First Ever Measurements of Einsteinium | Hacker News Reader

First Ever Measurements of Einsteinium

sciencedaily.com

59 pointsoedmarap10 comments

Reminded me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability

Wait - the island of stability can be for more than a year? That's mindblowing. I wonder what the properties of these huge elements are.

Very heavy elements tend to “break” the periodicity of the periodic table a bit, because there are so many inner-shell electrons shielding the nucleus, and because of odd relativistic effects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_quantum_chemistry

That makes me wonder - if gold's color can be explained via theoretical effects, can we predict the color of elements which don't exist in bulk and/or decay rapidly? Are any of them theoretically unusual and interesting?

Bond length seems to be the only thing that has been measured in the efforts described in the article. I would have skipped reading the article if it had been clear about that from the beginning.

In super heavy nuclear chemistry, the really hard part is sample purification and preparation. Now that they’ve figured out how to do some of that bit, doing additional experiments with more material will be much easier.

In some science fiction, life forms exist at a much higher rate of thought and action than we do. I like to imagine such folks could make practical use of a metal that lasts only 250 days. Perhaps as part of exotic thrusters for space travel etc.

I like to spend some time really considering ideas like these.

Manufacturing these atom by atom would be a tremendous pain, so either the element (or compounds thereof) would have some extremely rewarding properties for its manufacture or one could posit a deposit of something with a reasonably long half-life occurring during the "right kind" of supernova or other highly energetic phenomena -- something rare that might foster competition.

The properties of these elements, well, as you climb up the table, you get more and more relativistic effects from these super-heavy nuclei (the electrons end up "moving" -- inasmuch as something can be moving in a QM sense in the electron cloud -- rather quickly), and the elements become more and more metallic. Covalent bonds would "lose" the relativistic effect, and I do not think that many of the compounds themselves would have properties that could not be replicated with something cheaper, but ... there's exactly one area where I do hold out some kind of hope: metastable nuclear isomers.

Elements sufficiently far into the island (or even continent) of stability would have many typical modes of decay restricted, and highly-deformed nuclei (some we can find even now are shaped like pears, they are so lopsided), that they might have very restricted methods available to store and release energy. In short, nuclear batteries. We haven't had much luck with those down in the "regular" elements but if I had to come up with a decent sci-fi reason to want many megagrams of MacGuffinonium, the bizarre properties of the nuclei enabling nuclear batteries -- with shocking power densities -- would certainly be eligible at least in a hand-wavy sense.

They would have to be very small. The speed of light doesn't change, just because they are thinking faster.

But if they are small, they are far more limited in how complex they can be, then they have fewer atoms to work with.

If they are small, then they have issues seeing light, which needs a certain size detector. And you can't just increase the frequency of light (to get smaller photons), because higher frequency light ionizes atoms and damages chemical bonds (or does right through).

> exotic thrusters

The speed of thermal conduction in a material isn't any faster either. So again, you would need something very small.

And awaiting a Derek Lowe article on this in 3, 2, 1...

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