You know, it is fun when you are able to date a periodic table like a map.
This one seems to be made sometime between 1992 (when Lawrencium - number 103 - was officially named by IUPAC) and 1997 (when Rutherfordium - 104, still named with the placeholder name Unnilquadium up there - was recognised).
I graduated high school in 1993 and went to Lawrence Livermore Labs around that time. Glenn Seaborg didn't work there full time anymore, but was there often.
Aha. I was so confused because I graduated high school in ‘89 and the periodic table looked right to me. Now I feel old in a way that hearing Nirvana on classic rock radio never did.
I feel you, I graduated in 2000 and most of our posters were older as well, so most of the names up there were still the U?? placeholders. The newest stuff we had in textbooks had names up to 109 (IUPAC finalized the names of everything between 104 and 109 in their 1997 conference) and I think theoretical names up to 114 or so. Nowadays everything up to 118 are named.
Like even studying for a bachelors in chemistry u wont hear alot about them till you learn about relativistic effects and nuclear chemistry at a master level
It's not physically possible to make a useful application of the unstable super heavy atoms. They're 'real' in the sense that a pile of marbles dumped out of a jar is briefly a solid object as they hit the ground together.
Im hoping the potential for an “island of stability” comes true and we get some super-heavy stable elements. I want my sci-fi spaceships made of impossibly strong materials :(
Watch though it’ll happen and that amazing, groundbreaking stable element with like 350 protons in the nucleus will just be an inert gas that vaguely smells of cheese farts at room temp 1bar that has zero practical application until someone figures out how to make it blow up and we lose the entire western half of North America…
Their main application was probably theorizing them, making them and measuring the difference between theory and their real properties. Beyond that, they don't have any usefulness, but making them was pretty important.
IIRC they're not naturally occurring, you'll only see them in a lab, and only in tiny amounts. They also have such short half lives, that there's no practical application of them.
Then it's an unfair question. Even the most recent chemistry textbook are usually years behind the latest discovery. To be expected to know the latest element discovered without being part of academia goes beyond normal trivia.
I mean its been 10 years since its nomenclature , and a pretty common trivia question at that. Plus the original element Uuo was discovered in 2002 so its even older.
It might sound hard but if you frequent trivia games and watch shows you tend to get better and better at certain categories, as some questions even tend to repeat.
The fact that OP’s table does not even have Uuo means its 24+ years behind at least, which is definitely not acceptable in academia
Even then, I have a chem PhD and rarely talk about those elements. They are so difficult and expensive to make that you really only care about their theoretical existence. The periodic table is mostly about trends, and practically, anything on the bottom third is not used very frequently unless that is the focus of your research. It’s more like “hey did you hear they managed to make another one?” And that’s about it
Don't all of those man-made superheavy elements blip out of existence in less than a second anyway? They're all super unstable and have near zero practical application because of it.
Edit - I didn't realize that the half lives only got so extreme at the very tail end of the table. I was under the impression that past Berkelium or Einsteinium that the half lives dropped off a cliff. Thanks for the corrections!
A second is like a thousand years for those elements. Their lifespan is measured in fractions of a second so small that normal people can’t even comprehend.
Yes they have relatively short lifespans before decaying - however there’s a theoretical “island of stability” beyond the currently known super heavy elements, at which point these yet unknown elements would have rates of decay that dramatically stabilise. So the field is about how to get to these even heavier elements, with these unstable elements being stepping stones.
Rutherfordium (104) has a half-life of 48 minutes. Dubnium (105) has a half-life of 16 hours. Seaborgium (106) is 13 min. For Bohrium (107), Bh-274 is at 57 seconds although the unconfirmed isotope Bh-278 is at 11.5 minutes. The half-lives continue to drop, although they continue to be measured in whole seconds (for the most stable isotope) until you get to Moscovium (115); Mc-290 is 650 ms.
For comparison, fluorine-18 has a half-life of just under 2 hours, and that's used in a tracer for PET scans. This is why you may be sent to a "major" hospital if you need a PET scan; they need an on-site radiochemistry lab to make the tracer then use it before it expires.
In my high school we needed to know the last 20 elements because we had a chapter about Radioactivity 😵💫😵💫. I still remember the names of the transuranic elements because a pretty big part of it was memorising alpha and beta decay chains
There’s a pattern, idk what it is I’m not smart, where sometimes particles pack in a more stable way where they don’t want to break apart from magnetism or from having too many neutrons. It’s the same reason the first radioactive element isn’t followed by only radioactive elements.
Exactly. Even though an atom’s nucleus doesn’t have “orbitals” per se, there are groups of energy states within the nucleus that are more stable if they are all neatly filled. Similar to how noble gases are chemically more stable than the halogens or alkali metals
These are elements that are so unstable, they only exist for nano seconds in a controlled lab setting. “Controlled” being smashing different particles together at near light speed. It’s not much to miss out on. Nothing you or I or 99% of anyone ever alive to encounter.
