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tw
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June 11th, 2009, 4:44 pm

New Element discovered. I'm sure the schoolboy mindcan twist that name into some sort of joke.
 
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trackstar
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June 11th, 2009, 5:01 pm

No school boys in here right now, tw, just comfortably numb Marxists and a couple of lusty traders taking a lunch break.Look at that market go! .
Last edited by trackstar on June 10th, 2009, 10:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.
 
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Traden4Alpha
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June 11th, 2009, 7:04 pm

Is element 112 really an element in the chemical sense of the word? Back in the good old days when chemists were discovering and purifying macroscopic quantities of elements, they could test and analyze the chemical properties of their discoveries. They could empirically determine it's melting point, boiling point, oxidation states, and the properties of various oxides, sulfides, etc.. Now, it physicists that synthesize transient femtoscopic quantities in particle accelerators and declare discovery.And if proton count is all that matters, then aren't all chemical elements already discovered in the sense that we can imagine their existence and accurately predict where they might lie on an extended periodic table?
 
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rmax
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June 12th, 2009, 11:02 am

QuoteOriginally posted by: Traden4AlphaIs element 112 really an element in the chemical sense of the word? Back in the good old days when chemists were discovering and purifying macroscopic quantities of elements, they could test and analyze the chemical properties of their discoveries. They could empirically determine it's melting point, boiling point, oxidation states, and the properties of various oxides, sulfides, etc.. Now, it physicists that synthesize transient femtoscopic quantities in particle accelerators and declare discovery.And if proton count is all that matters, then aren't all chemical elements already discovered in the sense that we can imagine their existence and accurately predict where they might lie on an extended periodic table?Agreed - although there will come a point where the proton / neutron mixture becomes unstable at a certain size. I suppose to extrapolate the largest element is a neutron star....
 
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Traden4Alpha
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June 12th, 2009, 12:16 pm

Nuclear instability is a bit of a bother and neutronium is quite hard on test tubes.I wonder if some externally-induced field could stabilize these large nuclei.....
 
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rmax
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June 12th, 2009, 1:20 pm

QuoteOriginally posted by: Traden4AlphaNuclear instability is a bit of a bother and neutronium is quite hard on test tubes.I wonder if some externally-induced field could stabilize these large nuclei.....Can you envisage an apperatus where you have some electromagentic force keeping the nucleus stable as you add more and more bits.... you then have a devil of a job dismantling the thing without a bang....
 
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Traden4Alpha
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June 24th, 2009, 1:24 am

QuoteOriginally posted by: rmaxQuoteOriginally posted by: Traden4AlphaNuclear instability is a bit of a bother and neutronium is quite hard on test tubes.I wonder if some externally-induced field could stabilize these large nuclei.....Can you envisage an apperatus where you have some electromagentic force keeping the nucleus stable as you add more and more bits.... you then have a devil of a job dismantling the thing without a bang....That reminds me of the scene in Ghostbusters when the EPA shuts-off the containment field.Still, there must be some way to lower "the temperature" of the nucleus, boost the strong force, attenuate the proton-proton repulsions or otherwise lengthen the half-life of nuclei.
 
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PaperCut
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June 24th, 2009, 2:31 am

Quantum cooling. Here is some pop-science drivel.Basically you have a statistical collection of objects (particles) and you shine a light on them. The light is quantized, so the only ones to receive it (and get bumped out of the collection) are ones with a particular state. What's left over is the "left tail" of the distribution of states - an ultra-cooled bunch of items - in your case nuclei, I guess.
 
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Traden4Alpha
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June 24th, 2009, 10:58 am

Pop-science drivel is always fun. When the technical consultant for Star Trek was asked how the transporters' Heisenberg Compensators worked, he replied "very well, thank you."Yet the issue remains: is there nothing in the universe that can influence the half-life of unstable ultra-heavy nuclei? For example, if one put ultra-heavy nuclei in between a pair of Casamir plates, would the reduced quantity of vacuum fluctuations lead to reduced random excitations of the nuclei and reduced rates of decay? Or if one mixed the ultra-heavy nuclei in a dense proton soup, would the Coulomb repulsions of the soup partially counterbalance the internal repulsions in the nuclei?
 
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rmax
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July 17th, 2009, 1:33 pm

So it has a name:Copernicium