The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean

Agyria

hahahahhahahahhahh

George Dyson

"Computers led to bombs, and bombs led to computers"

Ruthenium and Samarium

Both discovered in Russia and both are useless

Tycho Brahe

Broke the bridge of his nose and had it replaced with silver. When his body was dug up, however, they found a green crust on the front of his skull, suggesting he probably used a lighter copper nose

Which two elements are liquid at room temperature?

Mercury and Bromine

Kazimierz Fajans

- Had detected only short-lived atoms of element 91 in 1913 and named it "brevium"

Sonoluminescence

- Light produced from ultrasound - Caused from the non-reactivity of noble gases

Antiseptic Elements

- Silver - Copper

Euro

- The most sophisticated piece of currency ever devised

First virus discovered

- Tobacco Mosaic Virus - The protein runs 1,185 letters

Iron Pyrite

- Iron disulfide - Shines with luster more golden than real gold - Fool's gold

Crookes

- Made two fancy periodic tables during his time - One like a lute and one like a pretzel

Bubble science has been linked to ______________ ___________

Desktop Fusion

Kalgoorlie

- The region around Hannan's find - Soon became the world's largest gold producer - Known as the Golden Mile

What happens if you chew potassium gymnemate?

- Your tongue tastes sand - Potassium tastes salty, like Sodium

Foam

- A state where bubbles overlap and lose their spherical shape - Spongy bone in the body is most similar to foam - Used to protect space shuttles upon re-entry

Absorbing a neutron makes an atom ___________, which makes it explode and possibly release more neutrons

queasy

Donald Glaser

- 25 year old junior faculty member who frequently visited the bars near UMICH - One day he questioned the bubbles in his beer - He knew that bubbles are especially prone to form as liquid heats up and approaches its boiling point - Liquids are a thousand times more dense than gases so Glaser substituted the liquid for a gas - Created the bubble chamber - He shot an atomic gun at beer to study its subatomic properties - At first the experiments failed - He realized, the most sensible liquid to use was hydrogen, from a friend as we know him, Luis Alvarez - Hydrogen worked well because of its boiling point, so even minute amount of heat would make a froth - He won a Nobel Prize at the age of 33 for his work - He even borrowed Edwin McMillan and Segrè's white vest for the ceremony

Big Four Pollution Diseases of Japan

- 2x Mercury, 1x Sulfur Dioxide, 1x Nitrogen Dioxide

The Big Bang

- 4.6 million years ago - A supernova sent a sonic boom through a flat cloud of space about 15 billion miles wide - As a result, a crazy whirlwind of a cloud was created and the sun emerged from it - The gas giants formed when a stellar wind, a stream of ejecta from the sun, blew lighter elements outwards towards the fringes - The gassiest of these is Jupiter - Scientists analyzed the amount and placement of common and rare elements in the earth's crust and deduced how they could have gotten where they are

Alpha

- 4/2 He - Allows atoms to exist and also allows them to react with sufficient vigor to form compounds, since electrons neither roam too freely from their nuclei nor cling too closely

Carbon

- 6th element - Proteins are built up from Carbon - The most versatile element - Backbone of amino acids - Carbon's place on the table and its need to fill its outer energy level with eight electrons is responsible for amino acids bunching together - Due to its 4 valence electrons, it latches onto virtually anything to try and get those remaining 4 to fill the octet - It must form bonds with other atoms in whatever direction it can - It shares its electrons with four other atoms at once which allows it to build complex chains, or even three dimensional webs of molecules - The bonds it shares are steady and stable - Its flexibility is directly linked to its capacity to form life

Midas and the Golden Touch

- 700 BC Midas inherits the kingdom of Phrygia (Turkey) - Apollo asked him to judge his music and then turned his ears in donkey ears after he judged improperly - Midas had the best rose garden in the world - Sometimes receives credit for discovering tin (not true) - Discovered graphite and white lead - He earned the golden touch after tending to the drunk Silenus, who passed out in his rose garden one night - In reward, she gave him the ability to transform anything he touches into gold - His tomb was surrounded by bronze - His touch came as a result of the prosperous zinc in the soil of Asia Minor where brass making was going on - His touch was probably no more than a touch of zinc in the soil of his corner in Asia Minor

Julius Lothar Meyer

- A German Chemist who was the most serious rival to Mendeleev - Among other things, he had figured out that red blood cells transport oxygen by binding it to hemoglobin - Him and Mendeleev published their tables at the same time and split the Davy Medal in 1882 for co-discovering the periodic law

Trofim Lysenko

- A Soviet geneticist who believed that environmentally dependent characteristics can be inherited; led Soviet agriculture by this belief - This is why Stalin loved him

Color of emitted light

- A crash between closely spaced levels releases a low-energy reddish light - A crash between more widely spaced levels releases high-energy purple light

L- dopa

- A drug for Parkinson's disease that contains the precursors to dopamine so that once it is in the brain, it will be converted to dopamine. - Must have the proper-handed chemicals to prove effective like Pasteur said before

AIDS

- A foamy virus for the way infected cells swell before exploding

Jupiter

- A gas planet -Fifth from the Sun - The largest of all planets - It potentially has a huge diamond/gem core - Its magnetic field can be described only by oceans of black, liquid metallic hydrogen - Jupiter could've been a brown dwarf planet but it cooled down below the threshold for fusion but allowed for atoms to become very close together, creating a possibility for Jupiter to inhibit planet sized diamonds and oily Hydrogen metal - Survives the giant red eye - a hurricane three times wider than the earth - In its surrounding atmosphere, 25% of the suspected helium is missing and 90% of the neon - Jupiter lacks a nuclear furnace which prevents it from being able to stop the helium and neon from falling inwards and not staying in the atmosphere - Due to the precipitate that is formed, if one could get close enough they could see a neon rain!

Zircon

- A mineral that contains zirconium, the pawnshop heartbreaker and knockoff jewelry substitute - Zirconium makes convincing fake diamonds - Found as hard grains inside larger rocks - When they formed, they vacuumed up stray uranium and packed it into atomic bubbles inside themselves - Squeezed lead out - Measuring the ratio of lead to uranium in zircons will bring us back to year zero

1911 Dutch-German Scientific Discovery

- A scientist was cooling Mercury with liquid Helium when he discovered that below -452 F the system lost all electrical resistance and became an ideal conductor - Similar to if we melted down an iPod and realized that the battery remained fully charged no matter how long we played music

Titin

- A series elastic component protein responsible for allowing the sarcomere to stretch and recoil - 189,819 letter molecule

Quantum Dot

- A sort of holographic, virtual atom that nonetheless obeys the rules of quantum mechanics - Different elements can make quantum dots, but one of the best is indium - It's silvery metal, a relative of aluminum, and lives just on the borderland between metals and semiconductors - Acts as a superorganism - The quantum dots, sometimes referred to as pancake atoms, are so flat, the electron shells are different than usual - In a quantum dot periodic table, the octet rule does not hold

Oort Cloud

- A spherical region of comets that surrounds the solar system - The sun may reach a trough every 20 million years and send small unfriendly bodies toward earth - Most would be deflected by the Sun but enough would pass by to pummel Earth

Neutral Neutron

- Adds weight but not charge

Norilsk, Russia

- Air pollution causes a shortened life expectancy in region - Pollution was heavy and depending on which heavy metals were in demand, it snowed black, - In Norilsk, instead of begging for change, they collect cups of rain, evaporate the water, and sell the scrap metal for cash

Bronze

- Alloy of copper and tin - Shiny and has overtones of copper - Differs in color depending on percentages of tin, copper, and other elements where the minerals were mined

Brass

- Alloy of zinc and copper - Found in the part of Asia Minor where Midas once was - Shiny, gold-like

Alcoa

- Aluminum Company of America - In its first months in 1888, it eked out 50 pounds of Aluminum per day - When Hall died, he owned Alcoa shares worth $30 million

Silicon

- An alternative to carbon-based life in other galaxies - Element 14 - Carbon has more in common with Silicon than Nitrogen and Oxygen because Silicon is in the same column - Both Carbon and Silicon have 4 valence electrons, giving it some of Carbon's flexibility - Silicon, due to it's ability to mimic Carbon, has made it a dream of science fiction fans for it to become an alternative to carbon-based life in other galaxies - Silicon is closely related to Carbon but they are not identical and they each form distinct compounds - The longest nontechnical word in the dictionary is a disease that has "silico" at its core - Advances in computing and artificial intelligence also suggests that silicon could form "brains" as complicated as any carbon-based one - Silicon almost always bonds with oxygen in nature - Does not dissolve in water - Packs on more electrons than carbon - Making it bulkier - Carbon bends into rings to form sugars and store energy but Silicon isn't supple enough to bend into the right position to form rings - Silicon atoms also have a hard time squeezing their electrons into tight spaces for double bonds - Therefore, silicon-based life would have hundreds of fewer options for storing chemical energy and making chemical hormones - Sea urchins and radiolaria use silica only for structural support, not for respiratory and story energy situations - Silicon is also very cheap - Used in computers, microchips, cars, and calculators - Silicon semi-conductors sent men to the moon and drive the internet

Selenium

- An essential nutrient in all animals - Is toxic in large doses - Things containing selenium like Locoweed, drive cattle mad - It is animal meth - Means "moon" but comes from the Latin roots of lunatic - Attacks within a week - Makes hair fall out

William Thomson (Lord Kelvin)

- Announced that the earth had been born twenty million years before - He was the first to use a non Biblical strategy to find the earth's age - Stated that his earth's age prediction was correct until someone discovered extra sources of heat in the earth << this person was Rutherford

György Hevesy

- Arrived in England to study Radioactivity - His University lab director was Rutherford - He was assigned to separate out radioactive atoms from nonradioactive atoms inside blocks of lead (impossible) - He developed a way to track molecules inside veins and organs, by injecting dissolved lead into the living creature and tracing the lead's path. - The Radium-D would emit radiation as it went through allowing him to track it - With Niels Bohr, he opened the crack between chemistry and physics into a real political rift - Having been dispatched by Bohr, after his explanation of quantum physics of the new element, he worked with Dirk Coster and they found element 72, Hafnium, on the first try - Bohr's quantum mechanics was genius - He was not given the Nobel Prize in 1924 - He continued his work on experimental tracers - He also determined how quickly the human body recycles an average water molecule (every 9 days) - He dissolved his medals and awards before being taken by the Nazi's (he used aqua regia) << can dissolve "royal" metals - Eventually won a Nobel Prize in 1943

Sir Arthur Adding-One

- Arthur Eddington - Believed that alpha measured precisely 1/136 - Later learned that it was closer to 1/137 and he just added a 1 to his equation and never recognized his carelessness

What makes life live?

