Previously unknown isotope of uranium discovered
phys.org
phys.org
Manufacturing implies we can have any element/isotope we want, which is not the case. By attempting to manufacture, we discover whether manufacture is possible. We discover the existence of a new isotope.
Whether an isotope can exist is a property of the universe. We similarly discover the speed of light, discover quantum mechanics, discover radiation, etc.
This also fixes a misconception that resources is something we just find and use.
Resources are properties of nature we discover.
There are lack of resources, only lack of knowledge to help discover how we turn things into resources.
Or is it different?
Cars aren't properties of the universe. Elements and isotopes are fundamental enough, though, that we put them in that category.
The atom that they found - let’s call it Bob - was, for all intents and purposes, created.
The discovery isn’t of Bob. He’s cool and all, but he doesn’t stay around for a long time so there isn’t much that he can pers… atomly do for us.
So what’s cool about Bob that we can record and know for later? Well, there are two things to point out. First is that Bob stuck around for a while. The second is that Bob is governed by the laws of physics.
Therefore an atom with the same properties as Bob can, according to the laws of physics, stay around for a while. That’s the actual discovery.
Well, this discovery can be summarised more succinctly than “we found that things with the same properties as Bob can exist for a while”, because the name for the class of all things that have the same properties as Bob is the isotope Uranium-241.
Now, we can say that Bob is Uranium-241 just like we can say that I am a member of the human race, but just like we can’t say the human race IS me, we can’t say Uranium-241 IS Bob. Uranium-241 is the mere category of things that we know Bob was one of.
If aliens created a wormhole that accidentally sucked you away to their planet and they saw you, did they discover nonethewiser? Or is it more profound that they discovered the human race?
Same goes for this. We can say that we discovered Uranium-241 (which is shorthand for “we discovered that Uranium-241 is stable enough to survive long enough to be measured”). We did so by creating Bob, which merely acted as proof.
Before we had the ability to manufacture & detect new isotopes & new elements, we really did discover them. We could go poke around, explore new conditions that we hadn't explored before, and sometimes you'd actually discover a new isotope or element.
Imagine you light something on fire, you capture the gasses and analyze them, and for the first time in human history you see sulphur. Did you manufacture the sulphur? Or discover it? Intuitively it probably feels like the sulphur was discovered but the uranium in the OP was manufactured, but really it's just a spectrum of how much work one needs to do to create the conditions that the universe requires to show you the element or isotope.
Another interesting language question (IMO) is, once you can predict the existence of elements, their behavior, etc., what do you call it when you see the physical version for the first time? Did the person who first predicted the configuration & properties discover it? Did the person who created the physical version for the first time discover it? Did anyone discover it? Does it matter how much insight was required to make the prediction?
Now that we're pretty good at predicting elements & isotopes, maybe the better way to phrase it is "discovered a process that produces xyz". Or if something unexpected happens, "discovered xyz is able to physically exist".
https://www.chemistryworld.com/features/victor-ninov-and-the...
Alternatively, you could say that "discovering a new isotope" is shorthand for "discovering the process by which a new isotope can be produced".
Plutonium was long considered a "man-made element" and it mostly is but if you look carefully at natural uranium you will find occasionally a neutron hits a ²³⁸U atom and winds up making ²³⁹Pu but it doesn't last long so you find only the smallest traces of it.
A good way of thinking about it is considering intent. An engineer designing and then manufacturing a new car wants a to build a new car. A physicist making a new isotope just wants to prove that such an isotope can exist. In fact, often "discoveries" are can be purely mathematical: if you show a particle can exist in theory, that can be given a similar amount of weight as "proving" it by actually creating the particle.
Humans, a product of the universe itself, just discovered or found a way to configure matter this way.
Great question though and one I like to ponder myself.
Like the logic to describe math itself is put down by humans but that that logic is able to exist at all for humans to discover or exlore is perplexing.
> Humans, a product of the universe itself, just discovered or found a way to configure matter this way.
If you accept this as the distinction between "discovery" and "manufacturing", then everything in existence is discovered rather than manufactured, which feels like a useless distinction to make. I think this is just an inherently fuzzy line. An ancient example of this is the debate around whether mathematical concepts are discovered or invented.
The first time this is true. But the second time it's a known process with a known outcome (and if it isn't, then you've just discovered something else). The first time is always science. The second time is usually technology.
