The recipe for oganesson is pretty amazing. Shoot calcium at californium target for four months to make an atom of it. Repeat as necessary (but remember it has a half-life of under 1 millisecond).
"Because of the very small fusion reaction probability (the fusion cross section is ~0.3–0.6 pb or (3–6)×10−41 m2) the experiment took four months and involved a beam dose of 4×1019 calcium ions that had to be shot at the californium target to produce the first recorded event believed to be the synthesis of oganesson.[9] Nevertheless, researchers are highly confident that the results are not a false positive, since the chance that the detections were random events was estimated to be less than one part in 100000."
When social sciences try to use the mathematical tools of physical sciences, I wish they would use the same measure of statistical significance: "the chance that the detections were random events was estimated to be less than one part in 100000"
I think that the larger problem with social science is that they conduct experiments under extremely specific conditions and then attempt to generalize to populations where those same conditions aren't present at all. And I'm not talking about the media's interpretation and broadcast of the findings. I'm talking about the papers themselves.
It's also pretty hard/expensive to get 10000 people involved in a long term experiment. So they tend to get tens of people and extrapolate from there.
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.
You can get "1 in 10000" significance without 10000 people. (How many Tails in a row would you need to flip a coin to believe it's not random at that level? Somewhere between 13 and 20?)
Also, many datasets (think financial data or census data) are much bigger.
This is the modern physics model. The major discoveries and papers have 100s of authors attached to them. The soft sciences tend to have lots more smaller studies and papers.
The damage is that there isn't an "Accepted body of knowledge" that everyone knows to be true. Perhaps this isn't even possible.
There is a sick culture that thinks being the "idea person" is the most important part of research, and that "idea people" should be in charge of implementing their ideas. A lot of issues stem from that.
Well, the wikipedia source appears broken so I can't be sure but I bet that is a p-value. In that case it is wrong.
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.
You can't sequester humans in a cage for 50 years, controlling everything except the variable you want to study.
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.
If you posit that 50% of people like X, you survey 21 people and find that 0 like X, then the odds that you would get that result due to random sampling error assuming the original hypothesis were true is 1 in 2097152
However that doesn't take into account correlated sampling error. If you randomly sample college social science majors at a single school, you could easily get results like that, even if the rest of the population is actually split on the matter.
That's true, but that's also not a random sampling so doesn't really detract from what the above poster is saying.
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.
And I always behaved as an irrational market actor, because hey we exist in the real world too. I know in some of my finances I don't behave as a model would predict, for instance investing in companies that are doing something that is ethically interesting to me, despite the financials. Or doing the inverse if a company seems to be doing something wrong, even if it's perfectly legal and increasing the share price.
The commenter just described the probability of tossing a coin 21 times and all cointosses being heads, so (1/2)^21, or 1 in 2^21.
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.
When the social sciences do experiments as useless as this one - spending four months to get one atom for one millisecond - they get roasted for wasting money.
It's not, really - but the techniques used in its nucleosynthesis probably are.
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.
If I'm not mistaken, one of the reasons for doing this is figuring out if there is an island of stability somewhere there - a heavy element that somehow remains stable for an extended periods of time.
Note that it's not just "maybe there is randomly some new heavy element that's stable out there". We see definite hints in the behaviour of known heavy elements, and in our best models of nuclear physics, that point towards a possible island of stability.
Its properties also help constrain nuclear physics at high A and Z, which is needed for understanding astrophysical nucleosynthesis and hunts for the island of stability.
At some point (172, they think) it has to stop, because electrons need to go faster than c to orbit. near this point, the electric field of the nucleus pulls electrons out of electron-positron virtual particles ('out of the fabric of space') and you get a "beta+" decay.
The naive orbit model predicts a limit of z=137. The Dirac equation (more realistic) predicts z=173. But that's only using QED, no other forces. We could end up being surprised with a much higher maximum limit.
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.
This isn't entirely true: near the surface of a neutron star, there's a coexistence of neutrons, protons, and electrons in a type of thermal equilibrium.
(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!)
It's both. They exist at "all" points in their orbit at once (at varying probabilities) as a cloud like you say, but they also have an implied speed (but not velocity since there is no specific direction they are traveling) based on the electric potential they are in.
Every time I think I understand QM in any way, inside of a week I am astounded how wrong I was. But I guess that is ok then, as even Feynman said he had no idea what was going on too.
IUPAC has a much more informative article [0], giving the reasoning behind the names. This was published back before they were officially added to the table, though.
There is a youtube channel named "Periodic Videos" that makes incredible videos about elements and molecule, they made a few videos about the new elementsmthis is one of them https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wswa0NuBbMw
For Unicode Consortium, there might be four more new glyphs. The Chinese Chemical Society would, most likely, translate these new elements each into a new Chinese glyph.
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'm not a native English speaker, but I did go to an all-English speaking high school. I was a more-or-less conversationally competent in English at the time, but speaking it and learning from it full time in school was a real challenge.
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.
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 wonder if there is a limit to how dense a single atom can be. Does there exist somewhere in the universe, in some massive star, elements that would construct another row on our table?
