In the 18th and 19th centuries chemists were discovering new elements all the time, and what’s more they were useful elements like chlorine or phosphorus. There was an obvious incentive for chemists to try to discover more.
Nowadays it’s only particle physicists who discover new elements, and these elements last only for a few seconds at most, and have no conceivable use. They don’t occur in nature, indeed they are more like inventions than discoveries.
For example, Wikipedia says of the discovery of element 111 by a group of German physicists:
This raises a number of questions:
Was the German group deliberately trying to create element 111? Or was it an accident, and they were bombarding bismuth with nickel for some other purpose?
If they were trying to create element 111, why? It must have been clear from the start that it would have no practical use and indeed would not last for more than a few seconds. Surely there can’t be much glory in discovering a new element when it’s only three atoms which all fall apart in under five seconds. Would anyone give them funding if they were just doing this in order to be able to say “we’ve discovered an element”? Somehow I doubt it, which leads me to wonder if there’s some practical reason to create these unstable elements.
(Of course, these questions apply to all the recent element “discoveries”. I’m only using element 111 as an example.)
It is likely they were trying to create element 111. They probably wouldn’t have seen it if they hadn’t been looking for it and they wouldn’t have been looking for it if they hadn’t been trying to create it.
It’s basic research, man. Theories about nuclear physics can only be tested if we can apply them to things we’ve never seen before. Nuclear physics says what the most stable isotope of element 111 should be and what its half-life should be, but until it is tested, we don’t know how good those theories actually are.
I hadn’t thought of it that way. Looking at the half-lives of the radioactive elements, they seem to be rather random. Apart from tending to get shorter as you move up the periodic table, there’s no obvious pattern there. It makes sense to get some more data points in order to figure out what’s going on. Thanks for this.
Dr. Lao is right, that’s what science is about: developing a theory, making predictions and testing them, then refining your theory. From one of the team that produced elements 113-115:
Well, it won’t win you an Oscar or get you your own reality show. But discovering new elements is notoriously difficult and a tremendous technical achievement. Three atoms - how would you ever go about accomplishing finding three atoms in the midst of gazillions?
So, yes, there is scads of physics glory in discovering a new element, as well as huge amounts of significant work achieved in the advancement of detection and observation systems. It is a very big deal, as evidenced by the fact that it’s taken 66 years to discover the 19 trans-uranium elements.
Except that they didn’t *find *three atoms - they *made *three atoms. Different thing altogether.
That only proves that it’s difficult - not that it’s significant. I appreciate **Dr. Lao’**s point that making these elements helps us to understand nuclear physics, but I’m sorry, I can’t equate the achievement of the German group who created element 111 with that of, say, Humphry Davy, who discovered six or seven elements that were of actual use in themselves.
You’re right, Davy’s achievement was greater. In a way, he was lucky to be working at a time when there were naturally occuring erlements to be discovered using relatively simple equipment, but he did it when no one else had done it.
In addition, the teams that create these new transuranic elements are essentially doing the same thing as those that created other synthetic transuranic elements, only using bigger machines that hurl atomic particles with higher energy, and using better detectors to see the new atoms as come into a very brief existence. But it’s still good basic science, and rightfuilly gets their names into the record books.
How did they know they made them if they didn’t find them? (Yes, ZenBeam, they looked for the decay signature. Still not easy.)
Sorry, but this attitude is specious at best. In every single field of science there are those who made fundamental discoveries to launch their fields and those who have followed them to expand on and deeper our insights into those sciences.
You’re essentially saying that no significant science has been done in the last century or two or three, depending on the field. It’s like saying that no explorers have done anything significant since Columbus, because he’s the only one who found two whole continents. No one could possibly agree with that.