5/30/2023 0 Comments Periodic table chemistry jokesYou know the face kids make when they say pee-yoo (a la Calvin)? He wanted to sneak that into the periodic table. His dad had a weird sense of humor and “he just thought it would be fun” to treat this element as if it were stinky. When I talked to Seaborg’s son Dave, he said the same thing. “The obvious choice for the symbol would have been Pl,” wrote chemists David Clark and David Hobart in 2000, “but facetiously, Seaborg suggested Pu, like the words a child would exclaim, Pee-yoo!” when smelling something bad.” But why? Two colleagues, writing in Los Alamos Science writing in Los Alamos Science, a journal published by the famous science lab, say he told them it was a crazy impulse. There’s a naming committee that reviews and blesses the abbreviations, and so, Glenn Seaborg was free to choose. It has to be very short, usually two letters. The scientists who worked on the A-bomb were not allowed to call element 94 “plutonium.” Every ingredient in the bomb was top secret, so they gave it a false cover they called it “copper.” When they had to use actual copper in some of their experiments, they called that “honest-to-God copper.” Only when the war ended was Seaborg allowed to publish his discovery, and that’s when plutonium became an official element.ĭiscoverers can not only name their elements, they can also choose the abbreviated symbol that goes onto the periodic table alongside the atomic number. Seaborg and his colleagues at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory filled so many once empty boxes on the periodic table that it was said you could write him a letter addressed entirely in his own chemical elements, like this: He and his team at Berkeley had a cyclotron that smashed particles together and so they had an incredible run of discoveries: americium (95), curium (96), berkelium (97), californium (98), einsteinium (99), fermium (100), mendelevium (101), nobelium (102), and finally (and he’s the only guy who got his name on an element while still alive), seaborgium (106). The American chemist Glenn Seaborg came up with this name after his colleagues found neptunium (element 93) the year before. “Pu” stands for plutonium, the element named for Pluto, back in 1941 the newest, teeniest planet in the solar system. It’s pure silliness, staring right at you, right where I’ve drawn my circle, at element 94. You wouldn’t know it, because it’s hiding down there at the bottom of the periodic table of elements, but it’s a prank-something a five-year-old might do-and the guy who did it was one of the greatest chemists in America. Scientifically speaking, these science jokes that you’re about to experiment with are very, very science-y.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |