First: What, if any, plausible theories exist about elements that do not appear on the periodic chart? I don’t mean stuff that is heavier than lawrencium but just hasn’t been observed yet. I mean stuff with, like, 27 protons that isn’t cobalt and doesn’t really behave like cobalt. If you were to take a pile of 27 protons and managed to stick them together in the shape of a ring, for instance, would the result still necessarily be cobalt?
Second: My google-fu has turned up some limited information about arranging elemental atoms in ways that result in a fairly cohesive lump with a unique set of properties, but which are not actually crystals or molecules. What’s that about, and has anyone played with these things enough to find out if they’re worth the bother?
If a nucleus has 27 protons, then it’s cobalt. Subatomic forces are such that you couldn’t “stick them together” in the form of a ring or other unconventional arrangement. In fact, you need a certain ratio of neutrons to the protons to make the nucleus even temporarily stable. There are not, and cannot be, “elements that don’t appear in the periodic table.”
The concept of ‘arrangement of neutrons and protons’ is kind of difficult, anyhow. When they are bound in a nucleus, they don’t have a particular location in mucgh the same way that electrons don’t. The Uncertainty Principle, don’tcha know.
In fact, if you had any sort of semi-stable subatomic particle with a charge of +27, and allowed electrons to arrange themselves around that subatomic particle in the natural way, the resulting construction would still behave in the same way as an atom of cobalt. I’ve seen speculation that the world might be full of microscopic charged black holes, masquerading as ordinary atoms in this way.
Like a ball of 28 protons with an electron trapped inside–kept carefully at bay by the attractive forces on all sides of all them protons? (put your head back together, Colibri. I know it’s impossible. It is impossible, right?)
But seriously, apart from a ball of 27 protons, how else could you (theoretically) get a net +27 nucleus?
Are you talking about amorphous solids (which may or may not consist of single elements)? If so, then yes, people have been “playing with” these, and finding them to be useful at least since glass was invented, and continue to do so.
Clusters & quasicrystals, other such that I have even less of a clue about.
And I am sorely disappointed that 27 protons = cobalt period
Seems like subatomic matter is funny enough it should be more flexible than that. Friggin universe–totally predictable, except when it’s not.
That’s what I was thinking. The OP has got the idea of isotopes and isomers mixed together.
For the record, isotopes are atoms which have the same number of protons (which define what element the atom is) but different numbers of neutrons. Isomers are molecules which have the same combination of atoms but the atoms are bonded together in different ways.
If you had a 29 proton nucleus with two muons in their lowest energy state (plus 27 electrons), it would behave a lot like Cobalt. Briefly. Muons have a mean lifetime of 2.2 micro seconds. In the section Muonic Atoms on the Wikipedia Muon page, they write
In fact, proving that that’s impossible is a standard textbook example in introductory quantum mechanics courses.
Well, the charged black holes I mentioned are certainly one way. Or you could have other arrangements of quarks, possibly including some other than the up and down quarks that make protons and neutrons, arranged into a big lump in ways other than protons and neutrons. Maybe include some antiquarks in there for good measure. Or instead of trying to trap an electron inside the nucleus, you could use a muon or tauon, and let it stay outside, which would behave almost the same way as a whole nucleus.
The reason anything with a nucleus with a +27 charge “acts like” cobalt is that anything with that proton number will have 27 electrons. It is the electrons that determine how it interacts with other particles in almost all cases. If the nucleus is structured in such a way that it breaks apart or in some other way changes its proton number, then it automatically changes the electron number as well. And so when U-238 decays it emits an alpha particle and decays into another unstable isotope, which further decays, until eventually it turns into lead, which is stable.
And what makes this new compound “Lead” instead of something else is that it has 82 protons, which means it has 82 electrons. Anything with 82 protons we call “Lead”. Or rather, we have a name for a substance that we’ve known since ancient times, and we call that substance “lead” but we now know that what makes lead “lead” and not something else is having 82 protons. There are lots of nuclei that have different neutron numbers, but everything with 82 protons physically and chemically acts like lead. There are physical differences like density that you can measure, and they have different nuclear reactions, but chemically and to the naked eye they look exactly the same.
This makes me think of a couple of questions posed by Carl Sagan in The Demon Haunted World. He spends a chapter justifying why to ask this type of question.
Could there be an undiscovered integer between 6 and 7 ?
Could there be an undiscovered chemical element between atomic number 6 (which is carbon) and atomic number 7 (which is nitrogen) ?
The integer system is axiomatic. Seven is defined as the number that follows six.
And the integers also explain why there can’t be an undiscovered element between carbon and nitrogen. Elements are defined by the number of protons they have. Carbon has six and nitrogen has seven. And there’s no such thing as a partial proton. So if an atom has six protons, it’s carbon; if it has seven, it’s nitrogen; and there’s no possibilities in between these two.
This is certainly the case for what we know about the elements right now.
Quarks do carry non-integer charges of 1/3 and 2/3, though. We don’t currently theorize any way to get a fractional charge out of any “allowed” configuration of quarks, so it doesn’t fit the OP’s request, exactly. Still, if a sci-fi writer wanted an element 6.333 on the periodic table, it wouldn’t be much less plausible than sci-fi staples like faster-than-light travel.
The point of the question, as I understand it, is to question if the basic axioms are correct. If you define 7 as being 6 +1, the question then becomes: could there be an undiscovered integer between zero and one?
Ludwig Wittgenstein was supposedly giving a lecture and began to outline a mathematical procedure by saying “Let us assume X is the number of sheep in a flock…”
And one of the students raised his hand and asked, “But what if X isn’t the number of sheep?”
Wittgenstein later said he spend years thinking about this and never could decide if that was the stupidest question or the most profound question he ever heard.
People have speculated about the existence of stable nuclei containing strange quarks, called strangelets. It is conceivable that you could have an exotic nucleus like this with 27 protons and a number of strange hadrons, with a net charge not equal to 27. It would then behave chemically like some other element, but have interesting nuclear properties. Others have speculated that if such exotic nuclei exist, they may be useful as catalysts for nuclear fusion. Perhaps the Mr. Fusion home energy reactor may one day be realized.