April 1, 2021 • 46 mins
Daniel and Jorge take a trip to the theoretical Island of Stability and talk about super heavy elements
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hey, Jorge, what image do you have in your mind
when you think about an atom? I guess I probably
think of you know, that image of the little balls
going to run and who orbits around a little cluster
of other little balls. It's amazing how compelling that picture is,
even though it's totally wrong. What do you mean the
universe doesn't agree with me? It's not that cooperative, and
(00:30):
that image is mostly about the electrons. What do you
think about when you think about the nucleus of the atom?
I guess I always just picture like little proton and
neutron little balls just clustered together, kind of like you
take a bunch of marbles and then stick it together. Well,
as you might have guessed, I'm gonna tell you that's
also wrong. Hi am or handmade cartoonists and the creator
(01:05):
of PhD comics. Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist,
and I'm doing my best to make the universe cooperate.
It's generally uncooperative. It doesn't just tell you it's secrets,
you know, just just lay out for you the facts
about nature. It makes you go on a hunt, it
makes you ask the hard questions. But doesn't that make
the answer is more worth it, you know, when you
(01:27):
have to fight for it. I don't know. I'm the
kind of person who reads the last page of a
mystery novel first because I just want to know who
did it? And then why do you read the rest
of the book? I don't know. He's well, there you go.
Maybe the universe wants you to read all of it
before you find out the answers. That's right. The universe
has an agent and it wants me to read every
single arc of the novel. Yeah. I mean, it's been
(01:49):
fourteen billion years making it. You're just gonna jump to
the end. Quite a build up. Quite a build up.
But welcome to a podcast. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe,
a production of I Heart Radio, our podcast in which
we try to skip you to the end and bring
you the answers to the biggest questions about the nature
of the universe, how things are built, what they're made
(02:10):
out of, how they work on the tiniest little level,
and how that comes together to make our incredible, inexplicable,
bonkers universe. That's right, because it is a pretty complicated
and mysterious universe. There's a lot of nuances and details
and a lot of hidden things that we still haven't discovered.
That's right. The things that we see around us in
(02:31):
the universe are not like the fundamental elements of the universe.
They are not the things that make up nature at
its deepest level. We have to take them apart and
understand what that's made out of, and then what that's
made out of, and then what that's made of, and
you can just keep going deeper and deeper. Yeah, it
seems like the human species we've been sort of breaking
matter down little by little over the centuries, right. I mean,
(02:53):
before we thought that things were made out of like water, air, earth,
and then we found out about particles, and then atoms,
and then and sub atomic particles and sub subatomic particles.
It seems like we're breaking things down more and more.
That's right. We are digging deeper into the nature reality.
And that's fascinating because we wanted to know, like what
is the universe at the most basic level, if there
(03:14):
is even a basic level. But there's also another direction
that's really interesting for thinking about this problem, which is
going the other way. Starting from the smallest bits, what
can you make like if the universe is made out
of legos? What kind of stuff can you build? Yeah,
because it's pretty mind blowing, I guess when you realize
that all of the crazy variety of things that is around.
(03:38):
This taught me out of the same little tiny bits, right,
quarks and electrons, you know, like airr and dirt and
you know metal, they're all made out of the same things.
They just sort of behave totally different depending on how
many and how they're arranged, these little tiny bits. That's right,
it's really just the arrangement. In fact, the number is
about the same. You have about one proton to one
(04:01):
electron to one neutron in everything, even if it's lava
or hamsters or ice cream. So there's something really deep
and fascinating about the arrangements of particles. How you put
them together determines what they are, and as you're saying,
not just by a little bit. Like it determines whether
it's metallic, or whether it's insulating, or whether it's shiny,
(04:21):
or whether it's dull, or whether it melts at room
temperature or not. All these properties determined just by how
those bits are put together. Yeah, whether it's tasty or
whether it will kill you, or whether it'll be tasty
and kill you at the same time. That's the different
element there. You don't think it's possible for something to
be tasty and not kill you. I think it's totally possible,
(04:42):
but it hasn't quite taken off. But yeah, the difference
is very small, right, I mean, like if you have
twelve protons and electrons and it behaves like one thing,
but if you have sixteen of them, it pays like
something totally different. Yeah, it's totally different. And for a
long time, we thought those differences were fundamental, that they
were elemental, you know, that Harbin really was something totally
different from Neon. But now that we know that you
(05:04):
can take them apart and that they're made out of
the same bits, we wonder things like, what else can
you make out of these little bits? What else can
our little universe lego kit put together? Yeah, Like if
you keep adding more and more of them, what happens?
Or if you arranged them in a different way, do
you get a totally different element with maybe magical and
interesting new properties. Yeah, it's like you could create something
(05:26):
totally new, something that has never existed in the universe before,
or at least something that no human has ever experienced.
Imagine creating a new substance with a completely different set
of properties. When it comes to like how it reflects light,
is it transparent, is it pink? Is it kind of translucent?
Does it glow? Maybe it blinks? Who knows? But the
universe is the limit. Yeah, And as you add more
(05:47):
and more of these little bits, the elements get heavier
and heavier, Right, they get literally like heavier and more
massive and sometimes more unstable. Yeah. So we have the
periodic table the elements that records the ones we found
and the few that we've built. But a question that's
existed since we've had that table is how far does
that table go? Yeah? Is it like a super long
(06:08):
table like they have in those big houses or is
it like a small kitchen table. We don't know, right,
it's a mystery of the universe. How many leaves can
we add? Can we invite as many people as we
want over for dinner? Do you need a kittie table?
They need to eat outside? And who has that many chairs? Anyways,
maybe the universe should just have a picnic or you know,
have a zoom dinner or something, as is popular in
(06:31):
these days. But anyway, that begs the question that we're
going to tackle here today. So today on the program,
we'll be asking the question what is the heaviest possible element?
Meaning what's the most massive element you can make out
of these little bits? Yeah, because not every combination sticks together.
(06:52):
Sometimes you have a serving of neutrons and a serving
of protons and serving electrons and you try to stick
them together and they just blow apart. They're not stay.
But some configurations do hang out. Then they can last
for days or years or billions of years. And so
it's curious, like why can some of these things hang
out together? What makes them stable? How big an element
(07:13):
can you make and have it hang out and have
it be stable, have it like really be a thing
you can play with, right there? Sort of fickle things
protons and neutrons. That's kind of what it's about, right,
The elements need periodic table of the elements kind of
depend on the protons and the neutrons, right, I mean,
the electrons are sort of fluid and they don't matter
as much, but it's all about the protons and the neutrons.
(07:34):
It's all about the protons and neutrons because they feel
the strong force. They have strong feelings about what hangs
out and what breaks down. Is that why it was
called strong the Force because it's so dramatic. The Universe's
agent suggested that name. But you're right. It's the number
of protons that tells you sort of what element it is,
(07:55):
like are you carbon or are you neon? Is determined
by the number of protons and the new is and
then you can have various isotopes because you can add
neutrons or remove neutrons as you like without changing the
identity of the element. And then the electrons typically follow
the number of protons. So yeah, you're right. The number
of protons and the number of neutrons tell you what
it is and how heavy it is, and that determines
(08:17):
whether or not it hangs out or breaks apart. Right,
And you know, if you look at a periodic table,
it seems pretty filled out down there at the bottom,
Like as you go lower in the periodic table, that's
where you have the heavier and heavier elements, and it
seems pretty complete, like you can add one more proton
and neutron and you get another element, and you add
another one and then you get you know, there aren't
(08:38):
any big gaps there so far. Yeah, that's sort of amazing.
You know that there's a place for every element and
an element for every place. And that was a big
clue in the beginning. People started measuring the atomic numbers
of these elements and putting them together on the table
and realizing, oh, there are gaps. Is there something there?
And then they went and they specifically try to make
(08:59):
those things and figure out, oh, yeah, there is something
an element forty three technetium. It turns out it can
be made. And so organizing them in this way shows
us where to look for new elements, where to aim
for and constructing new kinds of stuff, right, And it
also has to do with this new concept that we're
also talking about here today, which is called the island
(09:21):
of stability. Now, Daniel, that sounds like, I don't know,
like a new age spa maybe in an island, tropical
island somewhere where you go and stabilize your karma or something,
But it's actually a pretty heavy physics topic. It is
a heavy physics topic has all to do with this
question of heavy elements and whether or not they can
(09:42):
hang out for a long time. So I don't know
how many people out there have heard of the Island
of stability, but we were wondering how popular this term
is out there in the general public. So as usual,
Daniel went out there into the wild to the Internet
to ask random people what is or where is the
island of stability. So thank you in advance to everybody
who participated and lend their voice to this question. If
(10:05):
you'd like to volunteer, please, they'll be shy. Send us
an email to questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com.
Here's some people had to say. Is it something like
the Uncanny Valley? So maybe it's if you look into
particles a lot into the readouts and there are little
islands of data that are like stable points that are
(10:29):
always there, so in a in the sea of static.
I have not heard of that before. There are elements
with high atomic number on the periodic table where the
protons and neutron ratio makes them have long lifetime, so
they have a large half life. I think those are
the atoms that I said to form the island of stability.
(10:52):
Maybe it has something to do with stable orbits within
the Solar system, so it could be kind of where
the gravity from the Sun makes the stability of the
Earth's orbit more stable. For Europe it's quite easy Switzerland, definitely.
And as for the rest of the universe, it makes
(11:13):
me think of a particular region, a small region that
would be very peaceful, very quiet, with no disorder in
the middle of a huge chaos. It's something that I
would ask my travel engent, I want to go there
that I don't know. Where is it? Yes, it sounds
like it could be something out in the universe um
(11:34):
where there's not much movement or spinning of anything. Possibly
the center of the universe, where nothing, nothing experienced from
I don't know. It kind of sounds like an equilibrium
of some sort, kind of on the razor's edge. Very unlikely.