- Asked by Pasteur - "well-marked line of demarcation that at the present can be drawn between the chemistry of dead matter and the chemistry of living matter" -

P.T. Barnum (Gordon Teal)

- At a semiconductor trade meeting that year, a cheeky engineer from Texas announced that he had a silicon conductor in his pocket - He took a germanium-run record player to external speakers and, rather medievally, lowered the player's innards into a vat of boiling oil <-- it choked and died - He then replaced the germanium with silicon and tried again <-- the music continued to play

Modern Semi-Conductor Industry and William Shockley

- Began in 1945 at Bell Labs in NJ - He was trying to build a small silicon amplifier to replace vacuum tubes in mainframe computers - Only the semi-conducting elements could achieve the balance engineers wanted by letting enough electrons through to run a circuit, but not so many that the electrons were impossible to control - Shockley's silicon amplifier never amplified anything so frustrated, he dumped the task onto two underlings, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain - Upon hearing of the men's success, Shockley set out to steal credit from the two men - He was not wicked, but a man who was ruthless when he though he was right - Later in his life Shockley invested in eugenics and donated his sperm to a "genius sperm bank" and advocated for poor people to get sterilized and stop diluting humankind's collective IQ - His plan worked and as he forged his part in the two men's discovery, it became known that the 3 men achieved credit for the discovery - Shockley banished Bardeen to another lab, in which Bardeen eventually quit all together out of disgust

Quasars

- Black holes that tear apart and cannibalize other stars, violence that releases gobs and gobs of light energy - When light passes through a dust cloud, vaporized elements in the cloud absorb it

Feynmanium

- Element 137 - The last element

Vanadium

- Element 23 - The best spermicide ever created - Deadly to small wriggling cells - It simply cracks the crankshaft of the sperm's tail and the tail snaps off leaving the sperm whirling around - It is still a doubted element for the body to metabolize due to its potency - It mysteriously raises glucose and lowers it - Vanadium water from Mt. Fuji is sold as a cure to diabetes

Silver

- Element 47 - Self-sterilizing like copper - If ingested, colors the skin blue permanently (condition is argyria) - "Blue Man" overdosed on silver nitrate to cure his syphilis (unsuccessful)

Maria Goeppert

- Born in Germany 1906 - Got her Ph.D at the University of Hannover - She had trouble getting hired as a woman - Followed her husband (Joseph Mayer) to work and conferences - She was given feminine jobs such as figuring out what causes colors - She was invited to work for the Manhattan Project - After WWII, the University of Chicago made her a professor of physics... still going unpaid - She began her work on the nucleus - Her question became when she realized that the atomic numbers are not in sequence with abundance - Why is Oxygen the third most abundant element with an atomic number of 8? - She suggested that protons and neutrons in the nucleus sit in shells just like electrons and that filling nuclear shells lead to stability - She proved that nuclei do have shells and do form what she called magic nuclei - They appear at atomic numbers two, eight, twenty, twenty-eight, fifty, eighty-two, and so on - She was recognized for her nuclear shell model - She began a real paying job at the new University of California after the Germans acknowledged her work

Marie Sklodowska

- Born in Warsaw, Poland - One of the most illustrious Poles ever - She moved to Paris in hopes of fulfilling her love for science - She would never return after meeting and marrying Pierre Curie - Studied Uranium - She noticed that the left over "waste" of the Uranium purification experiments was 300x more radioactive than Uranium - Won another Nobel Prize in 1911 for discovering two elements in Uranium's radioactive "waste" (Pierre had been run over by a carriage and died) - Had affair with Paul Langevin

Diet Coke and Mentos

- Bubbles are the main reason for why diet coke explodes when you drop in mentos - The grainy surface of the mentos grabs the dissolved bubbles, which are stitched into larger ones - A few large bubbles slowly break off and sent the coke bottle 20 feet in the air

Charles Townes

- Built the first working Maser - Received backlash, as no one believed it was possible - Won a Nobel Prize in 1964 for his work

What did Leo Szilard propose?

- By sprinkling a tenth of an ounce of cobalt-60 on every square mile of earth, there would be enough gamma rays to wipe out the entire human race - He hoped this method would never be employed

Neil Bartlett

- Canadian-based Chemist - Created the first Noble Gas compound, a solid orange crystal, with xenon in 1962 -

DNA

- Carrier of genetic information - Had phosphorus - Sugar backbone-nucleic acids

Ytterby

- Cerium was first discovered here - Means "Outer Village" - Streets here are named for minerals and elements - Pockets of lanthanides happened to end up underneath Sweden which made lanthanide-mining easy in Sweden - Johan Gadolin, a chemist in a line of scientific minded academics began getting shipments of unusual rocks from Ytterby for his opinion - Through Gadolin, the scientific world was made aware of Ytterby - He made progress in isolating clusters of lanthanides - 7 elements trace their lineage back to Ytterby, more than any person, place, or thing - It created ytterbium, yttrium, terbium, and erbium, holmium, thulium, and gadolinium - Out of the 7 of these, 6 were Mendeleev's missing lanthanides

Clair Patterson

- Clair Patterson knew the precise rate at which uranium breaks down and he knew the kinds of led that existed on earth - If Patterson could figure out how much higher the ratio of 206 and 207 to the fixed 204 isotope, he could use the rate of uranium decay to extrapolate backwards to year zero - Meteors are solid iron and meteors contain the same original ratios as the earth did, because no uranium was around to add new lead atoms - Patterson could meteor bits from Canyon Diablo in Arizona and went to work - He had to boil equipment in concentrated sulfuric acid to keep vaporized human lead out of his meteor rocks - He concluded through his research that the earth was formed 4.55 Billion Years ago

Cobalt bomb

- Cobalt-60 atoms would settle like land mines, making them too strong to be waited out, or to strong to endure - Cobalt bombs are unlikely weapons for war because the conquering army wouldn't be able to occupy the territory

Radon

- Colorless, odorless, and reacts with nothing - It displaces air, sinks into the lungs, and discharges lethal radioactive particles that lead inevitably to lung cancer

Noble Gases and Plato

- Column eighteen at the far right-hand side - The name "noble gases" goes back to ancient Greece - Plato minted the word "elements" - "stoicheia" in Greek - Plato in his work, The Symposium, emphasized that abstract and unchanging things are intrinsically more noble than things that grub around and interact with gross matter - He adored geometry for this reason - Plato said that every being longs to find its complement - Plato developed the world of forms which speaks of all objects being shadows of one real type - Noble gases are unreactive - Plato would have been charmed by the noble gases because "they are incorruptible and ideal" - The noble gases are pacifists and a demilitarized zone surrounded by unstable neighbors

Beta Decay

- Conversion of neutrons to protons and vice versa - Because the proton number changes that beta decay converts an atom into a different element

Alpha Decay

- Converts elements - The most dramatic change on nuclear level - Two neutrons and two protons are shorn away

Kenneth Parker

- Convinced his family to concentrate the firm's money in a new design, the Duo-fold Pen - He saw pens as a chance to make money - He introduced the Parker 51

Magnesium

- Could be a huge help for primitive creatures, allowing them to transition from organic molecules to real life - The earliest and most successful forms of life used magnesium - In animals it helps DNA function properly - Magnesium compounds sponge up on water - Jupiter has magnesium salts populated throughout so it is a candidate for life - Ultimately, Magnesium compounds can provide the raw materials to build life by eroding carbon-rich chemicals from the ocean floor

Copper

- Element 29 - Has antiseptic power - Copper ducts and tubing are standard in the guts of buildings now, as safety measures - The cheapest way to improve infrastructure - Bacteria, fungi, or algae inch across something made of copper, absorb the copper atoms which disrupt their metabolism, and eventually die - Is used to cover brass doorknobs and metals railing - Very cheap

Arsenic

- Element 33 - Romans used to smear it on figs

Dmitri Mendeleev

- Credited with created the first periodic table but this is not completely true - Six people invented it independently, but Mendeleev knew how to group them in small parts according to characteristics - He was born in Siberia and the youngest of 14 - After his family's factory burned down, he was sent to his father's alma mater in St. Petersburg - Him and Bunsen often clashed because Mendeleev was moody and because Bunsen's labs always smelled - He returned as a professor to St. Petersburg in 1860 and began to work on the nature of elements and eventually his periodic table in 1869 - He refused to believe in atoms, and things that you cannot see such as electrons and radioactivity - Mendeleev understood that certain traits about elements persist even if other don't - He organized it by playing a kind of chemical solitaire in his office - "Had balls enough to predict that new elements would be dug up" - His table passed the noble gas test as they fit perfectly into his table - He used -eka- as a prefix for those elements that were missing (means beyond) - "I admit Mendeleev has two wives, but I have only one Mendeleev" - Mendeleev is similar to Einstein and Darwin - None of these men did all the work, but they did the most of it and did it more elegantly than the others - People tend to remember only his triumphs but in reality he had a lot of falsehoods in his career as well - He decided that lanthanides were too vexed to make predictions about - If he had traveled west to Sweden, where Ytterby was discovered he may have found some more answers

Isaac Newton

- Derived the laws of calculus and his monumental theory of gravity - Became master of the Royal Mint of England - He found himself entangles with spies, lowlifes, drunkards, and thieves -- an entanglement he thoroughly enjoyed - He prosecuted the wrongdoers he uncovered with the wrath of the Old Testament God, refusing pleas for clemency - He even had people hung for fraud of the coinage

Ernest Rutherford

- Devoted himself to radioactivity, the genetics or nanotechnology of the day - He often blurted out weird euphemisms - He would sing, "Onward, Christian Soldiers" as he worked in the lab - His elegance allowed him to solve the mystery of how one element can transform into another - He built off the work of Curie sometimes - He let an active sample decay in a closed container, then drew bubbles off the gas into an inverted flask, which gave him all the radioactive material he needed - He proved that the radioactive bubbles were Radon - He noticed the mutation of elements - He recognized that elements could suddenly move laterally at they decayed and skip across spaces - He had named the little bits that flew off the radioactive atoms alpha particles - He also discovered beta particles - He discovered that alpha particles were escaped helium atoms with an early "neon" light - He was able to find the age of any rock by measuring the amount of Helium inside of it - Lots of helium in a rock indicates that it is old since it is only decaying - He realized that radioactivity in the earth's crust would generate extra heat - He went against Kelvin's claim very swiftly - Proved the helium-uranium connection

Artificial Obsolescence

- Did and increasingly would dominate the twentieth century - Materialistic, infantile and a "moral disintegration"

Radium

- Discovered and named by the Curies - Glows a translucent green - People drank radium-infused water as a health tonic

Polonium

- Discovered and named by the Curies - Named after Poland - No element had been named for a political cause before - Useless as a metal due to its incredibly fast half life - Has been linked to lung cancer from cigarettes, since tobacco plants absorb polonium excessively well

Antiproton

- Discovered by Segrè and Chamberlain - They are mirror images of regular protons - They have a negative charge - Travel backwards in time - Will annihilate any "real matter"

James Chadwick

- Discovered the neutral neutron - One of Rutherford's students

Benjamin Franklin

- Discovered why oil calms frothy water - Dabbled in bubbles

Fundamental Constants

- Do not depend on measurement - Pure, fixed numbers - Like pie (3.14159265...)

