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Periodic Table To Welcome Two New Elements
adeelarshad82 writes "Chemistry's periodic table can soon welcome livermorium and flerovium, two newly named elements, which were announced Thursday (Dec. 1) by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry. The new names will undergo a five-month public comment period before the official paperwork gets processed and they show up on the table. Three other new elements just recently finished this process, filling in the 110, 111 and 112 spots."
The problem probably comes from several parts. Mostly, the 'Atom', which came from Greek 'atomos': something that couldn't be made any smaller. It was the basic 'element' forming everything else, the building blocks of the universe.
What was stated to be indivisible was found to be: protons, neutrons, and electrons. Those things that made up atoms... thus proved that we COULD cut the uncutable. And now those three parts are being subdivided further, into quarks.
So it isn't exactly that elements are indivisible. It's just that the myriad of parts making them up (Protons, Neutrons, and that cloud of Electrons hovering around the nucleus) may change, with some of the changes drastically affecting the element enough that it's no longer what it is; the cases of elements like Uranium breaking down and becoming other elements is what happens with nuclear reactors (with us just harvesting the heat byproduct to make steam to turn turbines to generate electricity). The reverse can happen; combine two elements (say... Hydrogen) and fuse them together, and you can end up with a different element (Helium, among others). Same principle; the 'divisible' parts of the atoms are pushed together so that their nuclei join, and now the new single element changes with its new contents.
The interesting thing will be how long it'll take to divide quarks into even smaller bits of 'something'... and whether it's turtles all the way down.