Finally tuned, can't wait to find out. Is the island
of stability in Washington? D C has something to do
(11:58):
with quantum yields and how they can be arranged in
such a way that a stable particle is present as
opposed to just the energy in the field. I'm guessing
that it has to do with some sort of parameters
about how the fields are organized such that a particle
(12:20):
like an electron or something can can live. I seem
to remember there was discussion about the Higgs boson and
how it's at a higher energy because it kind of
got stranded on an island, as it were, and if
it ever got tipped off of that, whole bunch of
bad stuff could happen. All right, Not a lot of
people know where it is or what it is. No,
(12:43):
and nobody wants to sign up for your getaway weekend
there ran, Yeah, I know what's not to like. You
go somewhere and you, you know, stabilize a little bit,
you come back feeling center. It's right, Yeah, you're align
your ear chakras, you know. And a thousand dollars poor, yeah,
but a million dollars richer in your soul. What a deal?
(13:06):
What a deal? I like the person who equated it
to the Uncanny Valley. That's like a totally interesting connection,
there is it, though I'm not sure exactly how that's connected.
We're going to have video games with heavy elements in
them that don't look quite right. I think you're just
thinking of like geological features. Maybe we should have like
the Canyon of Complexity or the cliffs of insanity. There
(13:30):
you go. All right, So let's jump into this topic
and let's talk about how this island of stabilities related
to making the heaviest possible element in the universe basically, right,
I mean, because the periodic table kind of goes on
and on, and at some point I noticed that it
doesn't go on forever. Well, that's the question. We don't
know if it doesn't go on forever because there's nothing
else to make, or we just haven't yet found those
(13:53):
elements were being able to fabricate them in the laboratory,
that's the question. Well, that's the mystery. That's Can we
just get to the end of the book Daniel here,
and I guess those of you listening could skip to
the end of the podcast to find out, But then
what's of the journey? Daniel, Yeah, exactly, Then you miss
all these great jokes, all these heavy jokes. Alright, So
(14:13):
the periodic table can keep going possibly, and it's been
changing a lot in the last few decades, right like
we keep adding heavier and new elements. That's right, we
keep fabricating heavier and heavier elements by combining smaller ones.
Because the question we have is how far up can
we go? Is there a limit to how far you
can go? And if you go far enough do you
(14:34):
get to some like new region where things are surprisingly stable.
I guess that's two different questions, like what can you
put together theoretically physically in terms of the physical loss
of the universe. And there's also the question of how
stable it is, like how long will it stay in
that configuration? Right? That's right? And you know it sort
of has to be at least a little bit stable
(14:54):
for you to call it an element. If you take,
for example, element and element winting, you smush them together
to make element one nineteen, if it doesn't like settle
into a state that you can really call element nineteen
at least for a few milliseconds before it explodes, can
you really say you've done it right? You haven't really
mixed the ingredients to make your brownies if they sort
(15:16):
of repel each other and never come together. That's another element, right,
brownium brown Um, it's the tastiest element. It's the reason
brownies are so good. It's quite heavy too, depending on
how much butter you you put into it. But yeah,
it's it's a question of stability and is there sort
of a threshold and physics like it has to last
for X number of milliseconds or microseconds before you can say, okay,
(15:40):
that's an element. Yeah, that's a great question. When they
do these experiments, they only detect these atoms if they
see characteristic stuff that flies out of that atom. So
it's not like there's a minimum amount of time it
has to exist in order for them to like declare
it having been an element. But they need to see
its products, the things that it can only make, and
(16:01):
so for that to happen, there must be some sort
of minimum amount of time for an element to sort
of like relax and stabilize and come together from all
of its ingredients swooshing around. But that's going to be
a very very small time, much smaller than anything we
can measure. All right, Well, let's break it down, Daniel.
I guess the first topic we can talk about here
is this question of stability, like what makes an atom
(16:22):
stable and not stable? Yeah, it's fascinating, like why can't
you just put any number of protons and neutrons together
and get an atom and call it a day, And
why does some of them break apart and some of
them last forever? It's really a fascinating question, and it
turns out like usual it's complicated, you know, you might
turn it around and instead of asking like, why are
(16:45):
some of these things unstable, you might ask like, why
is any nucleus stable? Because the nucleus has in it
what protons and neutrons. And protons are positively charged, so
they repel each other, and the neutrons are just neutral.
So you might ask like, well, why doesn't the nucleus
break apart every single time? I have a strong hunch
about this. It's related to the strong force. It's related
(17:08):
to the strong force exactly. We know that protons and
neutrons are just a little bags of corks that are
held together by gluons, and so they are tied together
by the strong force, and we like to think of
them as not having an overall strong force charge, being
sort of neutral with respect to the strong force, because
the corks inside them add up all the colors inside balance,
(17:29):
and you get something which ostensibly is neutral from the
point of view with the strong force. And that's mostly true,
but the mostly is doing a lot of work there.
If you get really close to a proton, you could
be like closer to one of the corks than the
other ones, and so the corks don't exactly balance themselves out.
So when the protons and neutrons get really near each other,
(17:49):
then like the corks inside them can start talking to
each other. And so this little residual extra bit of
the strong force is actually the thing that holds the
nucleus together. That's enough to overcome the repulsion from the protons. Interesting.
I guess it's kind of like if you have a
positive charge in a negative charge and you stick them together,
they're not gonna really attract or repel anything around them
(18:11):
because together they're neutral right to everyone around them. But
if you get really really close to them, you might be,
you know, closer to the plus or to the miners,
in which case you would feel an attraction or repulsion. Yeah, precisely.
So you had two of those things that had a
plus and minus inside of them, and you brought them
close together and inverted the orientation so that the plus
of one was close to the minus of the other,
(18:33):
then they would feel an overall attraction. And so that's
a great example for how you can put something together
which has an overall neutral charge and still have it
attract itself. And that's the thing that holds these nuclear together.
That's the reason that they don't bust apart. That's why
helium and calcium and all the things that make up
your dinner tonight hang together. It's the strong force, right,
(18:54):
and so that's what's happening with the corks inside of
the protons and neutrons. Like the corks sort of attract
and repair all each other. But once you get three
of them that are stable, they're sort of neutral together, yeah, exactly,
And then you mix these things together and they can
hang out. But because it's the strong force, it's complicated.
Like the strong force is just a mess. When we
try to do calculations with a strong force is a
(19:15):
disaster because the strong force is so powerful that it's
very sensitive to small changes of distance. So we need
like massive supercomputers to figure out what's stable and how
these things work and the masses of particles. It's really
kind of a nightmare to do any calculations with. It's
a heavy endeavor. It's a heavy endeavor. But we've noticed
a few things, like we don't really understand how to
(19:37):
predict these things, but we've noticed some patterns. We've noticed
sort of like what is stable and what is not.
If you just sort of count the number of protons
and neutrons that are in the nuclei of stable atoms.
You notice some really interesting patterns. Yeah, you get sort
of like a magic sequence of numbers, right, They feel
almost sort of like supernatural. Yeah, exactly. All right, Well,
(19:57):
let's get into this magic sequence of number and let's
talk about how to make a really stable heavy atom.
But first let's take a quick break. All right, we're
(20:18):
talking about the heaviest possible element you can make in
the universe. How many protons and neutrons can you stick
together and still be stable? And we're talking about the
stability of these things, and it has to do with
some sort of magic number, right, Daniel. Yeah, it turns
out that certain numbers of protons and neutrons are more
stable than other configurations. And it's really kind of analogous
(20:40):
to the way we think about electrons filling up their orbitals.
You know the picture you were describing earlier of a
nucleus with electrons around it, And we know that, like,
you can have two electrons in the lowest orbital and
then a certain number in the next and a certain
number in the next and they sort of fill up
these shells, and as they fill them up, they get
more interact they are less interactive, etcetera. It turns out
(21:02):
that the protons and the neutrons inside the nucleus also
have these kind of shells, and you can get like
two neutrons at the inner shell, and then six in
the next shell, and twelve in the next shell, and
eight in the shell after that. So we've noticed these
trends that if you have just the right number of
neutrons to like fill up a shell, then the atom
(21:23):
becomes much more stable. Interesting, you mean, the nucleus of
an atom has layers like an onion or the sun.
It's really kind of hard to visualize. It's not like
there are physical shells. These are sort of energy levels.
These are like how many neutrons you have filling up
energy levels. The best way to visualize it is still
like a ball of marbles, but they're all sort of
(21:43):
like moving around and swishing, and different ones have different
amounts of energy. You see. Is it kind of like
electron clouds, like they're in different configurations and their quantum
you know shape, Yeah, exactly. That's a good way to
think about it. You know, like they're filling up these
energy levels, and as you get to like a complete shell,
then they sort of fit together very nicely in a
(22:04):
way that supports each other. And so if you have,
for example, uh, six neutrons and the third shell, then
they fit together really nicely. And the next shell needs
twelve neutrons, the next one needs eight, and the next
one needs twenty two. And these aren't numbers that we understand.