Gold

- Does not mix with other elements, meaning that it would be impossible to find gold mixed inside minerals and ores

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

- Dorothy wore silver, not ruby, slippers and traveled on a gold-colored brick road to cash-green city - Maybe this was an allegory about the relative merits of the silver versus gold standard

Prontosil

- Dye that contains sulfa molecule; its use began the practice of treating diseases with drugs - 1932 used by Domagk as the first antibacterial drug - It flopped when it hit the market - It won it's respect when it cured Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. in 1936 - It turns out the sulfonamide was actually fighting the bacteria, which mammal cells produce by splitting prontosil int two - In reality, this is not a bacteria killer but instead a bacteria birth control - They hit the fan and went down hard

History of the rocky planets

- Earth, Mercury, Venus, and Mars - They were swirled into molten globes and the elements within them were shook up and moved around - Dense iron sank to the core of each planet and Mercury sometimes releases iron snowflakes - Earth could've been just uranium and aluminum but the earth solidified so we are today left with clusters of elements

Photoelectric effect

- Einstein won the Nobel Prize for this, not his theory of relativity - This provided the first real evidence that quantum mechanics wasn't a crude stopgap for justifying anomalous experiments, but actually corresponds to reality - His ideas on gravity, the speed of light, and relativity do not quite fit with quantum mechanics

Sulfur

- Electrons are in a dozenet, not an octet - Shares one electron with a benzene ring, one with a short nitrogen chain, and two each with two oxygen atoms nitrogen

Neutron Chain Reaction

- Electrons keep neutrons/protons at 1-1 ratio - If too many neutrons, atom splits itself (releases excess neutrons) - Nearby atoms absorb neutrons » become unstable/spit out neutrons'' - Requires coordinating bullions of billions of neutrons,

Seaborgium

- Element 106 - Naming it after a living person wasn't "legal" but was considered okay - The Germans and Americans argued over who had found it first - They also dueled over the element's name - The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) stepped in - Seaborgium became the name of element 106 - This was the only element named after a living person at the time

Gadolinium

- Element 64 - Potential cancer assassin - Its abundance of unpaired electrons is the site of its value - It has the maximum number of unpaired electrons and due to this, it allows Gadolinium to be magnetized more strongly than any other element - This leads to its assistance when dealing with MRIs - By affixing gadolinium to tumor targeting agents, doctors can pick tumors out on a MRI scan more easily - Its array of unpaired electrons allows it to absorb scads of neutrons, which normal body tissue cannot absorb well - When it absorbs it become radioactive and sheds the tissue around it - It also inhibits proteins that repair DNA

Thallium

- Element 81 - The deadliest element on the table - Enters the body through ion channels to vacuum up potassium - Once inside, it pretends to be Potassium and starts unstitching key amino acid bonds inside proteins and unraveling their elaborate folds, making them useless - It roams around the body - Known as the poisoner's poison - Graham Young killed family members with Thallium - Sticks around for aeons and are likely to grow stable nuclei that never go radioactive - Was used by the CIA to try and kill Fidel Castro

Bismuth

- Element 83 - Heaviest, almost-stable element - Whitish metal with a pinkish hue to it - Burns with a blue flame and emits yellow fumes - Found in paints and dyes - Replaces red lead in crackling fireworks - Expands when it freezes - It can form rocks known as hopper crystals - It has helped scientists probe the deeper structure of radioactive matter - Its predicted half life is 20 Billion years - It will be the final element to go extinct - It is actually benign and medicinal - Found in pepto BISmol and prescribed to soothe ulcers - Most misplaced element on the table - It is a noble metal

Protactinium

- Element 91 - Credited to Meitner and Hahn (even though Fajans discovered it first) - Means, "Parent of Actinium" - It was first named Brevium by Fajans

Bromine

- Energetic grenade of an element - It has 7 electrons in outer layer, wants 8 - It shreds weaker elements in cells to get its electron fix - It irritates the eyes and nose - By 1910 it was being used in warfare

Robert Boyle

- Experimented on and tasted frothy urine - Dabbled in bubbles

Niels Bohr

- Explained quantum mechanics - Dismissed Townes's maser to his face saying it was simply, "not possible."

Croesus of Lydia

- Figured out how to separate electrum into silver and gold coins, in the process of establishing a real currency system

Francium

- Fragile and basically useless - Extremely radioactive - Very unstable: - Its 130-odd neutrons buffer the positive charges well but also add so much bulk that the strong force cannot reach all the way across the nucleus to quell civil strife - The least stable natural element - Still more abundant than astatine because many radioactive elements around uranium happen to decay into francium as the disintegrate - Instead of decaying and becoming astatine, it undergoes beta decay and becomes radium

Mercury

- From his mother's trick, he learned that mercury cannot be naturally separated into smaller units. - They keep company only with other mercury atoms and they minimize contact with the outside world. - It is element 80. - It's fumes are known for burning holes in the brain and it is extremely potent. - It's symbol is Hg, from hydragyrum, which is latin for "liquid silver". - Mercury is extremely poisonous because the body will rid itself of any poison, mercury included. - Mercury frays the "wires" in the central nervous system and burns the brain. - All throughout his childhood, Sam associated spilled mercury with a fever.

Cold Fusion

- Fusion that does not require the incredible temperature and pressures of stars, but takes place at room temperature

Robert Bunsen

- German Chemist who did not actually create the Bunsen Burner, but instead just improved the design and popularized it - His first love was Arsenic - He worked primarily with arsenic-based cacodyl, chemicals whose name is based on the Greek word for "stinky" - These cacodyl made him hallucinate - He developed an antidote to Arsenic Poisoning which is Iron Oxide Hydrate - The careless explosion of a glass beaker of arsenic nearly blew out his right eye and left him half blind for the next 60 years - He loved everything that spewed from the ground (natural explosions) - He invented the spectroscope - He took a local technician's primitive gas burner and added a valve to adjust the oxygen flow and there you have the Bunsen Burner - His other attribution to the table is his help in building an intellectual dynasty in science at Heidelberg, where he instructed a number of people for early work in periodic law, which includes Dmitri Mendeleev

Neptunists

- Goethe's side of the argument - Thought rocks precipitated from minerals in the ocean, the realm of the god Neptune - They were incorrect

Glenn Seaborg and Al Ghiorso

- Grew up in Michigan - McMillan had been sent to work on the radars for WWII, so Seaborg was left with all the machinery and equipment - He discovered Plutonium by sifting through the radioactive sample of the seep of the neptunium - He was invited to work for the Manhattan Project - Be brought with him Al Ghiorso, who was a technician - Ghiorso was put to work wiring detectors - The two men discovered more elements than anyone in history and extended the periodic table by 1/6 - The men bombarded delicate plutonium with radioactive particles using alpha particles - They discovered and named Americium, Curium, Berkelium, Californium, Einsteinium, and Fermium - Seaborg announced 2 of these new elements on a children's radio show - Their apex was the creation of element 101

Alkali metals

- Group 1 - Have 1 electron - Similar to the Halogens in that they are extremely reactive - They can spontaneously combust in air or water instead of rusting or corroding - They form alliances (bonds) with the Halogens

Transition metals

- Groups 3-12, Rows 4-7 - The "great plains" of the periodic table - They have more flexibility than the other atoms in how they store their electrons - Have lower energy levels buried beneath the higher levels - They have different energy levels but they also fight other atoms to secure full outer energy levels with eight electrons - File electrons into the d-shells which hold 10 electrons - They prefer to put their extra electrons away and hide them beneath other layers - Plato would not have liked the way they work - The metals bury their d-shell electrons in bottomed drawers, those electrons end up shielded - Atoms try to react with the metals but cannot get at those electrons, and the upshot is that many metals in a row leave the same number of electrons exposed and act the same way chemically

Megalodon

- HMS Challenger set out from England to explore the Pacific Ocean - They hauled up dozens of spherical rocks shaped like fossilized potatoes and they were mostly manganese - It turns out, the manganese had formed itself around giant shark teeth - The manganese covered teeth covered 5+ inches in size - This shark grew to be about 50 feet long - It weighed 50 tons - It could swim 50 mph - The Megalodon died 1.5 million year ago

Alliances between the alkali and the halogens

- Halogens have one less electron they need for an octet - Alkali have one electron in outer layer and full octet below - Form strong links by dumping and adding to each other

Superatoms

- Have the eerie ability to mimic single atoms of different elements

Patterson and Pig-Pen

- He began to see Pig-Pen, the Peanuts character in the Sunday newspaper, as a metaphor for humanity - He felt that Pig-Pen's perpetual cloud was our airborne lead so he made a habit or always keeping his lab free of human lead

Louis Pasteur

- He discovered the handedness of tartaric acid - All the crystals twisted in one direction, light left handed fists - He had shown that there are two identical but mirror-image types of tartaric acid - He later said that life has a strong bias for molecules of only one handedness - He stated that living matter only arises from other living matter - Mulligan taught us well - The air contained no "vitalizing element" - Life is built solely from elements on the periodic table - He helped to develop pasteurization - He also saved a young boy's life with a rabies vaccine

