Slashdot Mirror
Meet Ununseptium, Best Contender Yet For Element 117
From Motherboard comes this description of what may turn out to be the newest entry on the periodic table,
newly synthesized element 117, created by researchers at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research of Darmstadt, Germany, and described in results published this week in Physical Review Letters. From the article:
"Element 117 has been temporarily given the very literal name ununseptium (one-one-seven in Latin), and will only honored with a real name once the the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics and Chemistry (IUPAPC) confirms its synthesis at the GSI accelerator. Ununseptium is 40 percent heavier than lead, making it on par with the heaviest atoms ever observed. ... Its properties seem to confirm that the existence of the so-called “island of stability”—a theory suggesting that the half-lives of superheavy isotopes will lengthen as their atomic numbers increase further away from uranium. Any element with an atomic number greater than 103 is considered superheavy (or in the 'transactinide class,' if you prefer the scientific jargon). Transactinides can only be observed artificially in a laboratory, and synthesizing them is no easy task."
Note: that "real name" process isn't a mere formality; just a few years ago, another attempt to synthesize a 117th element looked promising enough to be declared done, but could not be confirmed with the IUPAPC's tests.
Like sheep! Baaaah. Silly primates with their ordinal fixation, it was inevitable for the counters of cows and sheep to become counters of protons.
"How is everything that is different different from everything else?" Fair question, perhaps the ultimate question. So we started with four elements: "One, two... three... four! A ha ha ha ha!" says the Count. Then we got real and stuffed the periodic table with critters.
Q: How do I find the number of protons? A: You look it up in a table of the elements, silly! Baaa, wrong answer. Q: How did the scientists count the number of protons? A: They counted them just like you would, one by one. Baaaa. Wrong answer but I wish I'd said it. Q: Is there a certain way to count the protons in an element when identifying them? A: [quoted below] now we're getting somewhere...
[Bruce Alexander] There is a technique called mass spectrometry that is pretty good at counting protons, albeit indirectly. If you take an element, and strip of an electron you make it slightly positively charged. If you ping it through a gap between two oppositely charged plates (one negatively charged, and one positively charged), then the positively charged element will be repelled by the positive plate and attracted to the negatively charged plate. How fast the element moves towards the negative plate depends on how heavy the element is and, as the weight of an element depends on how many protons it has (as well as neutrons) you can 'count' the number of protons by measuring how fast the element moves towards the negative plate.
Okay so you're confidently shaving off what you think is an individual electron, observing the behavior of the resulting mass to infer a number of what you presume are individual protons. Q: How many decimal places of surety does this give us that in fact we are dealing with an ordinal number of things that act out on a linear scale? I wonder. How many electron licks does it take to get to the proton center of an atom-pop? Let's ask Mr. Owl. Mr. Owl just bit and swallowed the damned thing. Then I passed out of boring ordinal space into dream-time. In my dream I wondered how the fabric of reality knits together. Is the Hand Of God counting, "a-one, a-two, a-threee... crunch!" for every atom? What is the Hand with those wiggly ordinal fingers? Then I thought of entropy and radiation, the dances of the little electron chicks in their shells.
In order to build an atomic firmament suitable for every day use -- a quantum boundary of is-ness below which things are not just made of smaller things, al absurdium, nature must change the rules. At this boolean primordial level there can only be is-ness and is-not-ness, one and zero so the only way to change the rules is to NEGATE them. In other words, a flav fly groovy flip in which things are different from other things because of the absence of something, not the presence of something. Bizarre. What would that something that is absent, be? Because I like prime numbers one meta-universal topic came to mind. It may be the only possible answer.
FACTORABILITY. What if... what we know as discrete atomic elements are the shapes of relative stability that are BEST represented -- not by ordinal proton count -- but by prime numbers, as islands in a seething quantum foam, their stability arising by nature's inability to factor them further? What if the quantum firmament is continually 'factoring' thing
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>