It's not like we can sit down and figure out
why you need twenty two or why you need eight,
But it's just sort of an observation we've made. As
(22:25):
you put these things together, the nucleus becomes more stable
if you have these magic numbers of neutrons and protons. Interesting,
so you see this pattern in the periodic table, like
you know, the first two heavy elements are stable, then
the next most stable is the eighth one, and then
the most stable is the one and things like that. Yeah,
it's a little bit more complicated because you count the
(22:45):
neutrons and the protons separately, Like if the protons have
their magic number, then it's stable. If the neutrons have
their magic number, it can be stable. And then you
could have doubly magic elements things where both the neutrons
and the protons have their magic number, and those are
the most stable. But as these things sort of fit together,
you can get different amounts of stability per atom. Interesting,
(23:07):
you have two variables here that you need to match
to get the most stable element. Yeah, exactly. And it's
all sort of related to the quantum nature of these particles,
you know what I mean, Like, because they're a wave
and they have to fit within a certain energy level
or space, they sort of click in certain integers. Yeah,
these guys are all trapped inside this potential well in
the nucleus, this strong force which wants to hold them together,
(23:30):
and it's mostly successful for a stable atom, you know,
but some atoms are more stable than others. What happens
when an atom is breaking apart? You're right, it's a
quantum effect. It's like you have a particle stuck in
a potential well, but that potential well doesn't have infinite sides,
and so occasionally it can slip out. So the way
that a nucleus breaks apart, the way that it decays,
(23:51):
is that a quantum tunnels from one state where it's
trapped inside this well outside of it into a state
where you have two separate pieces, and so to do
that you have to quantum tunnel, and the likelihood of
that happening depends sort of like on the height of
the potential barrier. And also it's with I see all right,
so it's sort of quantized by these magic numbers. But
(24:12):
I guess the question we're trying to answer today is
is there a limit like you can have? You know,
two is a stable number. Eight's a stable number eight two. Potentially,
how far can you go, you know, how far can
you keep you know, putting these protons and neutrons together
and still get you know, the double magic stability numbers. Yeah,
it's really interesting. The heaviest stable thing that we have
(24:34):
ever found in the universe is lead. Lead is totally stable,
and it's element number eighty two. And you know, if
you make lead, we think it will just stick around forever. Really, Yeah,
that's the heaviest stable thing there is. It's like it
hits the two magic numbers, like the protons are super
happy together and the neutrons are super happy together. Yeah,
exactly eighty two is one of the magic numbers. And
(24:56):
that's we think is what makes lead so stable. Now,
there is other stuff out there. For example, uranium, Right,
Uranium is the heaviest element that we find in nature,
but of course we know that it's not stable. It
tends to decay down to lighter things. So there are
processes out there in the universe, like the collisions of
neutron stars that can make these heavy elements, some of
(25:17):
which are very long lived. You know, they live for
thousands or millions or even billions of years. But lead
is the heaviest stable thing that we've found. And so
you can ask really fun questions like is it possible
that there are heavier elements up there much further down,
deeper into the periodic table where you combine these magic
numbers to get like really big numbers that could like
(25:39):
click together in a stable way, like a super duper
heavy lead or something. Yeah, exactly, exactly an element that
makes lead feel lightweight. Yeah, And I guess is there
anything like after lead, what's the next you know, heaviest
but also sort of stable element that we know about.
You know, there's really nothing above lead that's very stable.
You know, uranium is up there, plutonium is up there,
(26:00):
but nothing up there really has much stability at all.
But we can look at the trends, and we can
get a sense for like as we go up, as
we crank up the number A hundred hundred, five hundred fifteen,
are things getting more or less stable, and that can
help us sort of predict whether or not there's going
to be stuff up there. But we can try to predict, right,
we can put these magic numbers together and we can say, well,
(26:22):
what if we could make this element like one twenty
six that's called n b hexi um. This one would
be doubly magic because as a proton number six, which
is magic, and then a hundred and eighty four neutrons,
which is also magic. So it would be this huge
massive nucleus, super duper heavy element one. But you know,
(26:43):
we haven't seen it yet or we have been able
to make it yet, so we just don't know if
it's stable or not. It's a hypothetical element, yes, exactly.
Everything above A hundred and eighteen is hypothetical. D eighteen
is the heaviest thing we've ever fabricated. Everything above that
is just speculating. We don't know if it can't exist
and what it would be like two is the heaviest
(27:04):
we've seen in nature, like the naturally seems to occur.
That's stable. But you can imagine heavier elements, and you
can give him names like you're allowed to do that.
You can name things that don't exist yet. They've named
a bunch of these elements that we haven't actually made yet.
But I think those names are placeholders, and when somebody
actually makes them, then they get sort of decide the name,
(27:25):
because up to one eighteen they have sort of more
interesting names than above that they have these sort of
placeholder names. Can I stick my claim in a number,
like you know, it's five seventy three taken? Can I
call that chammium? Do it? There? You go? Chammi? Um five?
Are you stable? Are you feeling stable today? My brownie? First?
(27:49):
All right? So we can imagine and there might be
these sort of super heavy lead elements that are doubly
magic and super stable, but we don't know, right, Like
that's a big mystery. We don't know. It's a big mystery.
And we've been sort of bad historically at understanding where
the periodic table might end. And this is because this
is hard, right, the strong force and nuclear physics is
(28:10):
tough stuff. But people have been making predictions for a
long time and getting it wrong. You know, for example,
when we discovered plutonium, which is just element ninety four,
people thought about naming it ultimium because they thought maybe
it was the last element anybody would ever make. And
now you know, we're more than ten elements beyond it.
I see, I guess maybe a question here is what's
(28:30):
the limitation? You know, both in nature and for us
as humans, like it seems like nature doesn't like making
things heavier than lead or uranium or plutonium. Is that
because that's just the you know, it takes too much
energy to make heavier things. It takes energy, but you
also have to have the ingredients, right, to make a
really heavy element, you have to have the ingredients which
(28:52):
will also be pretty heavy. And you know, these heavy
elements are rare. As you get further up in the
periodic table, you need things like drawn star collisions to
even fabricate enough platinum or uranium or plutonium. And so
to make something which is like twice as heavy as plutonium,
you need some situation where you're like smashing plutonium against
(29:12):
plutonium to make you know, I don't know what it's
called double plutonium plotium exactly. So these things just get
rarer and rarer, and so you just don't have them
being made at all. But one question is whether these
things actually already exist out there in the universe. Like
it's possible that und hexium exists and it's somewhere out there,
(29:34):
buried deep in the Earth or in the center of
a neutron star. Right, Because when these heavy neutron stars crash,
I mean, can anything happen, Like could it just become
one giant element with a million protons in it? That's
an awesome question, and you know, sort of breaks apart
this whole concept of what an element is because if
(29:54):
we talk about this thing and it's not fundamental, right,
it's a special circumstances, something that appears in a spe
configuration under certain pressures and temperatures. And if you push
stuff together into a neutron star, I don't think you
can really call that an element because I think those
neutrons are in some crazy special state where they're really
crammed together. And we also don't know how to calculate
(30:16):
the details of how that works. As a whole other
field of study what's going on inside neutron stars. But
we talked about this one to like what's inside a
black hole, and we called it black hoolium because it's
some weird state of matter where these things are squished together.
So the boundaries between the neutrons and protons are probably
breaking down, right interesting, And what about for us as humans, Like,
(30:37):
what's the limiting factor? Why can't we just keep smashing
these heavier and heavier elements together to make super heavy elements. Well,
that's what we're doing, and there's an exciting program at
Berkeley and then a lab in Russia that's doing exactly that.
And that's how we've made element up to one eighteen,
is that we found lighter elements and we smashed them
together to try to make heavy elements. But it's not easy, right,
(30:58):
It's not easy for a couple of reasons. One is
that you just don't have that much of the ingredients.
For example, you want to make one seventeen, then you've
got to smash berkeley um, which is into calcium which
is twenty and there's not that much berkeleum around, Like
it took them two years of dedicated running just to
(31:19):
make twelve milligrams of berkeleum, which is like the minimum
you need to make this target to shoot calcium ad.
So it's just not easy to get the ingredients. If
we had an unlimited source of all the elements we knew,
we could smash them together to make heavier stuff. But
it's not easy that you can just like order these
ingredients on Amazon, which is probably gonna have its own
(31:39):
elements soon Amazonium. They're all just going to be bizosium,
bizosium one, zosium two. He owns everything anyway, No, he
retired to any He's just the puppet master behind the
scenes now. So I guess maybe my question is why
can't I just take, you know, like two plutonium atoms
and smash those together, you know, and then you get
ninety four plus ninety four are then you get you know. Yeah.
(32:02):
So the second reason is hard is that if you
smash them together, you just get a bunch of little bits.
You've got to do this thing which is sort of gentle.
You gotta push them together hard enough for them to emerge,
but not so hard that you destroy the outcome. Right,
you shoot two plutonium nuclei together at the speeds we
have the large hadron collider, you're just going to get
a huge explosion. In fact, we do that at the
(32:22):
large hadron collider. We collide usually protons and protons, but
sometimes we collide gold nuclei, sometimes lead nuclei, but you
don't get a stable atom, which you get is too
destroyed heavy nuclei. Oh I see. I guess if you
take like one thing built out of legos and you
smash it against something else that lego, you don't just
get one bigger thing made out of legos. You just
(32:45):
get a big best on your floor. Probably. Yeah, But
you know, if you take one brownie and you smash
and get another brownie, you kind of do just get
a double sized brownie. So maybe brownie physics is the
way to go. Yeah, you're in the wrong. You're in
the laboratory instead of the kitchen, Daniel, that's your problem. Yeah,
so you've got to bring these things together. So they
formed this stable state, but not with so much energy
that they destroy it. So this process is actually called
(33:08):
confusingly cold fusion. Nothing to do with the other notorious
cold fusion research that was done in the nineties that
try to produce energy from hydrogen fusion. This is a
totally separate process that's trying to emerge nuclei of heavy
atoms sort of kissed them together, so they turned into
this heavier thing, and you're just quite delicate. It's like
a reboot or a rebrand. It's a totally separate line
(33:32):
of research that actually predates the crazy cold fusion. This
is like actual cold fusion. And you know it makes sense.
It's fusion because they're merging together heavy nuclei to make
something new, and it's cold because they try not to
do it too hard. Right, Well, I guess that covers
why it's hard to make these super heavy elements. And
we sort of talked a little bit about what makes
(33:53):
these heavier elements possible and stable, but we still haven't
talked about why we can't make these super heavy elements,
or whether or not they're theoretically or practically possible. And
it all seems to have to do with this concept
of the island of stability. So let's get into what
this island is and whether or not it makes for
(34:13):
a pleasant vacation. First, let's take another quick break, all right, Daniel,
let's talk about the island of stability. Now, this has
(34:33):
to do with I'm guessing some sort of like special
configuration that the protons and neutrons have to be in
before they can make these magic numbers happen. Yeah, we
look at the pattern of the number of neutrons and
the number of protons that are in various atoms, and
you could ask the question, like, what happens if I
put seventeen neutrons and nine protons together, or a hundred
(34:54):
and forty four neutrons and protons, what do you get?