Stalin

- He distrusted spooky, counterintuitive branches of science such as quantum mechanics, and relativity and threatened to the liquidate the scientists if they did not drop these ideas

Linus Pauling

- He figured out quantum mechanics governs the chemical bonds between atoms: bond strength, bond length, bond angle, nearly everything - The Leonardo of chemistry - Proved that chemistry could be understood rather than being memorized - Snowflakes are six-sided because of the structure of ice - People die from sickle-cell anemia because their hemoglobin can't hold on to oxygen >> transformed how doctors thought of medicine - While being sick with the flu, showed that proteins can form long cylinder called alpha helixes - Never bothered with the double helix of DNA - He decided that the bulky nucleic acids sat on the outside of each strand - He also reasoned that DNA had a triple helix and had phosphorous molecules in the center - He ignored the comments of his graduate student who saw fault with his work - Upon hearing of the work of Watson and Crick, he accepted his mistakes and conceded defeat - Earned a Noble Prize in Chemistry in 1954 - Realized vitamins had the ability to cure people - Became the world's leading anti-nuclear weapon activist - Won a second Nobel Prize, for Peace in 1962 becoming the only person to win two unshared Nobels

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

- He is ranked as the greatest, most accomplished German ever to live - The Shakespeare of Germany - He was a German writer and statesman - In his literature, he could not hold back in making pronouncements in philosophy and science - He devised a theory on how colors worked but put too much bullshit poetry into it - His best work, Faust, includes a bootless socratic dialogue between Neptunists and Plutonists on how rocks form - He selected J.W. Döbereiner for the open chemistry spot at the University of Jena - "The last man to know everything"

Segrè's mistakes

- He misidentified nuclear fission products as transuranic - He sloppily misidentified transuranic neptunium as a fission product

David Hahn

- He wanted to solve the world's energy crisis and break its addiction to oil - He erected a nuclear reactor in the shed of his mom's backyard - Influenced by The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments - His girlfriend's mother forbade him to speak to guests at his parties because he'd blurt out unappetizing facts about the chemicals in the food they were eating - He began playing with very violent chemicals - He did not seem to get better at chem - He learned about fission, fusion, and radioactive decay - He relied on uranium fission and the radioactivity of neutrons - He faced the problem after the uranium atoms fission and release of neutrons, when the lighter atoms are stable and cannot perpetuate the chain reaction

William Röntgen

- He was playing with a Crookes tube, an important new tool for studying subatomic phenomena - He made a Crookes tube with a small aluminum window and the beam would tunnel the foil into the air - This didn't work so he took his own route - He covered the Crookes tube with black paper, so that the beam would escape only through the foil and he painted his plated with a luminescent barium compound - He propped up a barium coated screen and put the objects at hand, like a book, near the tube to block the beam - He was able to see through things - He put it up to his hand and saw his bones (the first X-RAY!) - He won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1901 - Element 111 is now his

Per -Ingvar Branemark

- He was studying how bone marrow produces new blood cells - He chiseled out holes in the femurs of rabbits and covered the holes with an eggshell-thin titanium window, which was transparent to strong light

Mark Twain

- He went out and bought a typewriter after seeing a demonstration of it - Twain typed letters on typewriters he hated and cussed out pens that he loved - He had no pretensions of practicing science, but both he and Goethe were fascinated by scientific discovery - They doubted that man had enough wisdom to use technology properly - Wrote a bemusing story, entitled, "Sold to Satan", the perils of the periodic table

John von Neumann

- Helped design the basic architecture of modern computers - Dismissed Townes's maser to his face like Bohr

Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman

- Incorporated a second phase of cooling in which a magnet repeatedly sucked off the "hottest" remaining atoms in the rubidium gas - The temperature kept sinking - Temperature plunged to 1/1,000,000,000 of a degree above absolute zero - The sample of 2,000 rubidium atoms collapsed into the Bose-Einstein condensate, the coldest, gooiest, and most fragile mass the universe has ever known - Won the 2001 Nobel Prize

Kublai Khan

- Introduced paper money in the 1200s - Persecuted and killed anyone who did not use the currency

Paul Langevin

- Invented method of generating ultrasonic waves; had an affair with Marie Curie - His wife knocked him out with a chair after hearing of his affair

Fritz Haber

- Helped the German gas research units outpace the rest of the world - He converted nitrogen in air to an industrial product - He managed to form a fertilizer by capturing Nitrogen - He basically turned Nitrogen gas into NH3 ... ammonia - With this method of fertilization, farmers would no longer have to rely on dung - His method saved millions from starvation during WWI - He actually only cared about cheap ammonia so that he could help Germany build nitrogen explosives - The Germans had made "white crosses" which were tiny shells filled with liquid bromine that they hoped would turn into gas on impact - It didn't work on the Russians because the liquid froze - He turned his head to Chlorine - He directed with enthusiasm the first successful gas attack in history on the French - He also founded Haber's Rule - Even though Germany lost, Haber earned the Noble Prize in Chemistry in 1918 - He was later charged with being an international war criminal for prosecuting a campaign of chemical warfare - He had created an insecticide, Zyklon A, which eventually was used to gas his family members during the Holocaust

Europium

- Helps the government combat swindling - Its electrons can leap from low energy to high energy shells when excited with light/heat-emits light (red, blue, or green) - It is a great counterfeiting tool - Europium dyes consist of two parts - 1.) The receiver/antenna forms the bulk of the molecule. The antenna captures the incoming light energy, which europium cannot absorb, transforms it into vibrational energy, which europium can absorb; and wriggles that energy down to the molecules tip. Here the europium stirs up its electrons, which jump to higher levels - The fluorescing dyes are selected so that europium appears dull under visible light, and a counterfeiter might be lulled into thinking he has a perfect replica - Under a laser however, the fibers laced with europium pop out like parti-colored constellations

Chromium

- Highly sensitive to alpha: the smaller alpha was in the past, the redder the light that chromium absorbed and the narrower the spaces between its G-Flat and G-Sharp - By analyzing the gap between chromium and the other elements produced billions of years ago near the quasar , scientists can judge whether alpha has changed in the meantime

Gilbert Lewis

- His theories are from the 1920s and 1930s - No one did more than him in terms of how electrons behave and form bonds in atoms - His work was especially illuminating for acids and bases - Grew up in Nebraska - Studied in Germany under Walther Nernst - He was miserable there so he returned to Massachusetts - He was miserable at home too so he moved to the Philippines working for the U.S. government, taking with him only Nernst's Theoretical Chemistry, in which he would study - He grew homesick and attended UCal Berkeley - Here, for over 40 years he turned their chemistry department into the best - He was probably the best scientist never to win the Nobel Prize - He never secured the prize because he work was broad instead of deep - He never invented one thing but spent his life refining how an atom's electrons work in many contexts, especially acids and bases Instead of saying that in HCl H+ splits off, he emphasized that Cl- absconds with its electron - An acid is an electron thief - Died alone in his lab in 1946 - Smoked twenty cigars for 40+ years and may have died of a heart attack - It is ironic that his lab smelled like bitter almonds... cyanide gas the afternoon he died...

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

- Hungarian painter - Drew an academic distinction between forced obsolescence and artificial obsolescence

Coherence

- If elements are cooled below even superconducting temperatures, the atoms grow so loopy that they overlap and swallow each other up

Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle

- If you know a particle's position very well, you cannot know its momentum well at all and vice versa - Does not apply to a set of particles, only to individual particles - Within a beam, a set of light particles, it's impossible to say where any one photon is located - With uncertainty about each photon's position inside the beam, you can channel its energy and direction very precisely and make a laser

Johann Friedrich Böttger

- In 1701 he performed a magic trick by having silver pieces disappear and then gold pieces materialize into their place - It was the most convincing display of alchemy and he was arrested to a castle to spin gold for the king's realm - He couldn't deliver on the demand and was a candidate for hanging - He claimed to know how to make porcelain to save his life - Bottger worked with Tschirnhaus and discovered that the secret ingredients in Chinese porcelain were a white clay called Kaolin and a feldspar rock that fuses into glass at high temperatures - They figured out that they would have to cook the porcelain and clay simultaneously - Impressing Augustus, Bottger hoped to be released but the king felt he was too valuable and tightened the security on him - To feed the burgeoning industry in Europe, a feldspar mine opened a dozen miles from Stockholm, on the isle of Ytterby, in 1780

John Newlands

- In 1865 he presented his makeshift table to a chemistry society - His table lacked the noble gases so his tops rows only had 7 units - The Chemical Society of London laughed at him

Carborane

- In 2005 a chemist from New Zealand invented this boron-based acid with a pH of -18 - Based on our 10x rule, this means that it is ten billion billion times stronger - Thats roughly the number of atoms it would take to stack them to the moon - The strongest solo acid - The world's strongest and gentlest acid - Its boron atoms share electrons so generously that it practically becomes helium, and it won't go around ripping electrons from other atoms, the usual cause of acidic carnage - Adds an octane kick to gasoline - Helps make vitamins digestible - Used in chemical "cradling" - Very stable and unreactive nature allows it to flood a solution with protons, then freeze the molecules at crucial intermediate points

Stan Jones

- In fear of Y2K, he decided that his immune system better get ready for the upcoming apocalypse - He began to distill a heavy-metal moonshine in his yard by dipping silver wired attached to 9-volt batteries into tubs of water - He drank this 4 and a half years - He still believes that it is the best antibiotic in the world - "Being alive is more important than turning purple"

Bubbles

- In liquids they form around imperfections or incongruities - They were used to see the infinitesimal particles and track how they behaved - Used to study the development of cells - "Spheres of Splendor" - Calcium easily forms foam and bubbles

Americium

- In smoke detectors - Reliable source of alpha particles - David used the Americium to make his neutron gun - Smoke absorbs the alpha particles, which disrupts the current and sets of the shrill alarm

Aluminum

- Is considered a precious metal due to its luster - It is the most common metal in the earth's crust, but is very expensive because it never appears in pure form - It is always bonded to something, usually oxygen - The Washington monument is covered in Aluminum - Charles Hall purified it - Used in soda cans, bats, and airplanes - It lost its value when it became easy to make

Periodic table

- It has 18 columns and 7 horizontal rows, with a "landing strip" of two extra rows at the bottom - Each brick of the castle is an element and they are not interchangeable. - 75% percent of the bricks are metals, which are cold, gray solids, at least at temperatures that humans are used to. - In between the gases and metals we find some hard-to-define elements who amorphous nature gives them the ability to make very strong acids. - The periodic table is a map

