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Comment by zkirill | Hacker News Reader

Sorry for what is most certainly a naive question from someone who hasn't studied much chemistry or physics. This line stood out to me.

> Locock’s rapid identification was possible because the two minerals had been synthetically created before, so he was able to match the composition of the newly discovered natural minerals with their human-made counterparts.

Isn't it possible, in theory, to synthesize an infinite variety of chemical elements which would just get heavier and heavier as we append them to the periodic table, or is there some kind of a natural limit?

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It sounds like you may be confusing "mineral" and "chemical element". Minerals are regular arrangements of compounds of elements. It is enormously easier to get progressively heavier (or extreme in any other sense) synthetic minerals than to synthesize new elements. Synthesizing new minerals require arranging existing common elements in new ways; synthesizing new elements requires extreme high-energy physics.

The very heavy atoms that we can create usually have incredibly short half-lives and decay in a tiny fraction of a second.

Isn’t there an active research for the “island of stability” at the top end of the table? Aka a set of elements that theoretically remain stable.

Yes! Here is a nice PBS Spacetime video on the subject that was recently published.

"Are there Undiscovered Elements Beyond The Periodic Table?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prvXCuEA1lw

That was a good watch! Thanks.

Mineral != element.

In terms of elements, yes there are some fundamental limits. The limit (as I was taught in undergrad physics) we practically estimated by finding the heaviest element where an electron does not breach the speed of light.

Fun fact : gold has its distinctive color due to quantum mechanics and the electron's speed around the nucleus. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_quantum_chemist...

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