And most of the you get something unstable, which just
breaks apart almost instantly. But this this diagonal line where
the protons are increasing and the neutrons are increasing, and
you get a bunch of stable items, and those are
the elements that we know, right, but it sort of
runs out at a certain point there's like the heaviest element,
(35:15):
and above that things start to get really unstable, like
we were talking about. But nuclear theorists suggest or speculate
that deep beyond that, like far past the elements that
we know, if you have the right number of protons
and neutrons, there might be an island out there where
if you put them together, they can actually be stable.
They could last for a very very long time. Oh,
(35:37):
I see, like there's a maybe a whole range of
special combinations of protons and neutrons that is stable, but
it's just not connected to sort of the range of
stable configurations that we know about. Yeah, exactly, we have
like a peninsula jutting out. You know, they have the
pensula stability and then a gap, and you know, there's
no configuration where you could assemble those protons and neutrons
(35:59):
together to make something stay able. But then if you
keep going, you keep going, you find this island where
certain number of protons and certain number of neutrons, really
large crazy numbers could maybe actually hang out together and
be stable. Because I guess in general, it seems like
the number of protons and the number of neutrons needs
to be similar, right, Like you can't have an element
(36:20):
with one proton and a hundred neutrons, just like you
can't have an element with like a hundred protons and
one neutrons. It seems like nature likes for those two
numbers to be similar. Yeah, they do need to be similar,
but they're not exactly equal, right, Like, for example, you
tend to have more neutrons than protons, Like the line
veers up off the diagonal. So for example, if you
(36:41):
have eighty two protons in lead, then you have like
a hundred and twenties six neutrons in lead. So we
don't quite understand it, but it tends to prefer having
more neutrons than protons. But you're right, it's about the
same number. You can't go too far off the diet, right, right,
And the two numbers are a little bit different again
because of these magic numbers, like protons like to be
(37:02):
happy in certain numbers and neutrons like to be happy
in other numbers, and so it's getting the right combination
that gives you the stable element. Yeah, exactly. And lead,
for example, is one of these doublic magic ones that
has eighty two protons, which is a magic number, and
a hundred and twenties six neutrons, which is a magic number.
I see, And that works for us for up to
(37:23):
a certain point. But you're imagining that, or physicists are
imagining that maybe there's you know, a whole set of
combinations way out there, like you know, a thousand protons
and two thousand neutrons that maybe also stable, just like
let it, yeah exactly, not quite as far as two thousand.
Nobody's gone that far, but it might be true. Right,
It might be that these magic numbers just keep increasing,
(37:46):
and we have not just one island out there at
like a hundred and twenty protons, but another one at
a d eighty four protons, another one even further beyond that,
And so we find this island of stability. It might
suggest that you could just keep going on making like
riduculously heavy elements. I see, well, I guess the question,
Danniel is, how do you know that they're the island
(38:07):
and we're not the island? Like, what if we're the
island and they're the continent. That sounds great. I'm happy
to be on an island. I love islands. Islands are wonderful.
But these other islands, we think they would be disconnected. Right,
as the magic numbers increase, they get further and further apart,
and so you can't get as far away from sort
of this island of stability without falling into the ocean
(38:28):
of decay. I guess you what we call it? All? Right, Well,
all of this sounds a little bit theoretical. These magic
numbers combinations might exist, and it might give us stable atoms.
So what have pizzicts been doing to sort of explore
this or confirm or deny this. Well, one thing they've
been doing is just trying to make these things. And
so they're trying to push the technology, like create heavier
and heavier elements and see if there's this trend towards
(38:51):
increasing stability. We don't have to actually get all the
way onto the island to have an idea that it
might be there. If as we make heavier and heavier elements,
we see the stability to go up and up and up,
and that suggests that we're like on the right path.
We're like coming up the shore towards the island of stability.
I see, we're like testing the waters kind of, yeah, exactly.
(39:12):
And so for example, in the nineties, people were working
on making this atom fleruvium, which is number one hundred
and fourteen, and they worked on it for a long
time and they saw one, like they made a single
one of these atoms. What they could tell like, hey,
we made one atom of this. It's hard to do, right,
So they were smashing plutonium onto calcium and they were
(39:34):
looking for individual ones. They are sensitive to individual atoms,
which is pretty cool, and they made this one and
it stuck around for like thirty seconds, which is crazy
long for a heavy element. Right, it's not as long
as we think the island of stability as we think
those elements might have lifetimes and thousands, millions or billions
of years, but it's much longer than the lighter elements
(39:56):
just before. So it's sort of like this trend we
were looking for. I see. So they try to make
this element and it lasted for thirty seconds once once,
and then they were never able to make it again. Right,
people have been trying to make this again and again,
but they just haven't been able to and so we
don't know if that was wrong or if they got lucky.
(40:16):
And it's just really really hard. Sometimes these experiments can
go for years without making one and then get like
two atoms made in a single week. It's just sort
of up to luck. Wow, that's crazy. What must it
feel like to have made this. It's like finding one
unicorn and then it goes away, and then you're trying
to tell everyone that unicorns exists exactly. And if I
made a unicorn in the large Hadron collider, I'd be
(40:37):
pretty excited, but yeah, I'd hope it was reproducible. That's
for thirty seconds and then nobody else saw it, Daniel,
then I would doubt my sanity and I would book
a trip to the island of stability to restore myself.
There you go. I guess you should have taken a
selfie with it, or it didn't happen. All right. Well,
let's say we do start to make these super duper
heavy elements. I guess what would they be good for
(41:00):
is making better paperweights? Well, they'd be fascinating sort of theoretically,
because they would tell us that we do understand something
about how the nucleus comes together, and they would help
us predict like where the next island of stability is.
That it's always just sort of good to learn, like
at a basic level, how does the universe fit together?
How can you fit these things together and can build
something that hangs together? That sort of from the abstract,
(41:20):
I just want to know area. But there are also
potential practical uses. Remember that a lot of our spacecraft
that we send out there to explore the universe run
on nuclear fuel. For example, the Mars Rover that just landed,
or Voyager and Pioneer. They're deep out into space, they
have nuclear batteries on them, and super heavy elements which
(41:41):
are not completely stable but last for a long time
might be excellent sources of power for spacecraft. Oh, I see,
Like you would make a super heavy element and then
use the decay to like power your spaceship for a
thousand years exactly. And you want your fuel to last
the whole length of your trip. And so if you
want to go really really far, then you need which
is not totally stable. It takes a long time to decay,
(42:04):
and so if you want to fly for a million years,
then you need to find something with a half life
of about a million years. I see, because if you
even plutonium won't last you forever. Well, eventually all decays exactly,
And the heavier elements are also denser, right, so you
can carry them around in sort of smaller spaces, and
you know, space is always a premium on these spacecraft. Interesting,
and I guess it would also just teach us just
(42:26):
about matter and what's possible and what corner of the
universe do we exist in, Like do we exist in
the the most common one? Or are we sort of
a flute? Yeah, And there are crazy ideas for what
these super heavy elements might look like. People have the
idea that, for example, the nucleus of one of these
super heavy elements like dred and eighty four protons and
(42:47):
it might not even be spherical, you know, the way
you think about like electrons having shells, and some of
those things have like weird blobs in shapes to them.
Some people speculate that the nucleus of a super heavy
element might be sort of like a finguer eight, or
it might be sort of like a bubble, like be
hollow and have like no neutrons and protons inside, could
be sort of like an actual physical shell. Interesting, but
(43:10):
you would only see that if you drill down to
the nucleus of this atom, right, yeah, exactly. You have
to make a bunch of them and then somehow probe
them by shooting particles at them. So you'd make your unicorn,
and then you kill your unicorn in doing experiments on it.
What if the nucleus looks like a unicorn? That's theoretically possible,
isn't it. It's theoretically possible. There must be some magic
(43:30):
number for that. It would make it very hard to
shoot particles at it because it would be so cute.
People like, oh, let's not study this thing, let's just
let it go. Be a tragedy to see a decayed
And then there are also folks who are just looking
for this stuff. They think, let's not build this, let's
see if it exists in nature. As you were saying,
sometimes crazy stuff happens at the core of neutron stars.
How do we know that these crazy heavy elements haven't
(43:53):
already been made and just like lying in the ground
waiting for us to find them. Interesting, So there's a
pretty amazing possibilities out there. There are really crazy possibilities
out there. And there's even a guy from Hebrew University
who claimed in two thousand and eight to have discovered
some of these things. He didn't see them directly, but
he saw a bunch of crystals with like weird radiation
damage that he claimed could only have been made by
(44:15):
the decay of a super duper heavy element. But then again,
of course other people look for the same sort of
patterns and didn't spot them, so it's not really reproduced interesting,
I guess. Then the hunt goes on for the heaviest
element possible in the universe, both theoretically and experimentally. Yes, exactly,
it's just another way we can continue to explore the
nature of the universe that we find around us. We
(44:38):
can put these building blocks together and try to create
new stuff, become like masters of the universe and make
new weird elements that we could then use and build
stuff out of it, and also just gain insight into
how matter works. Cool. Well, I've always been curious about
how heavy I can get, and um, I'll let you
know how that goes. Just keep shooting brownies at yourself
(44:59):
and eventually happen. Just keep colliding brownies with my mouth.
It's an experiment. It's an experiment. I promise it's for science. Yeah,
all that teems like a foregone conclusion about what's gonna happen. Well,
eventually you might just decay. Well, eventually we all decayed, Daniel.
The question is how many brownies will you have eaten
(45:20):
before that happens to you? I think it's an ancient
question in philosophy. All right, Well, keep thinking about the
universe and keep thinking about what kinds of matter could
exist out there. There could be who knows, magic number
figure eight elements out there that maybe look like unicorns.
That's right, and we will continue to explore the universe
and try to understand this stuff. Not just taking stuff
(45:43):
apart and figuring out what it's made out of at
the smallest scale, but putting it back together and trying
to make new crazy stuff for us to experience, to
fly us around the universe, and to make delicious new
kinds of desserts. For warning, I would appreciate that. Thank
you in my island of stability. Who says particle physics
has no applications? All right, Well, we hope you enjoyed Dad,
(46:03):
Thanks for joining us, See you next time. Thanks for listening,
and remember that Daniel and Jorge explained. The Universe is
a production of I Heart Radio or more podcast. For
my heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
(46:24):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, Jorge, what image do you have in your mind
when you think about an atom? I guess I probably
think of you know, that image of the little balls
going to run and who orbits around a little cluster
of other little balls. It's amazing how compelling that picture is,
even though it's totally wrong. What do you mean the
universe doesn't agree with me? It's not that cooperative, and
(00:30):
that image is mostly about the electrons. What do you
think about when you think about the nucleus of the atom?