Iodine

- It has deception built into its chemical structure - Tellurium comes before iodine but has a greater weight - Mahatma Gandhi apparently hated Iodine - Gandhi had led an uprising on the salt tax of India - The salt lacked Iodine, an element that had been proved essential for preventing birth defects and mental retardation - The Indian rulers felt it was only necessary for them to Iodize their salt - There was backlash when Indian rulers ordered for the common salt to be banned - Common salt was unbanned and as a result, Iodized salt consumption plummeted 13% and birth defects climbed - Common salt was reinstated and without Iodine, mental retardation and worse are possible in the Indian lands

Titanium

- It seemed as if titanium was an unlikely candidate for being accepted by the immune system but Branemark was surprised - It hypnotizes the blood cells - It triggers zero immune response - It cons the body's osteoblasts, its bone-forming cells, into attaching themselves to it as if there were no difference between titanium and the bone - It has been the standard for implanting teeth, screw-on fingers, and replaceable sockets

Future naming and discovery

- It seems as if the Germans have blown past us Americans in terms of naming - Berkeley had tried so hard to claim Seaborgium because they knew that they had not a prospect of future joy

Molybdenum

- It's story goes unknown but the most remote battle of WWI took place at a Molybdenum mine in Colorado - The Krupp armament company found a recipe for strengthening steel: spiking it with molybdenum - It can withstand excessive heat (melts at 4,750 F) - Its atoms are larger than iron's - They have 60% more electrons which allows them to absorb heat and bind together more tightly - It prevents the iron from sliding around - Germany ran out of Molybdenum and the only supplier was a mine in Colorado - By WWII, Molybdenum had been replaced by Tungsten

Jack Kilby

- Kansan with a leathery face and had spent a decade in the high-tech boondocks before landing a job at Texas Instruments in 1958 - He was hired to solve a computer hardware problem known as the tyranny of numbers - Cheap silicon transistors worked okay, but he would need many of them for fancy computer circuits - An absence of supervisors in the summer gave him the chance to pursue a new idea he called an integrated circuit - He turned to germanium for his prototype, not silicon - This integrated circuit freed engineers from the tyranny of hand-wiring (all the pieces were made of the same block so they did not have to be soldered together) - He never truly received credit for his first computer chip but in 2000 he received a belated Nobel Prize for the integrated Circuit

Dirty Bomb

- Kill with gamma radiation >> malignant X-Rays - The gamma rays result from frantic radioactive events - They burn people and dig down into bone marrow and scramble the chromosomes in white blood cells - The cells either die out, grow cancerous, or grow without constraint - Radiation is the entire point of this type of bomb

Nuclear Bomb

- Kill with heat - One-stage fission bomb - Can kill a lot of people and flatten a lot of buildings - It is easier to build than an Atomic Bomb

Drake Equation

- Laid out by Frank Drake to answer Fermi's question - It is a series of guesses: - About how many stars exist in the galaxy - What fraction of those have earth-like planets? - What fraction of those have intelligent life? - What fraction of those life forms would want to make contact? - So on... - Drake guessed that there are 10 sociable planets

How earth's age was determined

- Lead and Uranium fixed the birth date of earth through a series of meticulous experiments done by a graduate student in Chicago in the 1950's - The heaviest elements are radioactive and almost all break down into lead

Tantalus / Tantalum and Niobe / Niobium

- Legendary figure doomed to eternal thirst and hunger in the underworld - Mournful woman; from Niobe, whose children were slain by Apollo and Artemis because of her bragging; the gods pitied her and turned her into a rock that was always wet from weeping - Both are dense, heat resistant, noncorrosive metals that hold charge well - Used in cell phones - Tantalum is found primarily in the Congo - Congo is also home to Coltan Ore - The 5 million deaths caused by the Congo has demonstrated the the Periodic Table can play on human's worst inhuman instincts

Dr. Rush

- Lewis and Clark carried with them 600 mercury laxatives each 4 times the size of an aspirin. - They were called Dr. Rush's Bilious Pills, after Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and medical hero for staying in PA during the yellow fever epidemic. - Dr. Rush's treatment, for any disease, was a mercury-chloride sludge administered orally. They figured that the medicine would work because it would be poison fighting poison. - His treatment made patients teeth and hair fall out and it poisoned and killed many people. - This treatment made many people queasy and mercury deposits can still be seen in soil where the gang dug a latrine.

BIPM (Bureau International des Poids et Mesures)

- Located just outside of Paris - Acts as the standards bureau's standards bureau, making sure all the "franchises" stay in line

Georgy Flyorov

- Loyal subject of the Soviet nuclear weapon program - He was a nuclear scientist - He deduced that the fission work had become state secrets so he wrote a letter to Stalin - If Flyorov had kept quiet, Stalin might never have known about the nuclear bomb until August 1945 - Trapped in his homeland, he knew that playing politics was the only hope for his scientific advancement -He focused on "blackboard science", that is, topics that are too hard to explain to laypeople - At this point in time, scientists are trying to fuse lighter elements together - The Russians had discovered element 104 and 105 from Flyorov's work before those back in Berkeley

David Hahn's Breeder Reactor

- Makes its own fuel through a clever combination of radioactive species - It would be fed with Uranium-233 which readily undergoes fission, and surrounding it would be thorium-232 - It would become then thorium-233 - Then it would decay into protactinium - It spits out another electron and becomes uranium-233 - He used a dentist's lead apron to protect his organs - He was going to abandon his plan after his inability to find uranium-235 - In reality he was far from successful with his reactor - The cops caught on to Hahn put let him off - He went on to enlist in the navy, itching to work on nuclear submarines - He was assigned to swab decks, not his ideal job - He was found stealing smoke detectors that are run on americium

Nucleus

- Makes up more than 99% of the mass of an element - The core and essence of an atom - The number of protons (atomic number) determines the atoms identity - Atoms can have different numbers of neutrons called isotopes - Atomic number (protons) + Neutrons = atomic weight

Irene Joliot-Curie

- Marie's sad-eyed daughter - Brilliant scientist and continued her mother's work in radioactivity - She figured out a method for converting tame elements into artificially radioactive atoms by bombarding them with subatomic particles - She earned a Nobel Prize in 1935 - She died of leukemia in 1956 from inhaling her mother's beloved element, polonium - Ironically Marie died the exact same way

What was the name of the method? Repeating random sampling to get numerical data, used during the Manhattan Project.

- Monte Carlo method - This method caught on quickly - The advent of cheap computing meant that Monte-Carlo style experiments, simulations, and models began to take over branches of chemistry, astronomy, and physics

The immune system

- More biologically sophisticated than it's respiratory system - The periodic table easily deceives it - Metal and wood cannot be successfully integrated into the body because the immune system rejects them

Solid

- Most basic state of matter

Nitrogen

- Must form multiple bonds to keep itself happy, similarly to Carbon, though not to the same degree

Plutonists

- Named after the underworld god, Pluto - Argued by Satan in his book - Thought that volcanoes and heat deep within the earth form most rocks - They were correct

William Crookes

- Never worked at a university unlike our other scientists - The oldest of 16 kids - Wrote a book on diamonds - He was an editor for a gossipy science magazine - Did enough world class science on elements such as selenium and thallium to get invited to the Royal Society - His little brother Philip died at sea - Crookes and the family nearly went made with grief - He believed in communicating with the dead and even created a device to monitor the susurrus of wandering spirits in the candlelit rooms - When he was young he pioneered the study of Selenium - Could be the cause of him being struck mad - His hair never fell out and he went mad years after he stopped with Selenium - He also discovered thallium which may have made him go mad - First to suggest the existence of isotopes - Confirmed the presence of helium in rocks - Discovered protactinium without realizing it in 1900

Elements

- Normally have equal numbers of negative electrons and positive protons making them neutral - Electrons can be freely traded between atoms, and when atoms lose or gain electrons, they for charged atoms called ions

Scandium

- Now used a tungsten-like additive in aluminum baseball bats and bike frames - Helped the Soviet Union make lightweight helicopters

NASA's Cape Canaveral Columbia

- On March 19, 1981, 5 technicians died in a simulation - It turns out, NASA had been using pure oxygen to circulate spacecrafts, not air, which contains approx. 80 percent nitrogen - The astronauts did not wear gas masks or wait until the nitrogen was pumped out and breathable before stepping back in

Halogens

- One column west of the noble gases (column 17) - They are extremely reactive because they have 7 electrons - Combine with the alkali

Rhenium

- Originally thought to be the missing element 43 and was named nipponium by Masataka Ogawa - He had found it on accident and it turned out to be rhenium, element 75 - Later found by Otto berg, Walter, and Ida Noddack

Pathological Science

- Particular madness, a meticulous and scientifically informed delusion - Pathological scientists pick out a marginal and unlikely phenomenon that appeals to them and they bring all scientific reason into to play to prove its existence - Spiritualism is not a pathological science but it became so in Crookes's hands because of his experiments with the elements

Nitrogen

- Prevented the astronaut's neurons and heart cells from absorbing new oxygen, as well as pickpocketed little oxygen cells stored up for hard times - 2 out of the 5 men died - The person feels no pain and the brain shuts down - It is odorless and colorless and causes no acid buildup in our veins - It "Kills with kindness" as the brain is unable to detect the change from oxygen to nitrogen

Cesium

- Proved convenient for the mainspring of atomic clocks because it has one electron exposed in its outermost shell, with no nearby electrons to muffle it - It performs 9,192,631,770 back-and-forths in one Mississippi

William Knowles

- Proved that "dead" matter, if you were clever about it, could indeed invigorate living matter - He used a rhodium catalyst to inflate many of his 2D models - He affixed the rhodium to the center of an already chiral compound, creating a chiral catalyst - Both the catalyst and the rhodium atom were sprawling and bulky leaving one possible position for the 2D molecule to unfold into a 3D molecule in only 1 dimension - He received a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1968 for his work

Einstein

- Proved that sometimes acts like particle BBs called photons - Combining the wave and particle views, he correctly deduced that light is not only the fastest thing in the universe, it's the fastest possible thing, at 186,000 mps, in a vacuum

