One of the earliest memories of the school science lab was to see the Periodic Table for the first time. You know, that forbidding-looking chart of squares and funny, recondite little symbols like Mn and Cs, all arranged in a curious array of lines and columns. A long way from the everyday world of glam rock, flared trousers and playground rivalries about football teams and Ben Sherman shirts.
Those who looked slightly beyond the immediate would know that change was coming. NASA kept landing on the moon. And some very clever people were trying hard to push this same periodic table beyond its natural limit of 92 and make artificial elements with far more protons than could be found in nature. Fast forward fifty five years or so, and we suddenly realise how far they have got. Read this from Nature Briefings: Heaviest Element Yet within reach
Researchers have demonstrated a new way to make superheavy elements, opening the door to creating the heaviest element ever and adding another row to the periodic table. Scientists used a beam of titanium to make a known superheavy element, livermorium — element 116. If they’re able to make elements 119 and 120, as planned after an equipment upgrade, they will be the first documented from the eighth ‘period’. In this row, scientists expect to find atoms with so-far unseen electron configurations.Nature | 7 min read
Reference: arXiv preprint
It really is worth clicking on the link, gentle readers. If only to see a group of people performing at the best levels which our species can. Co-operating. Multinational. Thinking differently. Counter-intuitive-hell, what is a”titanium beam” anyway? That’s how progress comes. Just thinking again, in the old tired ways, the channels laid down as a child, will get us nowhere. Except, perhaps, backwards. The periodic table really can go beyond 92. Petrol really is bad for your health. Old allegiances will threaten your survival, if you’re not careful. Time to think as these scientists have done,
#nuclear physics #periodic table #research #chemistry
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