I guess I always just picture like little proton and
neutron little balls just clustered together, kind of like you
take a bunch of marbles and then stick it together. Well,
as you might have guessed, I'm gonna tell you that's
also wrong. Hi am or handmade cartoonists and the creator
(01:05):
of PhD comics. Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist,
and I'm doing my best to make the universe cooperate.
It's generally uncooperative. It doesn't just tell you it's secrets,
you know, just just lay out for you the facts
about nature. It makes you go on a hunt, it
makes you ask the hard questions. But doesn't that make
the answer is more worth it, you know, when you
(01:27):
have to fight for it. I don't know. I'm the
kind of person who reads the last page of a
mystery novel first because I just want to know who
did it? And then why do you read the rest
of the book? I don't know. He's well, there you go.
Maybe the universe wants you to read all of it
before you find out the answers. That's right. The universe
has an agent and it wants me to read every
single arc of the novel. Yeah. I mean, it's been
(01:49):
fourteen billion years making it. You're just gonna jump to
the end. Quite a build up. Quite a build up.
But welcome to a podcast. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe,
a production of I Heart Radio, our podcast in which
we try to skip you to the end and bring
you the answers to the biggest questions about the nature
of the universe, how things are built, what they're made
(02:10):
out of, how they work on the tiniest little level,
and how that comes together to make our incredible, inexplicable,
bonkers universe. That's right, because it is a pretty complicated
and mysterious universe. There's a lot of nuances and details
and a lot of hidden things that we still haven't discovered.
That's right. The things that we see around us in
(02:31):
the universe are not like the fundamental elements of the universe.
They are not the things that make up nature at
its deepest level. We have to take them apart and
understand what that's made out of, and then what that's
made out of, and then what that's made of, and
you can just keep going deeper and deeper. Yeah, it
seems like the human species we've been sort of breaking
matter down little by little over the centuries, right. I mean,
(02:53):
before we thought that things were made out of like water, air, earth,
and then we found out about particles, and then atoms,
and then and sub atomic particles and sub subatomic particles.
It seems like we're breaking things down more and more.
That's right. We are digging deeper into the nature reality.
And that's fascinating because we wanted to know, like what
is the universe at the most basic level, if there
(03:14):
is even a basic level. But there's also another direction
that's really interesting for thinking about this problem, which is
going the other way. Starting from the smallest bits, what
can you make like if the universe is made out
of legos? What kind of stuff can you build? Yeah,
because it's pretty mind blowing, I guess when you realize
that all of the crazy variety of things that is around.
(03:38):
This taught me out of the same little tiny bits, right,
quarks and electrons, you know, like airr and dirt and
you know metal, they're all made out of the same things.
They just sort of behave totally different depending on how
many and how they're arranged, these little tiny bits. That's right,
it's really just the arrangement. In fact, the number is
about the same. You have about one proton to one
(04:01):
electron to one neutron in everything, even if it's lava
or hamsters or ice cream. So there's something really deep
and fascinating about the arrangements of particles. How you put
them together determines what they are, and as you're saying,
not just by a little bit. Like it determines whether
it's metallic, or whether it's insulating, or whether it's shiny,
(04:21):
or whether it's dull, or whether it melts at room
temperature or not. All these properties determined just by how
those bits are put together. Yeah, whether it's tasty or
whether it will kill you, or whether it'll be tasty
and kill you at the same time. That's the different
element there. You don't think it's possible for something to
be tasty and not kill you. I think it's totally possible,
(04:42):
but it hasn't quite taken off. But yeah, the difference
is very small, right, I mean, like if you have
twelve protons and electrons and it behaves like one thing,
but if you have sixteen of them, it pays like
something totally different. Yeah, it's totally different. And for a
long time, we thought those differences were fundamental, that they
were elemental, you know, that Harbin really was something totally
different from Neon. But now that we know that you
(05:04):
can take them apart and that they're made out of
the same bits, we wonder things like, what else can
you make out of these little bits? What else can
our little universe lego kit put together? Yeah, Like if
you keep adding more and more of them, what happens?
Or if you arranged them in a different way, do
you get a totally different element with maybe magical and
interesting new properties. Yeah, it's like you could create something
(05:26):
totally new, something that has never existed in the universe before,
or at least something that no human has ever experienced.
Imagine creating a new substance with a completely different set
of properties. When it comes to like how it reflects light,
is it transparent, is it pink? Is it kind of translucent?
Does it glow? Maybe it blinks? Who knows? But the
universe is the limit. Yeah, And as you add more
(05:47):
and more of these little bits, the elements get heavier
and heavier, Right, they get literally like heavier and more
massive and sometimes more unstable. Yeah. So we have the
periodic table the elements that records the ones we found
and the few that we've built. But a question that's
existed since we've had that table is how far does
that table go? Yeah? Is it like a super long
(06:08):
table like they have in those big houses or is
it like a small kitchen table. We don't know, right,
it's a mystery of the universe. How many leaves can
we add? Can we invite as many people as we
want over for dinner? Do you need a kittie table?
They need to eat outside? And who has that many chairs? Anyways,
maybe the universe should just have a picnic or you know,
have a zoom dinner or something, as is popular in
(06:31):
these days. But anyway, that begs the question that we're
going to tackle here today. So today on the program,
we'll be asking the question what is the heaviest possible element?
Meaning what's the most massive element you can make out
of these little bits? Yeah, because not every combination sticks together.
(06:52):
Sometimes you have a serving of neutrons and a serving
of protons and serving electrons and you try to stick
them together and they just blow apart. They're not stay.
But some configurations do hang out. Then they can last
for days or years or billions of years. And so
it's curious, like why can some of these things hang
out together? What makes them stable? How big an element
(07:13):
can you make and have it hang out and have
it be stable, have it like really be a thing
you can play with, right there? Sort of fickle things
protons and neutrons. That's kind of what it's about, right,
The elements need periodic table of the elements kind of
depend on the protons and the neutrons, right, I mean,
the electrons are sort of fluid and they don't matter
as much, but it's all about the protons and the neutrons.
(07:34):
It's all about the protons and neutrons because they feel
the strong force. They have strong feelings about what hangs
out and what breaks down. Is that why it was
called strong the Force because it's so dramatic. The Universe's
agent suggested that name. But you're right. It's the number
of protons that tells you sort of what element it is,
(07:55):
like are you carbon or are you neon? Is determined
by the number of protons and the new is and
then you can have various isotopes because you can add
neutrons or remove neutrons as you like without changing the
identity of the element. And then the electrons typically follow
the number of protons. So yeah, you're right. The number
of protons and the number of neutrons tell you what
it is and how heavy it is, and that determines
(08:17):
whether or not it hangs out or breaks apart. Right,
And you know, if you look at a periodic table,
it seems pretty filled out down there at the bottom,
Like as you go lower in the periodic table, that's
where you have the heavier and heavier elements, and it
seems pretty complete, like you can add one more proton
and neutron and you get another element, and you add
another one and then you get you know, there aren't
(08:38):
any big gaps there so far. Yeah, that's sort of amazing.
You know that there's a place for every element and
an element for every place. And that was a big
clue in the beginning. People started measuring the atomic numbers
of these elements and putting them together on the table
and realizing, oh, there are gaps. Is there something there?
And then they went and they specifically try to make
(08:59):
those things and figure out, oh, yeah, there is something
an element forty three technetium. It turns out it can
be made. And so organizing them in this way shows
us where to look for new elements, where to aim
for and constructing new kinds of stuff, right, And it
also has to do with this new concept that we're
also talking about here today, which is called the island
(09:21):
of stability. Now, Daniel, that sounds like, I don't know,
like a new age spa maybe in an island, tropical
island somewhere where you go and stabilize your karma or something,
But it's actually a pretty heavy physics topic. It is
a heavy physics topic has all to do with this
question of heavy elements and whether or not they can
(09:42):
hang out for a long time. So I don't know
how many people out there have heard of the Island
of stability, but we were wondering how popular this term
is out there in the general public. So as usual,
Daniel went out there into the wild to the Internet
to ask random people what is or where is the
island of stability. So thank you in advance to everybody
who participated and lend their voice to this question. If
(10:05):
you'd like to volunteer, please, they'll be shy. Send us
an email to questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com.
Here's some people had to say. Is it something like
the Uncanny Valley? So maybe it's if you look into
particles a lot into the readouts and there are little
islands of data that are like stable points that are
(10:29):
always there, so in a in the sea of static.
I have not heard of that before. There are elements
with high atomic number on the periodic table where the
protons and neutron ratio makes them have long lifetime, so
they have a large half life. I think those are
the atoms that I said to form the island of stability.
(10:52):
Maybe it has something to do with stable orbits within
the Solar system, so it could be kind of where
the gravity from the Sun makes the stability of the
Earth's orbit more stable. For Europe it's quite easy Switzerland, definitely.
And as for the rest of the universe, it makes
(11:13):
me think of a particular region, a small region that
would be very peaceful, very quiet, with no disorder in
the middle of a huge chaos. It's something that I
would ask my travel engent, I want to go there
that I don't know. Where is it? Yes, it sounds
like it could be something out in the universe um
(11:34):
where there's not much movement or spinning of anything. Possibly
the center of the universe, where nothing, nothing experienced from
I don't know. It kind of sounds like an equilibrium
of some sort, kind of on the razor's edge. Very unlikely.