Radium and Satan

- Radium's radioactivity charges the air around it electrically, so Satan glows a luminescent green - Radium is also hotter than it's surroundings, because its radioactivity heats it up - Due to this, Satan's massive frame is hot enough to light a cigar with his fingertip - Satan wears a coat of Polonium to avoid incinerating people - The polonium gives Satan a reason to threaten because as we know polonium is very toxic and poisonous - To end the story, Satan reveals that he burns and suffers from within

Lanthanides

- Rare Earth Metals - According to atomic numbers 57-71, they really belong in the sixth row - They were sent to the bottom to make the table skinnier - They bury new electrons even more deeply than the transition metals, often two energy levels down - They can barely be distinguished from one another because of this - It is impossible to find a pure sample of a lanthanide in nature (brothers contaminate it) - Brightly colored

Calcium

- Readily is able to form bubbles and foam - Used in bones because it is light and strong - Its mineral's are slightly basic - When water and calcium mix they create carbon dioxide - The reactions between rainwater and calcium form the huge caves in our wilderness

Fine Structure Constant

- Related to the fine splitting of electrons - It controls how tightly negative electrons are bound to the positive nucleus - It also determines the strength of some nuclear processes

Mercury Thermometer

- Sam talks about being sick as a child and it slipping and cracking all over as he talked with it in his mouth. - - - Using a toothpick like a hockey stick, his mother would perform a "magic trick" to bring the mercury ball back together, as all the pieces are attracted to each other

Discovery of element 101

- Scientists dabbed invisibly tiny bits of einsteinium onto gold foil and pelted it with alpha particles - They gold pieces then had to be dissolved away - They had to identify it like piecing a car together from scraps after a bombing - On a February night in 1955, Ghiorso's detector showed them that they had discovered element 101 - They called it mendelevium after Dmitri Mendeleev - It took a total of 3 years to create

Building Bombs Numerically with the Manhattan Project

- Scientists picked a random speed for a neutron bouncing around a pile of plutonium or uranium and picked a random direction for it - Women were then hired to calculate how the neutron collided with a plutonium atom; whether it was gobbled up; how many neutrons those in turn release, and so on.

Tin

- Scott used as a Solder - Easy to shape and has been a prized metal since Biblical times - When it turns cold, it rusts and then erodes away - This is not a chemical reaction - This happens because tin atoms can arrange themselves in two different ways, and when they get cold, they shift from their strong "beta" position, to form the "alpha" powdery form - The alpha-beta shift even releases enough energy to cause a audible groaning (tin scream)

Marie and Pierre Curie

- Shared Nobel Prize of 1903 in Physics for discovering that chemistry is different from physics in terms of Uranium and other elements - No one except for her emerged from that early era with more than on Nobel Prize - Named one of the elements Polonium - Named the other Radium

The most common mineral or mineral group in the Earth's crust is:

- Silicon Dioxide - Those who live in the vicinity of volcanoes are susceptible to p16, a disease that resembles pneumonia - This is also achieved through breathing in asbestos and silicon dioxide - Many dinosaurs may have met their death by breathing in Silicon Dioxide because our lungs are so used to CO2 that they have no problem ingesting this similar gas - Unlike Carbon Dioxide, silicon dioxide is a solid, not a gas - On the level of cellular respiration, breathing solids just doesn't work - Due to this inability to exercise cellular respiration, silicon-based life is extremely difficult to conduct - Silicon-based creatures would have to rely on solids, which don't mix easily, so it's impossible to imagine silicon life forms doing much of anything

Argon

- Single hardest element humans have forced into a compound - Below -445 F it is a durable crystal

Tellurium

- Smells garlic and the smell sticks around

Rosalind Franklin

- Specialized in X-ray crystallography, which shows the shapes of molecules - She had determined that DNA was double stranded

Archibald Wheeler

- Spoke of the universe as foam on its fundamental level - He thought foam gave way to the universe - His quantum foam idea traces back to Lord Kelvin - Lord Kelvin's idea was used by many - Maybe bubbles really were the efficient cause of life itself - Bubbles are found trapped in Arctic-like sheets of ice - The first organisms certainly started off as bubbles that surrounded DNA or RNA

Charles Hall

- Student of Professor Jewett - He worked with him on separating aluminum throughout his undergraduate years at Oberlin - In 1886, he ran an electric current from handmade batteries through a liquid with dissolved aluminum compounds - This process was cheap and easy - The "Aluminum Boy Wonder" was 23

Henry Moseley

- Student on Ernest Rutherford - He grew infatuated with studying elements by blasting them with electron beams - He found a mathematical relation between the wavelength of the X-Rays, the number of protons an element has in its nucleus, and the element's atomic number - Moseley provided the first confirmation of atomic number instead of atomic weight - He linked an element's place on the periodic table to a physical characteristic, equating the positive nuclear charge with the atomic number - He showed that order of elements was based on the atomic anatomy - He found 4 holes in the periodic table - He enlisted in the King's Army when WWI broke out - He died at age 27 at the Battle of Gallipoli - His search for the remaining unknown elements inspired many and by 1940, only element 61 was missing

Poisoner's Corridor Elements

- Subtle and migrate deep inside the body before going off - They can give up different numbers of electrons depending on the circumstances

Neutron

- Supplied a fantastic way to probe atomic innards, because scientists could shoot a neutron at atoms without it being electrically repulsed - Helped scientists induce a new type of radioactivity

Pons and Fleischmann

- Supposed to be the greatest scientist duo since Watson and Crick - Their fame rotted into infamy - Two Chemists at U of Utah - They placed a Palladium electrode in a chamber of heavy water and turned on a current - The hydrogen in heavy water has an extra neutron - They created molecules of hydrogen gas with two protons and two neutrons - The heavy hydrogen and palladium was capable of swallowing 900x its own volume of hydrogen gas - Their thermometers spiked during this - The got too warm.. warmer than possible - It burned a hole in the beaker, lab bench, and the concrete floor - They wrongly believed that they had created cold fusion - They achieved the fame and started going crazy with the wealth, even asking Bush for $25 in research funds - Once people caught on to their false claims, they held rallies to turn them in - They never backed down - Strange bubbles appear in the Palladium, and its atoms rearrange themselves in novel ways (maybe some weak nuclear forces are involved)

Beryllium

- Tastes like sugar - Extremely toxic - Perfect decoy of actual sugar - When mixed with radioactive matter, it slows emitted particles down - Fermi created the first nuclear chain reaction using the Beryllium - From inhaling too much Beryllium, Fermi's lungs had went to shit - Metals taste somewhat like salt and sugar due to the charges of the ions

Element 43

- Technetium - No element had ever been discovered "for the first time" more than 43 - It is the Loch Ness monster of the elemental world - 1st time - It was impure iridium - 2nd time - It was niobium - 3rd time - It was dayvium (mix of 3 elements) - 4th time - It was lucium but later named yttrium - Was eventually isolated by Emilio Segrè and Carlo Perrier - Greek for "artificial" - First man made element

Tungsten

- The "it" metal of WWII - W stands for "wolfram" - Nazi Germany coveted It for making machinery and armor-piercing missiles - The Germans were getting their supply from Portugal - Germany had tried to stock pile it before their alliances fell through - One of the hardest metals known - Has a melting point of 6,200 F - It is also heavier than Molybdenum which means it can act as a better anchor against the iron atoms from slipping around

Where do atoms come from?

- The Big Bang - According to scientists, it took 10 minutes to create all known matter - In theory, the big bang should have ejected elements uniformly in all directions - Data proved that youngest stars contain only hydrogen and helium, while older stars contain many elements. - B2FH, a work explaining the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis, suggests that the universe was once a primordial slurry of Hydrogen, with a smattering of helium and lithium. - Eventually the hydrogen clumped into stars and the pressure began to fuse hydrogen into helium - Stars lacking Hydrogen begin to burn and fuse helium in their cores - B2FH traces various fusion reactions and explains the recipe for producing everything up to iron: it's nothing less than evolution for elements - As a result of B2FH, astronomers today can lump every element between lithium and iron together as "stellar metals" and once they've found iron in a star they do not bother looking for anything smaller - Once iron is spotted, it's safe to assume the rest of the periodic table up to that point is represented.

Molybdenum and Tungsten

- The German military had started to tool with the periodic table during WWI and eventually started fighting combatants with these two metals

Due to seemingly regular extinctions, the iridium, which implies impacts, and the rhenium, which implies projectiles from our solar system, scientists searched for effects that could cause havoc, and they found the answer in the motion of the sun

- The Sun bobs around and some scientists believe that the bobbing is enough to bring it close enough to tug on enormous drifting clouds of comets and space debris that surround our solar system, the Oort Cloud

Half life

- The amount of time it would take 50 percent of the sample to disintegrate - It is a common measurement of radioactive elements

Helium

- The best example of "element-ness" according to Plato's world of forms - Element 2 - Has exactly the number of electrons it needs to fill its only shell - The noble gases are similar to Helium in that they have closed shells with full complements of electrons, so they don't react

Calaverite

- The compound mix of Tellurium and Gold that just so happens to shine sort of yellow - It decomposes at low temperatures - Some used to build Hannan's find in 1996 contained 500 oz. of pure gold per ton of rock

Chlorine

- The cousin of Bromine - It is more aggressive in attacking other elements for one more electron, and because it is smaller, each atom weighs less than half of a Bromine atom - It attacks the body's cells more nimbly - Turns the skin yellow, green, black and gives cataracts - One who is poisoned from Chlorine actually drowns, from the fluid buildup in their lungs

What is the most important part of an atom?

