Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) is setting its sights on creating element 120 as part of a new US effort to discover the first elements in row eight of the periodic table. The move follows the breakdown of the US–Russian partnership, which had previously discovered the five heaviest elements, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Y Tho? Legitimate question, is there a perceived functional use or even theoretical stepping stone to some greater knowledge beyond the mere proof of it’s existence?
Some scientists argue that finding new elements is not worth the money, especially when those atoms are inherently unstable and will disappear in a blink. "I personally don't find it exciting, as a scientist, just to produce more short-lived elements," says Witold Nazarewicz, a physicist who studies nuclear structure at Michigan State University in East Lansing.
But to element hunters, the payoff is compelling. The new elements would extend the table—now seven rows deep—to an eighth row, where some theories predict exotic traits will emerge. Elements in that row might even destroy the table's very periodicity because chemical and physical properties might not repeat at regular intervals anymore. Pushing further into the eighth row also could answer questions that scientists have wrestled with since Dmitri Mendeleev's day: How many elements exist? And how far does the table go?
Just to add, some also theorize that new elements may turn out to be stable, sort of the reverse of how f-block elements are a bunch of unstable elements in the middle of more stable [d-block] ones. If that is indeed the case, we may find a lot more candidates to work with in, say, materials science.
But also literally everything around us? Of my friends who went into materials sci/eng, two work in civil/commercial aerospace and one went to semiconductor.
You don’t know what you don’t know, sometimes science may not seem useful at first, or even 50-100 years in the future.
Take the fourier transform, some guy in the late 1700s said that you can break down any function* into sines and cosines as in simple waves.
At the time this wasn’t very useful except for deriving one equation. Know every single form of signal processing relies on fourier transforms.
So in the case of heavy elements, we simply don’t know if this may or may not be useful. However there is a chance it might be, maybe not now, maybe in a 100 years.
Fair enough, sometimes explanations don’t need a purpose. I guess my mind is in a place of hoping they’re not expending some immense amount of resources on something like this when we have significantly more pressing matters out there to contend with. The world is a wee bit unstable these past few years and I’d be a lot more interested in avoiding some Mad Max / Dune outcome than adding another box on the periodic table.
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