
An 80-Year-Old Prank Revealed, Hiding in the Periodic Table - ghosh
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2015/11/23/an-80-year-old-prank-is-revealed-hiding-in-the-periodic-table/?sf15759139=1
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apetresc
If the codename for Plutonium on the bomb project was 'Copper' then I wouldn't
be surprised if 'Pu' as an homage to 'Cu' also factored into his decision.

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dajohnson89
Cu comes from the Latin word for copper, _cuprum_. So, that had nothing to do
with it.

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geon
_Where_ Cu comes from is irrelevant. It may still have inspired the Pu naming.

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simonh
I remember discussing this when I was a kid doing Chemistry. We concluded it
was probably to make the symbol more visually distinct from Pt and also to
avoid confusion, since Pl could reasonably be expected to stand for either
Plutonium or Platinum. In fact thinking about it, calling it Pl would have
been an extraordinarily bad idea.

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bunderbunder
I'd probably be forever thinking Pl is Polonium.

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dajohnson89
I wouldn't consider this a prank, but instead a whimsy. It's a prank only if
he intentionally broke convention from using the first two letters with the
sole purpose of fucking with everyone.

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karavelov
If he named it Pl it could be mistaken with Plumbum, i.e. lead that itself has
element abbreviation as Pb.

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mhandley
Or equally, Pl_3 (3 atoms of Plutonium) would be very hard to distinguish from
PI_3 (Phosphorus Triiodide), especially in a sans-serif font. Pu seems like a
good call to me. If it also amuses 4-year olds, then so much the better.

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salgernon
The comments on the story mentioned it - but my wife immediately pointed out
that since they wee calling it "copper" as a code name during the war, that Cu
for cuprus is easily transformed ( ha ha ) into Pu. (I love my wife)

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Luc
In French you would say 'ça pue' for 'that stinks'. Is there a link with this
P-U business?

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nograpes
In English, we have several similar words that are derived from this French
meaning (putrid is an example). Both words are related to Latin "putere"
meaning "to stink". The ultimate root of these words is the Proto-Indo-
European root word *pu- "to rot, stink" [1].

It is not clear if the current meaning of the term pee-yoo is derived from
this Indo-European root. The first Oxford English Dictionary entry is in 1604,
where it shows up with several different spellings: pue, peuh, peugh, pyoo,
and pew [2]. The "stretching" of the word into two syllables must have
happened sometime later.

[1]
[http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=putrid](http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=putrid)

[2] [http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2010/08/on-the-
scent.html](http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2010/08/on-the-scent.html)

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eveningcoffee
This is a great read about such topic: [https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-english-
so-weirdly-different-f...](https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-english-so-weirdly-
different-from-other-languages)

It contains also part about English-French-Latin connection.

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Rayearth
So how should one take a prank like this to the next level? Use abbreviations
like Bs and Fu, or even outright spelling out dirty words by discovering and
naming a bunch of elements with consecutive element numbers?

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ZeroGravitas
Few of the other new ones follow the alledged standard, one other possible
link, to go with the Cu one:

Np _N_ e _p_ tunium

Pu _P_ l _u_ tonium

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whoopdedo
Ne was already used for Neon. Plutonium is the only element that skipped the
first available abbreviation.

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nitrogen
Lead?

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venning
Does anyone know what is being displayed in the background of the picture of
Seaborg in the article?

See [1]. It looks like variations of the periodic table but arranged along
something other than atomic weight. I suppose if they were still
discovering/creating elements, they would align their table differently than
one where there have been no changes in years.

[1]
[http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/files/2015/11/GettyI...](http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/files/2015/11/GettyImages-50863862.jpg)

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gus_massa
It looks like a table of the stable nuclei, the y-axis is the number of
protons, the x-axis is the number of neutrons.

Each atom type has it's row with the different isotopes. See:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_nuclides](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_nuclides)

[http://www.hydroisotop.de/sites/default/files/bilder/Isotope...](http://www.hydroisotop.de/sites/default/files/bilder/Isotopes_en.jpg)
( [http://www.hydroisotop.de/en/isotopes-valuable-carriers-
of-i...](http://www.hydroisotop.de/en/isotopes-valuable-carriers-of-
information) )

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InclinedPlane
One way that scientists on the Manhattan project would refer to fissile
elements indirectly was by using the last digit of their atomic number and of
their atomic mass. So Pu-239 would be called 49 and U-235 would be called 25.

Some examples:
[http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/ManhattanProject/LosAlamos...](http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/ManhattanProject/LosAlamos.shtml)

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Phithagoras
In line with the scatological references in the periodic table, according to
"The Disapearing Spoon" By Sam Kean, Berkelium was intended to have the
initals Bm, but eventually Bk was decided upon.

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zingermc
Interesting that Robert Krulwich, from the Radiolab podcast, did the
illustrations for this article. He even visited the comments section!

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adrianm
Am I missing some critical source, or is this simply pure conjecture on the
part of the author?

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sp332
The sources are named and quoted in the article, so I don't know why you think
it's pure conjecture.

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suprjami
The ultimate dad joke. 10/10.

