Slashdot Mirror
Periodic Table Gets a New, Unnamed Element
koavf writes "More than a decade after experiments first produced a single atom of 'super-heavy' element 112, a team of German scientists has been credited with its discovery, but it has yet to be named. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry has temporarily named the element ununbium, as 'ununbi' means 'one one two' in Latin; but the team now has the task of proposing its official name." Slashdotium? Taconium? Man, I shoulda gone into science so I could have named something sweet that kids have to memorize in classes.
The natural abbreviation for Plutonium is Pl, which was free since Platinum uses Pt. One of the discoverers, Glenn Seaborg, thought it would be funny to submit it with the abbreviation Pu. He figured the joke would be noticed and the abbreviation changed, but it never happened.
Due to the atomic number 112 I recommend Fibonaccium, after the Fibonacci sequence which adds the 2 preceding numbers to find the next in sequence.
A nucleus with a half-life measured in milliseconds or smaller doesn't seem to qualify, at least in my sort of language-to-thought translator, as really as an "element". That word carries with it the connotation of actual material existence which seems incompatible with its inability to actually exist for any period of time on the human scale.
I freely admit this is a quibble, but this sort of thing bugs me. Yes, IAAP and this rant has no bearing whatsoever on the scientific merits of the research (not my field, so I'll pass on that) and is just about the naming.
Thomas Sowell wrote "Ethnic America", exploring why different ethnic groups do better or worse than others in the American milieu, but he also discusses different ethnic groups and cultures around the world. For instance, Jews tended to be more successful in urban-type jobs (clerks, lawyers, educators, etc.) than rural, e.g. farming. Jews newly immigrating to the US and still living in tenements tended to have the same rates of public library use as native-born middle class Americans. They were in the slums, but the slums were not in them. Chinese, Arabs, Persians, and Indians who emigrate tend to be in merchant or small businessman class wherever they end up, even if they were not merchants back home. Could have to do with the temperament of someone who is willing to leave hearth,home and the familiar and take on the responsibilities of a new, different society. Germany was long known as the "land of poets and philosophers", until the rise of Nazism and it was done in by its poets and philosophers.
Your list of German achievements is not really that impressive in the scope of history. Lets break it down:
The first car. I think a frenchman was actually the first, but the real innovation was Henry Ford's mass production assembly line, not the automobile itself.
Calculus. Leibniz and Newton are not co-inventors - not really anyway. Basically they both built on work done by others including al-Haythem and other decidedly non-German mathematicians. The difference is that Newton did something truly amazing (and innovative) with it.
Quantum physics. As you say 'developed part of the foundation.' Quantum theory developed gradually, with contributions of a lot of people from a lot of places. It was not like Einstein's theory of relativity, which was a real breakthrough (although it too relied on the field equations of Maxwell (an Englishman) and other past theories. Einstein was from Austria by the way.
So all your examples are sort of 'me too' or 'i helped out' innovations. You would be better off to look at the French (Curie, Pasteur, or even Descartes). Or the English (Darwin, Newton). Or the Italians (Galileo, Marconi, etc.). And I am just picking a few of the bigs from Europe (since I am not readily familiar with the history of science outside the western world - my bad).
And lets not forget the Americans. There is no ethnic identity associated with being American, but one could argue that is their strength - the mixing together of scientists who hail from all parts of the world with different cultural backgrounds and ways of thinking about life the universe and everything.
So to bring it down to your level, what have the Germans really innovated, uniquely and on their own? How to start (and loose) two world wars? How to best gas Jewish people?
But seriously, the Germans have made great contributions to science and technology. That can not be ignored. But not more than many other nations. They are about par for the course.
Someone get rid of the troll mod on this. It's not an unreasonable question, and it's asked in about the most politically correct language manageable for such a charged issue.
The truth is that the scientific and technical advances don't come at random, but are dependent on a range of societal factors. China has one of the largest populations of any countries on earth, yet many much smaller countries produce far more scientific advances per capita. This is clearly not a genetic issue - the Chinese are dramatically disproportionately represented in the sciences in the US, but their society isn't managed in a way that's conducive to training the independent thinking skills needed to do the best science. Go back a few centuries though, and China was the most sophisticated and advanced civilization in the world.
I'm not passing value judgements here, every civilization has it's own strengths and weaknesses, but the sort of mindless PC attitude that mods such a reasonable and polite question as trolling really shouldn't be tolerated.
The parent post (and probably mine as well) could very reasonably be modded off-topic however!
There is a TED talk by Hans Rosling which demonstrates Africa is actually making insanely rapid progress, but it isn't apparent to us because they started at so far behind.
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_reveals_new_insights_on_poverty.html