Finally tuned, can't wait to find out. Is the island
of stability in Washington? D C has something to do
(11:58):
with quantum yields and how they can be arranged in
such a way that a stable particle is present as
opposed to just the energy in the field. I'm guessing
that it has to do with some sort of parameters
about how the fields are organized such that a particle
(12:20):
like an electron or something can can live. I seem
to remember there was discussion about the Higgs boson and
how it's at a higher energy because it kind of
got stranded on an island, as it were, and if
it ever got tipped off of that, whole bunch of
bad stuff could happen. All right, Not a lot of
people know where it is or what it is. No,
(12:43):
and nobody wants to sign up for your getaway weekend
there ran, Yeah, I know what's not to like. You
go somewhere and you, you know, stabilize a little bit,
you come back feeling center. It's right, Yeah, you're align
your ear chakras, you know. And a thousand dollars poor, yeah,
but a million dollars richer in your soul. What a deal?
(13:06):
What a deal? I like the person who equated it
to the Uncanny Valley. That's like a totally interesting connection,
there is it, though I'm not sure exactly how that's connected.
We're going to have video games with heavy elements in
them that don't look quite right. I think you're just
thinking of like geological features. Maybe we should have like
the Canyon of Complexity or the cliffs of insanity. There
(13:30):
you go. All right, So let's jump into this topic
and let's talk about how this island of stabilities related
to making the heaviest possible element in the universe basically, right,
I mean, because the periodic table kind of goes on
and on, and at some point I noticed that it
doesn't go on forever. Well, that's the question. We don't
know if it doesn't go on forever because there's nothing
else to make, or we just haven't yet found those
(13:53):
elements were being able to fabricate them in the laboratory,
that's the question. Well, that's the mystery. That's Can we
just get to the end of the book Daniel here,
and I guess those of you listening could skip to
the end of the podcast to find out, But then
what's of the journey? Daniel, Yeah, exactly, Then you miss
all these great jokes, all these heavy jokes. Alright, So
(14:13):
the periodic table can keep going possibly, and it's been
changing a lot in the last few decades, right like
we keep adding heavier and new elements. That's right, we
keep fabricating heavier and heavier elements by combining smaller ones.
Because the question we have is how far up can
we go? Is there a limit to how far you
can go? And if you go far enough do you
(14:34):
get to some like new region where things are surprisingly stable.
I guess that's two different questions, like what can you
put together theoretically physically in terms of the physical loss
of the universe. And there's also the question of how
stable it is, like how long will it stay in
that configuration? Right? That's right? And you know it sort
of has to be at least a little bit stable
(14:54):
for you to call it an element. If you take,
for example, element and element winting, you smush them together
to make element one nineteen, if it doesn't like settle
into a state that you can really call element nineteen
at least for a few milliseconds before it explodes, can
you really say you've done it right? You haven't really
mixed the ingredients to make your brownies if they sort
(15:16):
of repel each other and never come together. That's another element, right,
brownium brown Um, it's the tastiest element. It's the reason
brownies are so good. It's quite heavy too, depending on
how much butter you you put into it. But yeah,
it's it's a question of stability and is there sort
of a threshold and physics like it has to last
for X number of milliseconds or microseconds before you can say, okay,
(15:40):
that's an element. Yeah, that's a great question. When they
do these experiments, they only detect these atoms if they
see characteristic stuff that flies out of that atom. So
it's not like there's a minimum amount of time it
has to exist in order for them to like declare
it having been an element. But they need to see
its products, the things that it can only make, and
(16:01):
so for that to happen, there must be some sort
of minimum amount of time for an element to sort
of like relax and stabilize and come together from all
of its ingredients swooshing around. But that's going to be
a very very small time, much smaller than anything we
can measure. All right, Well, let's break it down, Daniel.
I guess the first topic we can talk about here
is this question of stability, like what makes an atom
(16:22):
stable and not stable? Yeah, it's fascinating, like why can't
you just put any number of protons and neutrons together
and get an atom and call it a day, And
why does some of them break apart and some of
them last forever? It's really a fascinating question, and it
turns out like usual it's complicated, you know, you might
turn it around and instead of asking like, why are
(16:45):
some of these things unstable, you might ask like, why
is any nucleus stable? Because the nucleus has in it
what protons and neutrons. And protons are positively charged, so
they repel each other, and the neutrons are just neutral.
So you might ask like, well, why doesn't the nucleus
break apart every single time? I have a strong hunch
about this. It's related to the strong force. It's related
(17:08):
to the strong force exactly. We know that protons and
neutrons are just a little bags of corks that are
held together by gluons, and so they are tied together
by the strong force, and we like to think of
them as not having an overall strong force charge, being
sort of neutral with respect to the strong force, because
the corks inside them add up all the colors inside balance,
(17:29):
and you get something which ostensibly is neutral from the
point of view with the strong force. And that's mostly true,
but the mostly is doing a lot of work there.
If you get really close to a proton, you could
be like closer to one of the corks than the
other ones, and so the corks don't exactly balance themselves out.
So when the protons and neutrons get really near each other,
(17:49):
then like the corks inside them can start talking to
each other. And so this little residual extra bit of
the strong force is actually the thing that holds the
nucleus together. That's enough to overcome the repulsion from the protons. Interesting.
I guess it's kind of like if you have a
positive charge in a negative charge and you stick them together,
they're not gonna really attract or repel anything around them
(18:11):
because together they're neutral right to everyone around them. But
if you get really really close to them, you might be,
you know, closer to the plus or to the miners,
in which case you would feel an attraction or repulsion. Yeah, precisely.
So you had two of those things that had a
plus and minus inside of them, and you brought them
close together and inverted the orientation so that the plus
of one was close to the minus of the other,
(18:33):
then they would feel an overall attraction. And so that's
a great example for how you can put something together
which has an overall neutral charge and still have it
attract itself. And that's the thing that holds these nuclear together.
That's the reason that they don't bust apart. That's why
helium and calcium and all the things that make up
your dinner tonight hang together. It's the strong force, right,
(18:54):
and so that's what's happening with the corks inside of
the protons and neutrons. Like the corks sort of attract
and repair all each other. But once you get three
of them that are stable, they're sort of neutral together, yeah, exactly,
And then you mix these things together and they can
hang out. But because it's the strong force, it's complicated.
Like the strong force is just a mess. When we
try to do calculations with a strong force is a
(19:15):
disaster because the strong force is so powerful that it's
very sensitive to small changes of distance. So we need
like massive supercomputers to figure out what's stable and how
these things work and the masses of particles. It's really
kind of a nightmare to do any calculations with. It's
a heavy endeavor. It's a heavy endeavor. But we've noticed
a few things, like we don't really understand how to
(19:37):
predict these things, but we've noticed some patterns. We've noticed
sort of like what is stable and what is not.
If you just sort of count the number of protons
and neutrons that are in the nuclei of stable atoms.
You notice some really interesting patterns. Yeah, you get sort
of like a magic sequence of numbers, right, They feel
almost sort of like supernatural. Yeah, exactly. All right, Well,
(19:57):
let's get into this magic sequence of number and let's
talk about how to make a really stable heavy atom.
But first let's take a quick break. All right, we're
(20:18):
talking about the heaviest possible element you can make in
the universe. How many protons and neutrons can you stick
together and still be stable? And we're talking about the
stability of these things, and it has to do with
some sort of magic number, right, Daniel. Yeah, it turns
out that certain numbers of protons and neutrons are more
stable than other configurations. And it's really kind of analogous
(20:40):
to the way we think about electrons filling up their orbitals.
You know the picture you were describing earlier of a
nucleus with electrons around it, And we know that, like,
you can have two electrons in the lowest orbital and
then a certain number in the next and a certain
number in the next and they sort of fill up
these shells, and as they fill them up, they get
more interact they are less interactive, etcetera. It turns out
(21:02):
that the protons and the neutrons inside the nucleus also
have these kind of shells, and you can get like
two neutrons at the inner shell, and then six in
the next shell, and twelve in the next shell, and
eight in the shell after that. So we've noticed these
trends that if you have just the right number of
neutrons to like fill up a shell, then the atom
(21:23):
becomes much more stable. Interesting, you mean, the nucleus of
an atom has layers like an onion or the sun.
It's really kind of hard to visualize. It's not like
there are physical shells. These are sort of energy levels.
These are like how many neutrons you have filling up
energy levels. The best way to visualize it is still
like a ball of marbles, but they're all sort of
(21:43):
like moving around and swishing, and different ones have different
amounts of energy. You see. Is it kind of like
electron clouds, like they're in different configurations and their quantum
you know shape, Yeah, exactly. That's a good way to
think about it. You know, like they're filling up these
energy levels, and as you get to like a complete shell,
then they sort of fit together very nicely in a
(22:04):
way that supports each other. And so if you have,
for example, uh, six neutrons and the third shell, then
they fit together really nicely. And the next shell needs
twelve neutrons, the next one needs eight, and the next
one needs twenty two. And these aren't numbers that we understand.
