than you ever have or ever will again". I guess he was right!)
[0] https://iupac.org/iupac-is-naming-the-four-new-elements-niho...
For existing ones, see https://www.iupac.org/publications/ci/2004/2601/3_hao.html
EDIT:
It seems that the calling for naming proposals has started:
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=zh-CN&tl=en&js=y&p... http://www.chemsoc.org.cn/info.asp?gid=195
EDIT2:
In fact there are quite a lot of existing ancient glyphs in the current Unicode standard. There is possibility an existing Chinese glyph being reused for a new element, as suggested by Chinese Chemical Society in the letter above.
I remember clearly that one of the most difficult subjects was chemistry, because everything suddenly had new names and none of them made any sense. Why is it "sodium" instead of "natrium", or "potassium" instead of "kalium", when the elements are Na and K?
For the first six months, I had to basically memorize a table of translations between my native language and english, and silently translate everything my teacher was saying to be able to follow along.
Regarding the English-German difference in the element names, are there more than these two that don't match?
I've found this explanation of the historical context for the different names:
https://www.quora.com/Who-renamed-Natrium-and-Kalium-to-Sodi...
OK, there is also Sauerstoff for oxygen and Wasserstoff for hydrogen.
They're all in a similar numeric range, but are these entirely new elements, or other elements recategorised?
For example, element 118 was called "Ununoctium" and abbreviated "Uno". Now it has a real name, "Oganesson" (Og) after one of the discoverers.
Think of the nuclei as big, quivering blobs of jelly. They are too big to hold together and really want to split into other stuff. But studying them while they're still in one piece tests our understanding of a lot of basic physics, and lets us compare predictions to reality.
> the conditions in our accelerators are singular in the universe.
Most likely they are. A supernova is a random event, an accelerator is directed. It's quite possible we could make lots of something in an accelerator that would never happen in the random conditions of a supernova (for example if some other more common effect consumed the raw material needed for the rare thing to happen).
The r-process starts with something fairly stable and relatively light, like iron. Then you start throwing phenomenal amounts of neutrons at it. Outside of a nucleus, neutrons are unstable, and decay to protons in about 15 minute, so this can only happen if something is producing lots and lots of neutrons, all at once. Anyways, the iron catching those neutrons, becoming heavier and heavier.
Eventually, the nucleus becomes heavy enough that beta decay, in which a neutron inside the nucleus changes into a proton, starts happening at the same rate as neutron capture. At this point, it is a competition. In the table of isotopes [2], neutron capture moves to the right, and beta decay moves diagonally up and to the left. Between the two, the nuclei get heavier and heavier, with more and more protons and neutrons. The general path is known [3], zig-zagging through the isotopes, becoming more and more unstable.
The process stops when the source of neutrons runs out. At that point, everything beta-decays back to stability. Everything is finished, and the heavy elements of the universe have been produced.
There is a theorized "island of stability" [4]. We have enough protons, but not enough neutrons. Remember how the r-process adds one neutron at a time? Well, if the island of stability is as stable as predicted (half-lives of a few hours are typically predicted), then we might be able to produce those isotopes by careful selection of the input nuclei. Nature is limited to what exists in stellar environments, and can't choose. So (and here I'm stepping out of my area of expertise), since this selection wouldn't happen in nature, it is entirely possible that we are creating conditions that haven't existed in large quantities elsewhere.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-process [2] http://cdn.iopscience.com/images/0034-4885/76/5/056301/Full/... [3] http://www.onafarawayday.com/Radiogenic/Ch1/Ch1-2_files/imag... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability
For example, the neutron decays to a proton, because a proton+electron system has less energy than a neutron. Bind the neutron with a proton, forming deuterium, and suddenly it is stable. The neutron is unstable by only a free MeV, and so the binding to a proton can stabilize it.
All matter is made of up and down quarks. The next lightest quark, the strange quark, is about 100 MeV. It order to stabilize it, there would need to be some binding effect that would bind a strange quark 100 MeV more strongly than an up or down quark. That would be the only way to make the strange quark system be the most stable.
And here we run into the problem that, of the four fundamental forces, none of strong enough and specific enough to the strange quark to do so. The strong nuclear force, which stabilizes the neutron, is the strongest, and only provides that few MeV of binding, not the 100 or so that would be necessary.
Getting at that energy after it is stored would require a bit more handwavium, since you don't want it to destabilize (read: catastrophically explode) on common use. I could imagine using a gamma-ray laser (same principle as regular laser, but they don't currently exist) to destabilize the strange carbon.
They are as different from other elements as gold is different from carbon. Each is unique and unlike any other element, with unknown properties (they don't last long enough to study, although some guesses can be made).
We are hoping there is a "magic" number, that if we reach can make elements that actually last long enough to study (because certain numbers of particles are extra stable because they "fit" together very nicely - like how you can fit 6 coins around another coin much nicer than 7). That's called the Island of Stability if you want to look it up.
These elements are on the path to that, so it's important to study them. As of right now we don't know how to make anything heavier.
I find limits like these interesting (absolute zero, the plank temperature which may or may not be absolute hot, the speed of light, etc.)
Yes, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_drip_line
In particular the Neutron drip line is not known, so we don't know how large an atom can be. But there is such a number.
It's easy to understand why protons drip: Their electric repulsion pushes them out. For neutrons it's more complicated, but basically you need energy to force a neutron to attach to a nucleus, and at some point the energy released in falling off is high enough that they will no longer stay attached (this is a simplification BTW).
The IUPAC guidelines valid at the moment of the discovery approval however required all new elements be named with the ending "-ium".
A new IUPAC recommendation published in 2016 recommends using the "-on" ending for new group 18 elements, no matter whether they turn out to be a noble gas or not.
In June 2016 IUPAC announced that it planned to give the element the name oganesson (symbol: Og), in honour of the Russian nuclear physicist Yuri Oganessian, and the name became official on 28 November 2016.
https://jameskennedymonash.wordpress.com/2014/02/11/3d-perio...
It's fairly common for them to be named after places (often where they were discovered). Some other examples are Americium, Berkelium, Californium, Darmstadtium, Dubnium, Europium, Francium, and Germanium.
We can also put to rest suggestions like Lemmium, Octarine and Trumpium.
:)
I haven't read it yet, but supposedly this book is a fun read with some interesting stories on the discovery of elements: https://www.amazon.com/Periodic-Tales-Cultural-History-Eleme...
Mare Moscoviense is one of the very few maria on the far side of the moon: if you've never looked at photos of the far side, you'll be surprised how different it looks from the near side.
I think I had read something about a model accepting over 200 elements, but I don't remember the details and could not find the draft it in my library.
Update: there is a decent explanation with some reference in the periodic table wikipedia entry: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodic_table#Element_with_...
When you discover and can produce transuranic elements feel free to name them what you like.
Americium was first produced in 1944 by the group of Glenn T. Seaborg from Berkeley, California, at the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago, a part of the Manhattan Project.[0] Berkelium [...] is named after the city of Berkeley, California, the location of the University of California Radiation Laboratory where it was discovered in December 1949. [1] Californium [...] was first made in 1950 at the University of California Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley [2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americium [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkelium [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Californium
yttrium (Y) erbium (Er) terbium (Tb) ytterbium (Yb)
Dubnium is the "berkelium" - named after the place; Moscovium is the "californium" - named after the region; Ruthenium is the "americium" - named after the country.