I find limits like these interesting (absolute zero, the plank temperature which may or may not be absolute hot, the speed of light, etc.)
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).
In some ways. But the neutrons are not bound to each other, and more importantly the electrons freely transit inside the neutron star and not in orbit around it, which makes it not like an atom.
These are all real elements. They decay within tiny fractions of a second to other stuff, so they're hard to make and study.
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.
They're all very heavy elements at the bottom of the periodic table and not found in nature. We made them in particle accelerators (they decay very quickly after creation), and have been calling by temporary names until we got around to naming them.
For example, element 118 was called "Ununoctium" and abbreviated "Uno". Now it has a real name, "Oganesson" (Og) after one of the discoverers.
Not directly that I'm aware of, since they decay before you could do anything with them. Just a better understanding of their physics. We've hypothesized an "island of stability" where we might find heavier but more stable elements, but the ones we've found so far aren't it.
I just realized how big a deal a stable super heavy element would actually be. I mean is it crazy to think that if such an element were synthesized and it was stable enough to amass like a gram of it you could be looking at the largest single quantity of this element in the known universe?
Just an uneducated guess but... if an element was stable enough to amass a gram I don't think it would be that rare in the universe. At least unless the conditions in our accelerators are singular in the universe.
It might be rare. If it lasted say 100 years, a supernova could make some, but it wouldn't last long, making it quite rare. (Depending on how you define "rare", is rare a relative measure compared to other elements, or an absolute total quantity?)
> 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).
At some point, they could be. The heaviest of elements are formed in the "r-process" [1]. We're not really sure where it happens (either core-collapse supernova or neutron star mergers, but that is a different topic altogether), but we know in general what is happening in it.
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.
I have always wondered about whether there might be some kind of similar 'island of stability' with strange particles. Since particles come in three flavours, the normal kind, then ones made of strange/charm quarks and then top/bottom quarks, you could feasibly make 'strange atoms' with the strange equivalents of protons, neutrons and electrons. The same could even be done for top/bottom atoms. As far as I know, though, the half-lives of these strange family particles are too short to let them hang around for long enough. However, if we collect enough together to make e.g. strange-carbon or strange-uranium, maybe the fact that they are bound together as an atomic structure would stabilise them? It's really hard to find anything out about this, as most discussions of strange matter are about things like replacing the electron in a hydrogen atom with a muon, not replacing every particle in a larger atom with its strange counterpart...
The problem there is one of energy scales. Whenever a system decays, it goes from a state of higher energy to a state of lower energy. In order for something to be stable, there must be no decays that can possibly happen. That is, the system must already be at the lowest energy possible.
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.
You are welcome, and I completely agree that they would work well in a fictional setting. The most obvious use would be as a compact storage of energy. If you had one strange quark replacing a down quark in a Carbon-12 atom, it would have an energy density of about 660,900,000 MJ/kg. For reference, this is about a factor of 8 more than Uranium-235, and a factor of 14 million more than gasoline.
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.
I'm happy to have more usable hostnames for my periodic table-themed Customer sites. I was holding off because "Ununtrium" didn't have a very good ring to it.
I wonder why "Oganesson", where "Oganessium" would sound more conventional and be closer to "Oganessian"? Also, I'm not a chemist, but I thought -ine was reserved for a certain kind of compound?
Traditionally, the names of all noble gases end in "-on", with the exception of helium, which was not known to be a noble gas when discovered.
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.
Ah, that's probably the source of my confusion. None of them end in -ine in German. It's Chlor, Brom, Fluor, Iod. OTOH, there are chemicals with names like Hydrazine. It's a bit weird that it is supposed to be called "Tennesin" in German (according to Wikipedia).
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.
Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chemical_element_name_... for a full table. There are a bunch named after places (even copper and magnesium), whether continent (Europium), country (Francium), state (Californium), or even UC Berkeley (Berkelium). All told, nearly 30 are named after different places.
Element 116, Livermorium, is named after Livermore, California (well, technically, it is named after the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which in turn is named after the city). [1]
Although the naming guidelines for elements definitely allow place-derived names, the guidelines for places on the moon do not. Nevertheless, there is a "Mare Moscoviense / Sea of Moscow" because "Moscow is a state of mind" (lunar maria are usually named after states of mind, etc., e.g. Sea of Tranquility, Sea of Tears).
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.
AFAIK it is not known how big it could be. However, if you accept the current atomic models, there are serious issues preventing atoms with number higher than 135 (or thereabout), things like the electrons needing to move faster than light to stay around the atom.
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.
Sorry to be so OT, but at first glance I read this as "Fox News Officially Added to the Periodic Table of Elements" and was left both impressed and bewildered.
Great choices of names (nihonium and moscovium being a nice counter to Yankee self-back-patting like americium, berkelium, and californium), but I'm still waiting for phlebotinum and unobtainium to get serious consideration...
> being a nice counter to Yankee self-back-patting like americium, berkelium, and californium
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]
ytterby gets ytterbium, yittrium, erbium, and terbium.
Dubnium is the "berkelium" - named after the place; Moscovium is the "californium" - named after the region;
Ruthenium is the "americium" - named after the country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oganesson