There I was, playing X-Com and getting soundly beaten, when I got curious about E-115 - the mythical alien element which, in that game, provides all sorts of magical benefits from super reactors to flying saucers to huge fuckoff plasma guns.
So I looked up whether there was such a thing as an element of atomic mass 115, and lo and behold, not only is there one and it has a name, but we’ve managed to synthesize a handful of atoms of it ! OK, so most of them immediately decayed, but it’s the thought that counts.
Anyway, here’s the problem, or dare I even say the Problem : in real life, e-115 has been dubbed “Ununpentium”. This is extremely silly for 5 reasons :
It is stupid Latin to begin with. It is “one one fivium”. Hey, eggheads ! If you want your stuff to sound all educated and shit, it behooves y’all to get it right. The Romans had hundreds and tens and everything. If anything it should be “Centidecipentium” or something of the sort.
It’s a stupid name.
It is, naturally, named such to keep coherence with the other recently synthesized superheavy elements such as ununoctium and ununtrium. It is a stupid coherence. Do y’all call hydrogen “Unium” ? No ? Then stop that. It’s not even coherent in its dumb attempt at coherence since e-114 is Flerovium and e-116 is Livermorium.
It’s a STUPID name that sounds like it’s the result of intense lobbying on Intel’s part.
Scientists are geeks, they should love the opportunity of naming a new element after pulpy science fiction. That would be smart. I would totally support that.
Now, here comes the question : having established such an airtight case, whom should I present it to in order to get the element re-named to what it should always have been, glorious Elerium ? Is there a central authority on these matters ?
Traditionally, elements were named by whoever discovered them. Lately, though, when you discover an element, you submit the name to the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, who then make it official.
A lot of the elements over 104 have controversy in terms of their names…that’s because they were created/synthesized during the Cold War, and both western and Soviet scientists created them around the same time, and both sides picked different names. . .the so called “Transfermium Wars”.
115 was first created in 2004, and the IUPAP hasn’t given it an official name yet. But I’d get in touch with them, or maybe the Swedish scientists that created it, and give them your suggestions.
It takes the IUPAP a long time to officially name new elements. They want to make sure any controversies over credit for the discovery are resolved, and they want other groups to repeat the experiments to confirm the discovery. That takes a few years minimum.
In the meantime, they are given the silly Latin names based on atomic number.
For example, Element 116 was first synthesized in 2000, and it took the IUPAP 12 years to officially declare it Livermorium. Until then it was Ununhexium. But everybody just called it Element 116.
And I suspect that the temporary names are made deliberately silly, so that they don’t catch on in the dozen or more years it takes to come up with the official name. Remember the trouble that the astronomical community had with nicknames that become more popular than the real names… (Eris, aka Xena)…
Each syllable corresponds to a digit. The syllable names were constructed such that the first letters are unique to the respective digit, allowing for regular and unambiguous three-letter element symbols. The temporary element names of this sort are called systematic element names, and you can read more about them on Wikipedia (among other places).
Just a nitpick, meanwhile, but elements are distinguished and named based on their atomic number (the number of protons in the nucleus), not their atomic mass (the total number of protons plus neutrons).
So does anyone want to read the “instead of Centidecipentium” part of that question? It’s reiterating a question from the OP that hasn’t been answered yet.
The digit-by-digit scheme can be unambiguously extended indefinitely, by defining only ten roots. A scheme that would lead to “centidecipentium”, though, would need (in principle) ten roots for each place.
Is the question why one meaningless, extendable, temporary scheme over another meaningless, extendable, temporary scheme? What are you looking for here?
Yes, in fact. That was clear in the part of my question that you cut out. Also see the OP, and post 12.
I certainly wasn’t looking for how element 115 in particular translated to ununpentium, which is fairly obvious, and in any case that was already covered, in the OP no less.
I didn’t see that as answering the question since it didn’t address why a “centidecipentium” wouldn’t also work. When combined with Chronos’s post 13, perhaps it does.
I should have said “deliberately uncatchy” - my point being that you don’t want the temporary name to compete with the real name when the real name is finally selected.