- The electrons - They take up virtually all an atom's space

Antimony

- The element with the most colorful history on the periodic table - Nebuchadnezzar used a noxious antimony-lead mix to paint his palace walls yellow - He soon went mad after doing this - At the same time in history, Egyptian women were applying a different form of antimony as mascara to decorate their faces as well as give themselves witchlike powers to cast the evil eye on enemies - Scientists established that it was a hermaphrodite - Antimony pills won fame as laxatives - Unlike the norm, these pills did not dissolve in the intestines - They were so valuable that people dug through their fecal matter to reuse them - It is very toxic but found heavy work as a medicine - Mozart probably died from taking too much - World's strongest acid (when mixed with hydrofluoric acid)

Strontium

- The first flicker that something like the periodic table existed - It was discovered in a hospital lab - Its weight falls exactly between the weights of calcium and barium and acted similarly to them - Thanks to Dobereiner, it was the first element correctly placed in a larger universal scheme of elements

Lithium

- The first real mood stabilizer - Cal agreed to be medicated with it - Pure lithium is a scarily reactive metal - It prevents the next episode of mania from starting - It tweaks many mood-altering chemicals in the brain - It resets the body's circadian rhythm, its inner clock - It regulates the proteins that control the body's inner clock - It helps to cleave the proteins from DNA so people can wind down - Lowell felt he had improved from the Lithium - Artists feel flatlined or tranquilized on lithium

Emilio Segrè

- The greatest element craftsmen of an earlier era - He was an immigrant an a Jew - Him and Linus Pauling helped to transform the periodic table - He begged the director at the Berkeley Radiation Lab for a job and he was given it with a 60% pay reduction - Pauling and him made two of the biggest mistakes in science history - He identified element 43 on strips of molybdenum with the help of Perrier and Lawrence - Named technetium from the Greek word meaning "artificial" - Segrè was an assistant to Fermi in 1934 when he claimed he had discovered element 93 and other transuranic elements... falsely - He wrote a paper explaining how they had missed the possibility of fission which had been called to their attention by Ida Noddack - Fission was discovered by women - In 1955, he and Owen Chamberlain discovered the antiprotons - Won the Noble Prize in Physics for his discovery of Anti-protons

Parker 51

- The greatest pen in history - Inside the sleek frame, the pen ran on a newly patented plastic called Lucite and a newly patented cylindrical system for delivering a newly patented ink - For the first time, the ink would not dry by evaporation, while sitting on the paper, but instead by penetrating into the paper's fibers, drying via absorption in an instant - The tip of the gold nib was originally capped with a ring of osmiridium, an alloy of iridium and osmium - Within a year they filed for a ruthenium tip patent - Having this pen was a sign of immense wealth and it was even used by Eisenhower and MacArthur to sign the treaties that ended WWII - It also had refillable ink cartridges so there would be no need to buy new pens - Even Moholy-Nagy admired the pens

Actinium

- The key element in giving the modern periodic table its shape, since Seaborg and his colleagues decided to cleave all the heavy elements at the time -- now called the actinides, and cordon them off at the bottom of the table

Xenon

- The largest stable inert gas - Reacts for more easily than the others because its electrons are only loosely bound to its nucleus

Promethium

- The last element to be found - Found in 1949 in a lab in Tennessee - Names after the Titan in Greek mythology who stole fire, gave it to humankind, and was tortured by having a vulture dine on his liver - It is basically useless - Element 61 - Served as the celebration for many man hours put into completing the table

Cadmium

- The lightest element in poisoner's corridor - Element 48 - Found in Japanese mines of Kamioka - Mixed with zinc in the earth's crust - Coats batteries and computer parts, to prevent corrosion - Has use in pigments, tanning agents, and solders - Lined trendy drinking cups - Many people of Japan grew sick because their rice was acting as a cadmium sponge (itai itai disease) - Cadmium replaces zinc in the body in the same that it mixes with it in the ground - It also sometimes evicts sulfur and calcium, which explains why people's bones were affected - Once Cadmium enters the body it cannot be flushed out - Used to kill Godzilla in a movie

Max Schott

- The man called upon to seize Bartlett Mountain, Colorado - It turned out Otis King had sold it to Schott for $40,000, and had shipped all the Molybdenum to Germany

Paul Emile Francois Lecoq de Boisbaudran

- The man who discovered Gallium - Was born in France in 1838 - Became the best spectroscopic surgeon in the world - He saw new colors in the spectroscope and named the new element Gallia, which means France in Latin - Mad at Mendeleev for trying to claim Gallium, Lecoq said that Mendeleev had usurped a Frenchman's periodic table <-- a scientific sin - It turns out Mendeleev was right and Lecoq soon retracted his data and published results that corroborated Mendeleev's predictions

Lasers

- The most powerful lasers use yttrium spiked with neodymium - Inside the laser, a strobe light curls around the neodymium-yttrium and flashes incredibly quickly at incredibly high intensities - The coherence is the key to a laser

Rhodium

- The most valuable element among elements that you can actually buy

Forced Obsolescence

- The normal course of things for technologies - Plows gave way to reapers - Muskets gave way to Gatling guns - Wooden boat hulls to steel

Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC)

- The one case where uncertainty on a nanoscale affects anything on our macro scale - Bose had a theory that certain particles, like photons, could collapse on top of each other until they were indistinguishable - Einstein found this clever - Einstein created his own sect of this by covering not just photons but whole atoms - Einstein also said that if atoms got cold enough, they would condense into a new state of matter - The laser was crucial to their success - Lasers can cool atoms as well - To cool something down you have to slow its particles down - The rubidium atoms absorbed photons from all sides, slowed so their temperature reached 1/10,000 of a degree below zero - Temperature plunged to 1/1,000,000,000 of a degree above absolute zero - The sample of 2,000 rubidium atoms collapsed into the Bose-Einstein condensate, the coldest, gooiest, and most fragile mass the universe has ever known

Tellurium

- The only element that will bond with gold - It is a vampirish element, first isolated in Transylvania - It combines with gold to form some garish sounding minerals - Compounds of this element smell pungent, like garlic magnified a thousand times and difficult to get rid of

Oklo

- The only natural nuclear fission reactor known to exist is here - Been going for 1.7 million years - Turns out that it runs on Uranium, Water, and Blue-green Algae - It only went nuclear because the river water slowed the neutrons down enough for neighboring nuclei to snag them

Sam's reasoning for writing the Disappearing Spoon

- The periodic table is one of mankind's greatest achievements and it is both a scientific accomplishment and a storybook. - He wrote it to peel back all the different ways that the periodic table works and discloses to us.

Thallium

- The poisoner's poison - Makes hair fall out

Polonium

- The poisoner's poison of the nuclear age - Makes people's hair fall out like Thallium - Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned by polonium at a sushi restaurant

Fermi's Paradox

- The question posed by Enrico Fermi about extraterrestrial intelligence—"Then where is everybody?"—which asks why we have not observed other civilizations even though simple arguments would suggest that some ought to have spread throughout the galaxy by now. - Maybe nobody is calling because nobody is there!

Astatine

- The scarcest natural element on earth - 1 ounce - Any astatine present in the early earth has long since disintegrated radioactively, but other radioactive elements sometimes decay into astatine after they spit out alpha or beta particles - The number of astatine atoms in existence can be found by knowing the total amount of parent elements and calculating the odds that each of those will decay into astatine - It is a quick-acting radioisotope in medicine - It acts like Iodine in the body - It is the only element whose discovery was confirmed by a non-primate (guinea pig) - Very unstable

Gamma Decay

- The simplest and deadliest - Occurs when the nucleus emits concentrated X-Rays and is today the stuff of nuclear nightmares

Radioactivity

- The study of how nuclei fall apart - All atoms can share or steal electrons, but only a few rare ones can alter their nuclei by blowing off atomic shrapnel - Rutherford helped identify these as alpha, beta, or gamma decay

International Prototype Kilogram

- The world's official Kilogram - 2 inches wide - 90% platinum cylinder that, by definition, has a mass of exactly, 1.000000... kg - MUST stay constant - It is constantly monitored to make sure its mass does not drop or increase - It is swaddled with 3 successively smaller bell jars to prevent humidity from condensing on the surface - Made from dense platinum and iridium to minimize the surface area exposed to unacceptably dirty air, - Platinum also conducts electricity well, which cuts down on the buildup of "parasitic" static electricity that may zap stray atoms - Platinum is strong (prevents small damages)

James Watson and Francis Crick

- They wanted to solve the mystery of DNA - What they read in Pauling's paper flabbergasted them - They had built the same model a year before - They never ran experiments by themself but interpreted other people's data - In 1953 they wrestled a clue from another scientist - The man said that there are 4 nucleic acids that are always paired (A-T, C-G) - They put Phosphorous on the outside and created the infamous double helix -

Acids

- They were originally judged by being tasted/dunking fingers into them - Proton donors - Many contain hydrogen - When acids mix with water (2 hydrogen, 1 oxygen) , protons are added - Electron thief - Strength is measured in pH (lower the stronger) - Dropping an acid's pH by one unit boosts the acid's strength by 10x

Stanislaw Ulam

- Thought about calculating the odds of winning any randomly dealt hand of cards - He gave up - He realized, however, that he was using the same basic approach as scientists had used in the bomb building experiments in Los Alamos

Enrico Fermi

- Thought he had fabricated the first transuranic elements by pelting uranium atoms with atomic particles - This false, he had actually discovered nuclear fission

John Birch Society

- Thought the Soviets might even be a little too clever with their science - They protested against the addition of fluoride to tap water to prevent cavities

Atomic Clock

- Timekeeping device that uses the frequency of a specific atomic transition as a standard for measuring time - Inside, a magnet purges all the cesium atoms whose outer electrons jump to one level, call if G-Flat - The G-Sharp are left and gathered into a chamber and excited by an intense microwave - The cesium electron then pop and emit photons of light - Each cycle of jumping up and down is elastic and always takes the same amount of time, so the atomic clock can measure time simply by counting photons

Eka-aluminum

- Today known as Gallium - Bunsen had originally discovered it and wanted credit for its discovery instead of Mendeleev - Gallium melts at 84 F meaning that if held in your hand it will melt into pseudo-quicksilver - A common joke is to give a gallium spoon to someone with their tea and watch it dissolve - Looks just like Aluminum - It was the first new element discovered since Mendeleev's 1869 table

Robert Lowell

- Toyed with Lithium - He was insane and once awoke thinking he was the Virgin Mary - He was convinced that he could stop cars on the highway by spreading out his arms like Jesus Christ - He was known as Cal - He had a chemical imbalance, which rendered him manic-depressive - Lithium came to the market as the first real mood stabilizer - He felt he had improved with it - His music took a decline and maybe the lithium turned a mad genius to a normal human

Emilio Segre

- Tried to create an artificial sample of element 61 and probably succeeded but gave up after they failed to isolate it

Thalidomide

- Turned south because the curative form of the active ingredient was mixed with the wrong handed form because the scientists couldn't separate them - A mild tranquilizer that, taken early in pregnancy, can produce a variety of malformations of the limbs, eyes, ears, and heart.

