Saturday, November 5, 2011

The Death Of 'Unununium'

The periodic table has three new elements. Well, really, it already had those elements, but now they have proper names instead of Latin numerical placeholders. Element 110 is now darmstadtium (Ds), 111 is now roentgenium (Rg), and 112 is now copernicium (Cn). As with pretty much any element at this high level of the table, none of them are going to be found outside of the lab, and none of them last very long even after being found. But they're found, and so they're on the table.

No, we are not going to do the song. That thing is only accurate up to element 102.

Copernicus, you probably already know. Hopefully you already know him. He's the guy who first said the earth revolved around the sun. The other two namesakes, you'll be forgiven for not knowing. Darmstadt in particular, because that's just the name of the town in Germany where the GSI Helmholtz Centre is based. GSI found both darmstadtium and roentgenium, and naming one of the elements after the discoverer's home turf is more or less the scientific version of dancing in the endzone after a touchdown. It's not the first time, not by a longshot, and it won't be the last. It's not even the first touchdown dance for GSI, who also got to name element 108, hassium, after the German state of Hesse, where Darmstadt is located. GSI actually got to name all three elements here, and this brings their total to six, alongside hassium, meitnerium and bohrium.

So, big round of applause to them.

As for that third one, roentgenium. That one's named for Wilhelm Roentgen, who won the first Nobel Prize for Physics in 1901 for discovering X-rays. He did this despite being expelled from school for refusing to tell his teachers who drew a caricature of one of them, an expulsion which led to his getting professionally hamstrung for the rest of his life up to and including being accused of stealing the X-ray discovery.

No word, of course, on if the guy who actually made the drawing got punished. But it's just as well. That guy doesn't even have his name recorded. The guy who took the fall is on the periodic table now. So ha.

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