It's not like we can sit down and figure out
why you need twenty two or why you need eight,
But it's just sort of an observation we've made. As
(22:25):
you put these things together, the nucleus becomes more stable
if you have these magic numbers of neutrons and protons. Interesting,
so you see this pattern in the periodic table, like
you know, the first two heavy elements are stable, then
the next most stable is the eighth one, and then
the most stable is the one and things like that. Yeah,
it's a little bit more complicated because you count the
(22:45):
neutrons and the protons separately, Like if the protons have
their magic number, then it's stable. If the neutrons have
their magic number, it can be stable. And then you
could have doubly magic elements things where both the neutrons
and the protons have their magic number, and those are
the most stable. But as these things sort of fit together,
you can get different amounts of stability per atom. Interesting,
(23:07):
you have two variables here that you need to match
to get the most stable element. Yeah, exactly. And it's
all sort of related to the quantum nature of these particles,
you know what I mean, Like, because they're a wave
and they have to fit within a certain energy level
or space, they sort of click in certain integers. Yeah,
these guys are all trapped inside this potential well in
the nucleus, this strong force which wants to hold them together,
(23:30):
and it's mostly successful for a stable atom, you know,
but some atoms are more stable than others. What happens
when an atom is breaking apart? You're right, it's a
quantum effect. It's like you have a particle stuck in
a potential well, but that potential well doesn't have infinite sides,
and so occasionally it can slip out. So the way
that a nucleus breaks apart, the way that it decays,
(23:51):
is that a quantum tunnels from one state where it's
trapped inside this well outside of it into a state
where you have two separate pieces, and so to do
that you have to quantum tunnel, and the likelihood of
that happening depends sort of like on the height of
the potential barrier. And also it's with I see all right,
so it's sort of quantized by these magic numbers. But
(24:12):
I guess the question we're trying to answer today is
is there a limit like you can have? You know,
two is a stable number. Eight's a stable number eight two. Potentially,
how far can you go, you know, how far can
you keep you know, putting these protons and neutrons together
and still get you know, the double magic stability numbers. Yeah,
it's really interesting. The heaviest stable thing that we have
(24:34):
ever found in the universe is lead. Lead is totally stable,
and it's element number eighty two. And you know, if
you make lead, we think it will just stick around forever. Really, Yeah,
that's the heaviest stable thing there is. It's like it
hits the two magic numbers, like the protons are super
happy together and the neutrons are super happy together. Yeah,
exactly eighty two is one of the magic numbers. And
(24:56):
that's we think is what makes lead so stable. Now,
there is other stuff out there. For example, uranium, Right,
Uranium is the heaviest element that we find in nature,
but of course we know that it's not stable. It
tends to decay down to lighter things. So there are
processes out there in the universe, like the collisions of
neutron stars that can make these heavy elements, some of
(25:17):
which are very long lived. You know, they live for
thousands or millions or even billions of years. But lead
is the heaviest stable thing that we've found. And so
you can ask really fun questions like is it possible
that there are heavier elements up there much further down,
deeper into the periodic table where you combine these magic
numbers to get like really big numbers that could like
(25:39):
click together in a stable way, like a super duper
heavy lead or something. Yeah, exactly, exactly an element that
makes lead feel lightweight. Yeah, And I guess is there
anything like after lead, what's the next you know, heaviest
but also sort of stable element that we know about.
You know, there's really nothing above lead that's very stable.
You know, uranium is up there, plutonium is up there,
(26:00):
but nothing up there really has much stability at all.
But we can look at the trends, and we can
get a sense for like as we go up, as
we crank up the number A hundred hundred, five hundred fifteen,
are things getting more or less stable, and that can
help us sort of predict whether or not there's going
to be stuff up there. But we can try to predict, right,
we can put these magic numbers together and we can say, well,
(26:22):
what if we could make this element like one twenty
six that's called n b hexi um. This one would
be doubly magic because as a proton number six, which
is magic, and then a hundred and eighty four neutrons,
which is also magic. So it would be this huge
massive nucleus, super duper heavy element one. But you know,
(26:43):
we haven't seen it yet or we have been able
to make it yet, so we just don't know if
it's stable or not. It's a hypothetical element, yes, exactly.
Everything above A hundred and eighteen is hypothetical. D eighteen
is the heaviest thing we've ever fabricated. Everything above that
is just speculating. We don't know if it can't exist
and what it would be like two is the heaviest
(27:04):
we've seen in nature, like the naturally seems to occur.
That's stable. But you can imagine heavier elements, and you
can give him names like you're allowed to do that.
You can name things that don't exist yet. They've named
a bunch of these elements that we haven't actually made yet.
But I think those names are placeholders, and when somebody
actually makes them, then they get sort of decide the name,
(27:25):
because up to one eighteen they have sort of more
interesting names than above that they have these sort of
placeholder names. Can I stick my claim in a number,
like you know, it's five seventy three taken? Can I
call that chammium? Do it? There? You go? Chammi? Um five?
Are you stable? Are you feeling stable today? My brownie? First?
(27:49):
All right? So we can imagine and there might be
these sort of super heavy lead elements that are doubly
magic and super stable, but we don't know, right, Like
that's a big mystery. We don't know. It's a big mystery.
And we've been sort of bad historically at understanding where
the periodic table might end. And this is because this
is hard, right, the strong force and nuclear physics is
(28:10):
tough stuff. But people have been making predictions for a
long time and getting it wrong. You know, for example,
when we discovered plutonium, which is just element ninety four,
people thought about naming it ultimium because they thought maybe
it was the last element anybody would ever make. And
now you know, we're more than ten elements beyond it.
I see, I guess maybe a question here is what's
(28:30):
the limitation? You know, both in nature and for us
as humans, like it seems like nature doesn't like making
things heavier than lead or uranium or plutonium. Is that
because that's just the you know, it takes too much
energy to make heavier things. It takes energy, but you
also have to have the ingredients, right, to make a
really heavy element, you have to have the ingredients which
(28:52):
will also be pretty heavy. And you know, these heavy
elements are rare. As you get further up in the
periodic table, you need things like drawn star collisions to
even fabricate enough platinum or uranium or plutonium. And so
to make something which is like twice as heavy as plutonium,
you need some situation where you're like smashing plutonium against
(29:12):
plutonium to make you know, I don't know what it's
called double plutonium plotium exactly. So these things just get
rarer and rarer, and so you just don't have them
being made at all. But one question is whether these
things actually already exist out there in the universe. Like
it's possible that und hexium exists and it's somewhere out there,
(29:34):
buried deep in the Earth or in the center of
a neutron star. Right, Because when these heavy neutron stars crash,
I mean, can anything happen, Like could it just become
one giant element with a million protons in it? That's
an awesome question, and you know, sort of breaks apart
this whole concept of what an element is because if
(29:54):
we talk about this thing and it's not fundamental, right,
it's a special circumstances, something that appears in a spe
configuration under certain pressures and temperatures. And if you push
stuff together into a neutron star, I don't think you
can really call that an element because I think those
neutrons are in some crazy special state where they're really
crammed together. And we also don't know how to calculate
(30:16):
the details of how that works. As a whole other
field of study what's going on inside neutron stars. But
we talked about this one to like what's inside a
black hole, and we called it black hoolium because it's
some weird state of matter where these things are squished together.
So the boundaries between the neutrons and protons are probably
breaking down, right interesting, And what about for us as humans, Like,
(30:37):
what's the limiting factor? Why can't we just keep smashing
these heavier and heavier elements together to make super heavy elements. Well,
that's what we're doing, and there's an exciting program at
Berkeley and then a lab in Russia that's doing exactly that.
And that's how we've made element up to one eighteen,
is that we found lighter elements and we smashed them
together to try to make heavy elements. But it's not easy, right,
(30:58):
It's not easy for a couple of reasons. One is
that you just don't have that much of the ingredients.
For example, you want to make one seventeen, then you've
got to smash berkeley um, which is into calcium which
is twenty and there's not that much berkeleum around, Like
it took them two years of dedicated running just to
(31:19):
make twelve milligrams of berkeleum, which is like the minimum
you need to make this target to shoot calcium ad.
So it's just not easy to get the ingredients. If
we had an unlimited source of all the elements we knew,
we could smash them together to make heavier stuff. But
it's not easy that you can just like order these
ingredients on Amazon, which is probably gonna have its own
(31:39):
elements soon Amazonium. They're all just going to be bizosium,
bizosium one, zosium two. He owns everything anyway, No, he
retired to any He's just the puppet master behind the
scenes now. So I guess maybe my question is why
can't I just take, you know, like two plutonium atoms
and smash those together, you know, and then you get
ninety four plus ninety four are then you get you know. Yeah.
(32:02):
So the second reason is hard is that if you
smash them together, you just get a bunch of little bits.
You've got to do this thing which is sort of gentle.
You gotta push them together hard enough for them to emerge,
but not so hard that you destroy the outcome. Right,
you shoot two plutonium nuclei together at the speeds we
have the large hadron collider, you're just going to get
a huge explosion. In fact, we do that at the
(32:22):
large hadron collider. We collide usually protons and protons, but
sometimes we collide gold nuclei, sometimes lead nuclei, but you
don't get a stable atom, which you get is too
destroyed heavy nuclei. Oh I see. I guess if you
take like one thing built out of legos and you
smash it against something else that lego, you don't just
get one bigger thing made out of legos. You just
(32:45):
get a big best on your floor. Probably. Yeah, But
you know, if you take one brownie and you smash
and get another brownie, you kind of do just get
a double sized brownie. So maybe brownie physics is the
way to go. Yeah, you're in the wrong. You're in
the laboratory instead of the kitchen, Daniel, that's your problem. Yeah,
so you've got to bring these things together. So they
formed this stable state, but not with so much energy
that they destroy it. So this process is actually called
(33:08):
confusingly cold fusion. Nothing to do with the other notorious
cold fusion research that was done in the nineties that
try to produce energy from hydrogen fusion. This is a
totally separate process that's trying to emerge nuclei of heavy
atoms sort of kissed them together, so they turned into
this heavier thing, and you're just quite delicate. It's like
a reboot or a rebrand. It's a totally separate line
(33:32):
of research that actually predates the crazy cold fusion. This
is like actual cold fusion. And you know it makes sense.
It's fusion because they're merging together heavy nuclei to make
something new, and it's cold because they try not to
do it too hard. Right, Well, I guess that covers
why it's hard to make these super heavy elements. And
we sort of talked a little bit about what makes
(33:53):
these heavier elements possible and stable, but we still haven't
talked about why we can't make these super heavy elements,
or whether or not they're theoretically or practically possible. And
it all seems to have to do with this concept
of the island of stability. So let's get into what
this island is and whether or not it makes for
(34:13):
a pleasant vacation. First, let's take another quick break, all right, Daniel,
let's talk about the island of stability. Now, this has
(34:33):
to do with I'm guessing some sort of like special
configuration that the protons and neutrons have to be in
before they can make these magic numbers happen. Yeah, we
look at the pattern of the number of neutrons and
the number of protons that are in various atoms, and
you could ask the question, like, what happens if I
put seventeen neutrons and nine protons together, or a hundred
(34:54):
and forty four neutrons and protons, what do you get?
And most of the you get something unstable, which just
breaks apart almost instantly. But this this diagonal line where
the protons are increasing and the neutrons are increasing, and
you get a bunch of stable items, and those are
the elements that we know, right, but it sort of
runs out at a certain point there's like the heaviest element,
(35:15):
and above that things start to get really unstable, like
we were talking about. But nuclear theorists suggest or speculate
that deep beyond that, like far past the elements that
we know, if you have the right number of protons
and neutrons, there might be an island out there where
if you put them together, they can actually be stable.