Sold to Satan, by Mark Twain

- Two thousand words long and starts after the crash of steel shares in 1904 - The narrator decides to sell his soul to Mephistopheles - He and Satan meet and talk about the going price for souls - They get sidetracked by an unusual feature of Satan's anatomy... he is made entirely of Radium!

Tin

- Under Germanium - A dull gray metal used to can corn

Germanium

- Under Silicon - Responsible for modern electronics like Silicon - Column 14 - If things had gone differently 60 years ago, we might all be thinking about Germanium Valley in northern CA - Bardeen and Brattain worked great together and realized that Silicon was too Brittle and difficult to purify to work as an amplifier - They knew that Germanium, whose outer electrons sit in a higher energy level than silicon's and therefore are more loosely bound, conducted electricity more smoothly - Using Germanium, Bardeen and Brattain built the world's first solid-state amplifier in December 1947 and called it the transistor Germanium is temperamental and the scientists started to consult silicon instead of Germanium - Germanium generated unwanted heat temperatures - Scientists were faithful to Germanium, but spent a long time fantasizing about Silicon - Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley all won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1956 - Germanium was banished to periodic table obscurity while Silicon became an icon

Lead

- Under Tin - More or less hostile to life

Gerhard Domagk

- Upon witnessing the dying moments of his daughter he found that there was no apparent drug to save her - He had a red industrial dye in his lab that he had tested on a litter of mice with ten times the lethal dose of streptococcal bacteria - He did the same to another litter but also injected them with the industrial dye, prontosil, ninety minutes later - He went to check on that and every mouse from the first group had died and those in the second had lived - He injected his daughter with the blood colored serum, as the doctor said they would have to amputate her arm - She went down at first but on the 3 year anniversary of the mice experiment she grew better, she would live with both arms - This was the first genuine antibacterial drug - The company Domagk worked for (IGF) wanted him to wait before he published his results because they were waiting on a patent for prontosil - Prontosil was debunked and he went down - His peers understood the work he had done so they awarded him the 1939 Nobel Prize in medicine or Physiology - He was arrested and brutalized by the Germans but just when he was turning to their good side he cured Winston Churchill, a men bent on destroying Germany

Bonds and Atoms

- Virtually every element seeks out other atoms to form bonds with, bonds that mask its nature - Even pure elements like Oxygen appear as composites in nature - All atoms contain electrons which reside in different energy levels within the atom - Atoms fill their lower energy levels as full as possible with their own or shared or stolen electrons - Atoms that do not have enough electrons in their outer shell will fight for them - Whenever multiple touch, nucleus is mute and only the electrons matter

Victor Ninov

- Was called in by Berkeley to renew them - He investigated whether or not element 118 could be found by smashing krypton into lead - Element 118 decayed immediately and spit out element 116 which was also new - When the Russians and Germans tried to confirm the results by rerunning the experiments, they couldn't find element 118, just Krypton and Lead - They found no data in the 118 file - It seemed as if Victor Ninov had inserted false positives into his data files and passed them off as real

Robert Falcon Scott

- Was determined to be the first to reach the South Pole - When he arrived in January of 1912 he was greeted with the fact that someone was already there - He was worrisome for the expedition home - They had used tin solders and when they went to use them they were empty - He and his men eventually died on the way back only 11 miles wide of the British base

Patrick Hannan

- Was traversing the outback when him and 2 Irishmen collected eight pounds of golden nuggets and set off what was the greatest site of gold for his time

Luis and Walter Alvarez

- Were studying limestone deposits in Italy from the time of the Dinosaurs death - They noticed that the clay contained 600 times the normal level of the element Iridium - Iridium is a siderophile which means the majority of it is at the earths core - What got them thinking is that the source of Iridium is asteroids, comets, and meteors - They soon discovered that the iridium layer extended around the world The asteroid- iridium- extinction theory was proved when a crater 65 million years old was discovered in Mexico - Every 26 million years the earth undergoes mass extinction and this mass have been the cause for the extinction of the dinosaurs - Was it a coincidence that the dinosaurs disappeared when an asteroid fell? - Luis Alvarez differed with Nemesis, written by Richard Muller because he did not understand how it would be possible for their to be an asteroid pattern - Muller responded by saying that the sun had a roaming star, around which the earth circled too slowly for us to notice, and whose gravity yanked asteroids towards earth - This idea of Nemesis provides evidence for how slowly the dinosaurs died out - Every year that passes makes Nemesis more unlikely

1937 Russian-Canadian Scientific Discovery and Superfluid Helium

- When cooled down to -456 F, Helium turned into a superfluid, with exactly zero viscosity and zero resistance to flow (perfect fluidness) - Superfluid Helium defies gravity and flows uphill and over walls

Primo Levi

- While in Auschwitz, he began stealing small sticks of cerium - Cerium sparks when struck making it an ideal flint for cigarette lighters, and he traded the sticks to civilian workers in exchange for bread and soup - He estimated that it brought him two months worth of rations - Wrote, The Periodic Table

Lord Rayleigh

- Wondered why his submarine propellers were so prone to disintegrate and decay, even when the rest of the hull remained intact - It turns out that bubbles produced by the metal blade like sugar attacks teeth, and with similarly corrosive results

J.W. Dobereiner

- Worked along/under Goethe - Had practical skills but lacked the prestigious education that Goethe had - His greatest contribution to science was inspired by one of the rare elements, Strontium -His work focused on finding precise ways to weigh elements, and strontium was new and rare, a challenge - He recognized that Strontium was somehow a blend of two elements, one lighter and one heavier - He focused his work from them on, on the triads of the periodic table -chlorine + bromine + iodine -sulfure + selenium + tellurium - In each case, the weight of the middle fell halfway between the its chemical cousins - He grouped these elements into what we now know as columns of the periodic table - Invented the first portable lighter (known as Dobereiner's Lamp)

Seth Putterman

- Worked in fluid dynamics - Studied bubbles full time after hearing that sound waves through transmutation, can turn bubbles into light - Curious as to what caused the bubbles to sparkle, he began trying different gases - He noticed that although bubbles of plain air produced nice crackles of blue and green, pure nitrogen or oxygen, wouldn't luminesce - He began pumping gases from air back into the bubbles until he found the elemental flint -- argon

Otto Hahn

- Worked with Lise Meitner - Co-discovered Protactinium with her - Considered the best chemist in the world - Won the Nobel Prize in 1944 alone - He left Meitner in the dust

Lise Meitner

- Worked with Otto Hahn - Determined that Element 91 was Protactinium - She was professionally smitten with Hahn - She fled to Sweden during the Holocaust to work in one of the Nobel science institutes - Never won a Nobel Prize for her work with Meitner - After her death, she was awarded element 109

Uranium

- World's heaviest natural element - Pure Uranium emits just as many radioactive rays as uranium in minerals because the electron bonds between a uranium and the atoms surrounding it did not affect if or when its nucleus went radioactive - Its chemistry was separate from its physics as discovered by the Curies

What does Sam compare to the structure of the periodic table?

A castle, with an uneven main wall

Population Inversion

A necessary condition for laser operation, in which more members of a collection of atoms are in an excited state than are in lower energy states

Neologism Computers

A nickname for the women who did the calculating

Island of stability

A predicted set of isotopes of superheavy elements that may have considerably longer half-lives than known isotopes of these elements

Pasteurization

A process that heats milk to kill infectious diseases

Where do the heaviest elements 27-92 (Cobalt - Uranium) come from?

B2FH says "mini big bangs" - Extremely massive stars burn down into iron cores in about 1 earth day - Lacking energy to keep their full volume, burning stars implode under their own immense gravity, collapsing thousands of miles in just seconds - In their cores neutrons remain and as a reaction to this collapse they explode outwards - During the supernova many particles collide and jump over normal energy barriers and fuse onto iron - The iron nuclei become coated in neutrons which decay back into protons and thereby create new elements - Every natural combination of element and isotope spews forth from this particle blizzard

BCS theory

BCS theory is the theory of superconductivity put forward in 1957 by John Bardeen, Leon Cooper, and John Schreiffer, who received the 1972 Nobel Prize for their effort. The basic premise of BCS theory is that under the right conditions inside a conductor, electrons can form weakly bound pairs called "Cooper pairs" that form a condensate. Pairs in the condensate experience no resistance as they travel through the conductor.

Salting

Cobalt atoms would absorb neutrons from the fission and fusion

Amino Acids

Contain oxygen atoms on one end, a nitrogen on the other, and a trunk of two carbon in the middle

Dysprosium

Means "little hidden one" since it is tricky to separate from its brother element

"The scientific world was astounded to note that Mendeleev, the theorist, had seen the properties of a new element more clearly than the chemist who had discovered it"

Describes how Mendeleev managed to predict the accurate properties of Gallium better than Lecoq who actually discovered it

Friedrich Miescher

Discovered DNA

_______________ ___________ drives the periodic table

Electron behavior

Bases

Electron donors

What is the disappearing element?

Gallium

Chemical warfare is traced back to Ancient _________

Greece

Every star consists of

Hydrogen and Helium

Einsteinium and Fermium

Invented at UC Berkeley with cyclotron (hydrogen bomb test underwater)

Ernest Lawrence

Invented the cyclotron to mass produce radioactive elements

Fluorescence

Involves whole molecules

All solar systems have a unique ratio of ____________

Isotopes

Antonio Salazar

Leader of Portugal who had the last laugh of the war and his trading of Tungsten with the Germans

Neodymium

Makes unprecedentedly powerful lasers

Praseodymium

Means "green twin" for the same reason that neodymium means "new twin"

MAD

Mutually Assured Destruction: the idea that the superpowers had so many nuclear weapons that they would completely destroy each other in a war

Gadolinium

Perfect for magnetic resonance imaging (MRIs)

Who discovered neptunium, the first transuranic element?

Seaborg and McMillan

The nucleus of poisoner's corridor

Thallium, lead, and Polonium

What does Sam compare Ytterby to?

The Galapagos Island of the periodic table

Copernican Principle

The principle that the Earth is not the center of the universe

Quantum Mechanics

The single most accurate scientific theory ever devised

Luis Alvarez and his Barbershop Fission

The splitting of the uranium atom

True or False: It is highly unlikely that two systems would have the same ratio of radioactive to nonradioactive elements unless both systems were born at once

True: This explains why carbon's mass on one planet differs from carbon's mass on another planet

Electrons jump only between ____________ number levels

Whole

Haber's Rule

concentration x time = some constant outcome