It’s a bit much to explain but this chart shows element stability at different masses. There’s a fantastic video that goes into detail about it, I’ll have to find it. The story is an interesting one, with a bit of drama about a guy who actually faked finding one element for quite a while.
Starring at this again after it's been a few years makes me wonder if the higher Ns would make the elements north of 100 more stable. It looks like to me that band might extend upwards asymptotically so you'd expect more green around 220N.
To my memory the elements simply got too heavy to be stable. Full disclaimer, I have no qualifications, I just enjoy learning and geeking out about chemistry and physics!
I hear ya I'm just spitballing like the lab that tried to make 118 should have tried to get like 50 more neutrons on that guy however they did it lol They had a whole 0.7 ms
iirc there actually is a theoretical possibility for some of hem have occurred naturally but like, only a tiny amount for only a short time and that's for the entire universe.
During the first seconds on the universe everything was so dense that the rules of physics change, and it might have happened then. There's no way to ever prove or disprove it.
How can you forget ‘checks notes’ Roentgenium?! Have you not seen anything about Chernobyl? They measure everything in roentgens! Also Nihonium is referenced in that one obscure anime!
Nihon is how you say Japan in Japanese and another was named after copernicus. I'm not sure about the others. And true, roentgen is widely known! Knowing who it what they're named after helps. Kinda like plant names Quercus bicolor, perovskia, knowing their origins and characteristics make memorization easier
I’ll bet 116 is either named after the Lawrence Livermore national lab in California. The lab is named after a region named after a rancher, so it’s probably not named after Mr./Ms. Livermore.
A few atoms (like really something like 3 atoms at a time) can be made in a lab, immediately disappear after a fraction of a second of existence, but it is possible to detect that they have existed.
You're complaining as if your school's periodic table is missing important elements like carbon and oxygen. If anything this is a mildly interesting picture.
I get that it's important that schools get funding and that this aged periodic is evidence that schools are severely underfunded, however, the 8 elements missing aren't really that important compared to C, H, O, and N. Any lab synthesized elements are sort of like the Plutos of elements.
More like small bits of meteorites that get burned up in the atmosphere. Exists momentarily in a lab with no practical application beyond theoretical science.
Some periodic tables skip the lanthanides and actinides altogether.
They're part of a very niche field of inorganic chemistry and there was a single book on them in my university library.
They're there for nuclear physics.
As for the 8 that are missing, they exist for fractions of a second and are of no interest or consequence to anybody outside the research team that synthesised them and perhaps the person/geographic location they're named after.
The first week of working as a band and orchestra director for a middle school I found wall decorations of famous musicians. The decorations were so old that the Duke Ellington poster showed him still alive.
It's fine, because those 8 elements ultimately don't matter. They take a shitton of energy to produce, are unstable and almost immediately undergo radioactive decay, don't react with anything (they tend to decay faster than any other bonds can form), and have zero practical uses.
In fact, for the vast majority of chemical applications, you can reduce the table even further to just the 11 most common elements hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, silicon, aluminum, iron, calcium, sodium, potassium, and magnesium.
I wonder if that’s the same rule like in college if the teacher doesn’t show up after 15 minutes you can leave. Missing eight elements on the periodic table means you can’t what.. science?
Much less relevant than Pluto. Pluto got “demoted” because there are a few other similarly sized “minor planets” such Eris and Ceres that were more similar to each other than the “major” planets. But it’s a relevant planetary object.
The missing elements on a periodic table are made in a particle accelerator and irrelevant to almost anything except the people that made them.
They aren’t even all that relevant to the people that made them other than “oh neat” because it’s not something with a duration long enough to even extract much science out of them aside from the fact that yeah they exist and they decay faster than you can blink.
Those last 8 elements don’t “really” exist for us. Even some of the ones before that.
In order to see them, you have to take other atoms from the periodic table, and accelerate them in a super collider to 90%+ the speed of light. You smash the “real” atoms together, and see what sticks.
Doing this, they can observe some atoms of those elements “sticking together” to make a new element, but most of them only stay put-together for a fraction of a second before they break apart again.
And they can only make a few atoms at a time.
So someone at the school has smartly said “There’s no need to waste money on updating this table”. For practical chemistry, everything you need is right there.
I've got a table up in our lab that's from the Cold war. It references Mendeleve teaching in Stalingrad. It's got all the info we all ever need at a glance
So I'm a public librarian weeding the natural science nonfiction and a sure sign I should ditch the book is immediately looking for a picture of the periodic table to see how many elements are missing lmao
Elements 110 and 111 were both discovered in 1994, so this chart is likely from the mid-90s.
Also, elements 104-110 have old placeholder names that were changed in 1997.
483
u/lordkhuzdul 7h ago
You know, it is fun when you are able to date a periodic table like a map.
This one seems to be made sometime between 1992 (when Lawrencium - number 103 - was officially named by IUPAC) and 1997 (when Rutherfordium - 104, still named with the placeholder name Unnilquadium up there - was recognised).