

Two New Elements Join the Periodic Table - Garbage
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2011/06/04/two-new-elements-join-the-periodic-table/

======
Groxx
> _The new elements’ discoverers will get to pick permanent names for 114 and
> 116. And they can be just about anything the researchers want—”as long as
> it’s not something really weird,” says the Joint Working Party head_

Can I hope that means no "unobtanium"? Please?

I have a question. Since they're trying to get to an "island of stability",
what do they hope to find there? And since they seem (to me) to be likely to
get there by smashing a few atoms together, it's not likely to be anything we
can _do_ anything with. The achievement would seem to provide a better
understanding of particle physics, perhaps, but will the elements _themselves_
ever be of use?

~~~
ars
That's what's exciting - we have no idea what we'll find there.

But if it's stable it guaranteed to be interesting. True right now we have no
production methods, but if the elements are useful enough we'll work on that.

But the science is probably the main driver, not applications. We don't even
know where the island is! We have guesses, but no knowledge.

------
tlb
When physicists tell you that the Standard Model is incredibly complete,
remember that they still can't predict the properties of elements.

~~~
hammock
I have always wondered, why is it so difficult to predict the properties of an
element?

~~~
TheEzEzz
The quantum N-body problem is a 3N dimensional problem. If your element has
100 electrons then you need to model a 300 dimensional space. If you took a
very coarse discretization of 10 cells per dimension, you'd need a computer
with at least O(10^300) bits of memory.

~~~
archgoon
Which means that you rapidly get into trying to develop a large number of
approximation schemes. The validity of each scheme is difficult to determine,
and there's always the possibility that the atom, molecule or crystal that
you're studying relies upon some feature of the full 300 dimensional picture
that you waved away as not being significant.

Not only that, but there's a disconnect between what we know about chemistry,
and what we know how to interpret from the results of the simulation. Everyone
knows that carbon can form 4 bonds, we've known this long before we were sure
about electrons. However, trying to explain what this means in terms of
electron probability densities is a research problem in itself.

------
cromulent
For some reason it occurred to me that someone has already registered the
domain names, eg <http://ununquadium.com> , even though these are not the
official names. I checked, and someone has. Amazing.

~~~
drx
<http://google.com/?q=ununquadium>

If I was a domain squatter, I would crawl the internet looking for
words/ngrams and register .com domains with them. Which is probably what
someone did.