They could last for a very very long time. Oh,
(35:37):
I see, like there's a maybe a whole range of
special combinations of protons and neutrons that is stable, but
it's just not connected to sort of the range of
stable configurations that we know about. Yeah, exactly, we have
like a peninsula jutting out. You know, they have the
pensula stability and then a gap, and you know, there's
no configuration where you could assemble those protons and neutrons
(35:59):
together to make something stay able. But then if you
keep going, you keep going, you find this island where
certain number of protons and certain number of neutrons, really
large crazy numbers could maybe actually hang out together and
be stable. Because I guess in general, it seems like
the number of protons and the number of neutrons needs
to be similar, right, Like you can't have an element
(36:20):
with one proton and a hundred neutrons, just like you
can't have an element with like a hundred protons and
one neutrons. It seems like nature likes for those two
numbers to be similar. Yeah, they do need to be similar,
but they're not exactly equal, right, Like, for example, you
tend to have more neutrons than protons, Like the line
veers up off the diagonal. So for example, if you
(36:41):
have eighty two protons in lead, then you have like
a hundred and twenties six neutrons in lead. So we
don't quite understand it, but it tends to prefer having
more neutrons than protons. But you're right, it's about the
same number. You can't go too far off the diet, right, right,
And the two numbers are a little bit different again
because of these magic numbers, like protons like to be
(37:02):
happy in certain numbers and neutrons like to be happy
in other numbers, and so it's getting the right combination
that gives you the stable element. Yeah, exactly. And lead,
for example, is one of these doublic magic ones that
has eighty two protons, which is a magic number, and
a hundred and twenties six neutrons, which is a magic number.
I see, And that works for us for up to
(37:23):
a certain point. But you're imagining that, or physicists are
imagining that maybe there's you know, a whole set of
combinations way out there, like you know, a thousand protons
and two thousand neutrons that maybe also stable, just like
let it, yeah exactly, not quite as far as two thousand.
Nobody's gone that far, but it might be true. Right,
It might be that these magic numbers just keep increasing,
(37:46):
and we have not just one island out there at
like a hundred and twenty protons, but another one at
a d eighty four protons, another one even further beyond that,
And so we find this island of stability. It might
suggest that you could just keep going on making like
riduculously heavy elements. I see, well, I guess the question,
Danniel is, how do you know that they're the island
(38:07):
and we're not the island? Like, what if we're the
island and they're the continent. That sounds great. I'm happy
to be on an island. I love islands. Islands are wonderful.
But these other islands, we think they would be disconnected. Right,
as the magic numbers increase, they get further and further apart,
and so you can't get as far away from sort
of this island of stability without falling into the ocean
(38:28):
of decay. I guess you what we call it? All? Right, Well,
all of this sounds a little bit theoretical. These magic
numbers combinations might exist, and it might give us stable atoms.
So what have pizzicts been doing to sort of explore
this or confirm or deny this. Well, one thing they've
been doing is just trying to make these things. And
so they're trying to push the technology, like create heavier
and heavier elements and see if there's this trend towards
(38:51):
increasing stability. We don't have to actually get all the
way onto the island to have an idea that it
might be there. If as we make heavier and heavier elements,
we see the stability to go up and up and up,
and that suggests that we're like on the right path.
We're like coming up the shore towards the island of stability.
I see, we're like testing the waters kind of, yeah, exactly.
(39:12):
And so for example, in the nineties, people were working
on making this atom fleruvium, which is number one hundred
and fourteen, and they worked on it for a long
time and they saw one, like they made a single
one of these atoms. What they could tell like, hey,
we made one atom of this. It's hard to do, right,
So they were smashing plutonium onto calcium and they were
(39:34):
looking for individual ones. They are sensitive to individual atoms,
which is pretty cool, and they made this one and
it stuck around for like thirty seconds, which is crazy
long for a heavy element. Right, it's not as long
as we think the island of stability as we think
those elements might have lifetimes and thousands, millions or billions
of years, but it's much longer than the lighter elements
(39:56):
just before. So it's sort of like this trend we
were looking for. I see. So they try to make
this element and it lasted for thirty seconds once once,
and then they were never able to make it again. Right,
people have been trying to make this again and again,
but they just haven't been able to and so we
don't know if that was wrong or if they got lucky.
(40:16):
And it's just really really hard. Sometimes these experiments can
go for years without making one and then get like
two atoms made in a single week. It's just sort
of up to luck. Wow, that's crazy. What must it
feel like to have made this. It's like finding one
unicorn and then it goes away, and then you're trying
to tell everyone that unicorns exists exactly. And if I
made a unicorn in the large Hadron collider, I'd be
(40:37):
pretty excited, but yeah, I'd hope it was reproducible. That's
for thirty seconds and then nobody else saw it, Daniel,
then I would doubt my sanity and I would book
a trip to the island of stability to restore myself.
There you go. I guess you should have taken a
selfie with it, or it didn't happen. All right. Well,
let's say we do start to make these super duper
heavy elements. I guess what would they be good for
(41:00):
is making better paperweights? Well, they'd be fascinating sort of theoretically,
because they would tell us that we do understand something
about how the nucleus comes together, and they would help
us predict like where the next island of stability is.
That it's always just sort of good to learn, like
at a basic level, how does the universe fit together?
How can you fit these things together and can build
something that hangs together? That sort of from the abstract,
(41:20):
I just want to know area. But there are also
potential practical uses. Remember that a lot of our spacecraft
that we send out there to explore the universe run
on nuclear fuel. For example, the Mars Rover that just landed,
or Voyager and Pioneer. They're deep out into space, they
have nuclear batteries on them, and super heavy elements which
(41:41):
are not completely stable but last for a long time
might be excellent sources of power for spacecraft. Oh, I see,
Like you would make a super heavy element and then
use the decay to like power your spaceship for a
thousand years exactly. And you want your fuel to last
the whole length of your trip. And so if you
want to go really really far, then you need which
is not totally stable. It takes a long time to decay,
(42:04):
and so if you want to fly for a million years,
then you need to find something with a half life
of about a million years. I see, because if you
even plutonium won't last you forever. Well, eventually all decays exactly,
And the heavier elements are also denser, right, so you
can carry them around in sort of smaller spaces, and
you know, space is always a premium on these spacecraft. Interesting,
and I guess it would also just teach us just
(42:26):
about matter and what's possible and what corner of the
universe do we exist in, Like do we exist in
the the most common one? Or are we sort of
a flute? Yeah, And there are crazy ideas for what
these super heavy elements might look like. People have the
idea that, for example, the nucleus of one of these
super heavy elements like dred and eighty four protons and
(42:47):
it might not even be spherical, you know, the way
you think about like electrons having shells, and some of
those things have like weird blobs in shapes to them.
Some people speculate that the nucleus of a super heavy
element might be sort of like a finguer eight, or
it might be sort of like a bubble, like be
hollow and have like no neutrons and protons inside, could
be sort of like an actual physical shell. Interesting, but
(43:10):
you would only see that if you drill down to
the nucleus of this atom, right, yeah, exactly. You have
to make a bunch of them and then somehow probe
them by shooting particles at them. So you'd make your unicorn,
and then you kill your unicorn in doing experiments on it.
What if the nucleus looks like a unicorn? That's theoretically possible,
isn't it. It's theoretically possible. There must be some magic
(43:30):
number for that. It would make it very hard to
shoot particles at it because it would be so cute.
People like, oh, let's not study this thing, let's just
let it go. Be a tragedy to see a decayed
And then there are also folks who are just looking
for this stuff. They think, let's not build this, let's
see if it exists in nature. As you were saying,
sometimes crazy stuff happens at the core of neutron stars.
How do we know that these crazy heavy elements haven't
(43:53):
already been made and just like lying in the ground
waiting for us to find them. Interesting, So there's a
pretty amazing possibilities out there. There are really crazy possibilities
out there. And there's even a guy from Hebrew University
who claimed in two thousand and eight to have discovered
some of these things. He didn't see them directly, but
he saw a bunch of crystals with like weird radiation
damage that he claimed could only have been made by
(44:15):
the decay of a super duper heavy element. But then again,
of course other people look for the same sort of
patterns and didn't spot them, so it's not really reproduced interesting,
I guess. Then the hunt goes on for the heaviest
element possible in the universe, both theoretically and experimentally. Yes, exactly,
it's just another way we can continue to explore the
nature of the universe that we find around us. We
(44:38):
can put these building blocks together and try to create
new stuff, become like masters of the universe and make
new weird elements that we could then use and build
stuff out of it, and also just gain insight into
how matter works. Cool. Well, I've always been curious about
how heavy I can get, and um, I'll let you
know how that goes. Just keep shooting brownies at yourself
(44:59):
and eventually happen. Just keep colliding brownies with my mouth.
It's an experiment. It's an experiment. I promise it's for science. Yeah,
all that teems like a foregone conclusion about what's gonna happen. Well,
eventually you might just decay. Well, eventually we all decayed, Daniel.
The question is how many brownies will you have eaten
(45:20):
before that happens to you? I think it's an ancient
question in philosophy. All right, Well, keep thinking about the
universe and keep thinking about what kinds of matter could
exist out there. There could be who knows, magic number
figure eight elements out there that maybe look like unicorns.
That's right, and we will continue to explore the universe
and try to understand this stuff. Not just taking stuff
(45:43):
apart and figuring out what it's made out of at
the smallest scale, but putting it back together and trying
to make new crazy stuff for us to experience, to
fly us around the universe, and to make delicious new
kinds of desserts. For warning, I would appreciate that. Thank
you in my island of stability. Who says particle physics
has no applications? All right, Well, we hope you enjoyed Dad,
(46:03):
Thanks for joining us, See you next time. Thanks for listening,
and remember that Daniel and Jorge explained. The Universe is
a production of I Heart Radio or more podcast. For
my heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
(46:24):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hosts And Creators
Daniel Whiteson
Kelly Weinersmith
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