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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."
Will they ever name an element Colbertium, after Stephen T. Colbert, DFA?
this table is updated periodically.
FTA - "All five of these elements are so large and unstable they can be made only in the lab, and they fall apart into other elements very quickly. Not much is known about these elements, since they aren't stable enough to do experiments on and are not found in nature."
Atomic number 115 still hasn't been named (or confirmed, according to TFA), but I know what it should be named when the time comes.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
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.
Allow me, then.
If you define an element as something that "cannot be broken down any further" you exclude anything that decays into lighter elements, such as uranium or radium. You also exclude substances that can be induced to break down through various means.
However, it's not a problem if you refine the definition slightly: an element is that which cannot be broken down chemically. You can't turn an atom of X into a lighter atom of Y just by mixing chemicals together in a beaker (no offence, chemists, I'm just trying to illustrate a point). Fire X through a particle accelerator hard enough, though, and sometimes it breaks apart into smaller/lighter pieces when it hits something.
Is that better?
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
There are no stable transuranium elements.
Yet. Perhaps we will find a transuranium island of stability.
Growing up, and being taught in school "elements cannot be broken down any further."
It's always nice to run into a fellow member of the Class of 1827 here on /.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.