Is it all that fuzzy or useless if you shift your thinking to view things as discoveries made by you rather than manufactured by you?
Manufacturing something could be a process carried out by human intelligence but the knowledge to process stuff into something 'more' is a discovery to be made.
i.e. people make/invent chairs but discovered/experience a universe that lets them sit on chairs.
You just showed up to observe the universe and was gifted some ability to manipulate it to your advantage.
You can say you were first to have an idea and we have a society that says you can have a right to 'own' that idea to sell or make money from it.
But you didn't make a universe; a universe made you and you get to have ideas that are new, hopefully.
The scientists shot some uranium nuclei into doughnut shaped gas cell hitting a rotating target of plutonium nuclei. This was a new method of creating and measuring heavy isotopes that they say makes the process easier, so it would be fair to say that they "invented" the process. They ended up with a bunch of ionized particles produced by the collision. They then measured those particles via time-of-flight mass spectrometry -- essentially, the velocity of the particles in the gaseous medium could be used to precisely determine their weight to an unprecedented level of accuracy.
But to their surprise, among the various isotopes they measured, was one uranium isotope that nobody has ever encountered before.
You could say they "made" the isotope in the particle collision process, but it wasn't a deliberate goal or by product. Hence it was a discovery. If there turned out to be an industrial use for this newly discovered isotope, and engineers came up with a way to produce it on a regular basis, then certainly at that point you could say it was being manufactured.
Episode: https://youtu.be/vl0_DElyTZU
Chart: https://nawanagayasu.wixsite.com/mysite-1/nawa-s-hybrid-char...
Another interesting thing to think about is cosmic rays are far stronger than anything we can create in a particle accelerator, but the current flow in an accelerator is a zillion times the intensity of cosmic rays, so thats why we build particle accelerators to "discover" things that already exist in cosmic rays.
Technically there are some atoms of this "stuff" in a lump of uranium ore, well, a big enough one, anyway, but it would take much fancier instruments to detect and manipulate it, its easier to make lots in close proximity to a detector.
Given it has a half-life of around 40 minutes and isn’t a decay product (even via irradiation) of anything that’s found in uranium ore, I think that’s quite unlikely.
It may occur somewhere else in nature, very briefly/rarely, however.
Yeah, for now.
but that isn't true generally. I think the boundary of what we can argue should or shouldn't exist elsewhere on the basis of statistical arguments is probably pretty interesting.
questions like: what is the simplest man made crystal that is very unlikely to occur naturally anywhere in the universe?
So - If the "hard" SF novel you're writing needs some sort of Unobtainium for its big hand-wave...this discovery probably doesn't fit the bill.
Ive been watching too much doctor who and now I want a thermoscan based on black holes for my tea
(Yes, there is a well-known paradox/open-problem implied by this.)
If you have one of a "mere" 606 million tons, the Hawking radiation is hot enough to directly include fast moving positrons (and has a luminosity of 1.178 GW), while still massive enough to spaghettify you (370g at 10cm).
If the black hole is lower mass, the radiation gets even more energetic. The radiation from 606 thousand ton black holes (sometimes suggested for Hawking radiation drives for spacecraft) is hot enough the radiation will either include antiprotons, or at least the photons will be energetic enough to spontaneously create them on impact: https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2022/05/14/no-a-black-...
Once upon a time I wondered if magenetic fields influenced nuclear reation rates. Some googling suggested the answer is no, but I found very little in the way of actual experimental results testing it. In more recent times I think I did see one referene to an actual effect but I don't recall what it was. So IMHO this door is clearly open for fictional exploration.
Ice-9, Dilithium, magnetic monopoles, are all much better Unobtainiums.
SG-1 kinda has the same problem, when you learn that Naqada is 20 km from Luxor and Kelowna is close to where the show was filmed.
Kelowna is more of a stretch, but I'm betting that someone in the writers' room said "Hey, we already had a Salish episode; if anyone asks, we could just say that some native spirits influenced the names on both planets!" Apparently those people actually were the first inhabitants of that area. So all they'd need to do is connect them to Langara!
And it's not like place names and material names are mutually exclusive. Silicon Valley is an example of a place named after an element, and Berkelium is an element named after a place. There are 26 elements are named directly or indirectly after places.