The Science of Discworld Revised Edition

exotic ones, with very short lifetimes, have been made in experimental atombashers: so far we’ve got to element 114, with 113 still missing. Element 116 may also have been made, but a claim of element 118 from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1999 has been withdrawn. Physicists always fight over who got what first and who therefore has the right to propose a name, so at any given time the heaviest elements are likely to have been assigned temporary (and ludicrous) names such as ‘ununnilium’ for element 110 – dog-Latin for ‘l-1-0-ium’.
    What’s the point of making extremely short-lived elements like these? You can’t
use
them for anything. Well, like mountains, they are
there;
moreover, it always helps to test your theories on extreme cases. But the best reason is that they may be steps towards something rather more interesting, assuming that it actually exists. Generally speaking, once you get past polonium at atomic number 84 everything is radioactive – it spits out particles of its own accord and ‘decays’ into something else – and the greater an element’s atomic number, the more rapidly it decays. However, this tendency may not continue indefinitely. We can’t model heavy atoms exactly – in fact we can’t even model light atoms exactly, but the heavier they are the worse it gets.
    Various empirical models (intelligent approximations based on intuition, guesswork, and fiddling adjustable constants) have led to a surprisingly accurate formula for how stable an element should be when it has a given number of protons and a given number of neutrons. For certain ‘magic numbers’ – Roundworld terminology that suggests the physicists concerned have imbibed some of the spirit of Discworld and realized that the formula is closer to a spell than a theory – the corresponding atoms are unusually stable. The magic numbers for protons are 28, 50, 82,114, and 164; those for neutrons are 28, 50, 82, 126, 184, 196, and 318. For example the most stable element of all is lead, with 82 protons and 126 neutrons.
    Only two steps beyond the incredibly unstable element 112 lies element 114, tentatively named eka-lead. With 114 protons and 184 neutrons it is doubly magic, and in theory it ought to be a lot more stable than most elements in its vicinity. It is not clear how credible the theory is, though, because of the approximations in the stability formula, which may not work for such large numbers. Every wizard is aware that spells can often go wrong. Assuming that the spell works, though, we can play Mendeleev and predict the properties of eka-lead by extrapolating from those in the ‘lead’ series in the periodic table (carbon, silicon, germanium, tin, lead). As the name suggests, eka-lead turns out to resemble lead – it’s expected to be a metal with a melting point of 70°C and a boiling point of 150°C at atmospheric pressure. Its density should be 25% greater than that of lead.
    In 1999 the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, announced that it had created one atom of element 114, though this isotope had only 175 neutrons and so missed one of the magic numbers. Even so, its lifetime was about 30 seconds – astonishingly long for an element this heavy, and suggesting that the magic may be working. Soon after, the same group produced two atoms of element 114 with 173 neutrons. Element 114 was also created in a separate experiment in the USA. Until we can make ‘eka-lead’ in bulk, not just a few atoms at a time, its physical properties can’t be verified. But its nuclear properties seem to be holding up well in comparison to theory.
    Even further out lies the doubly magic element 164, with 164 protons and 318 neutrons, and beyond that, the magic numbers may continue … It is always dangerous to extrapolate, but even if the formula is wrong, there could well be certain special configurations of protons and neutrons that are stable enough for the corresponding elements to hang around in the real universe. Perhaps this is where elephantigen and chelonium come from. Possibly Noggo and Plinc await our attention, somewhere. Maybe there are stable elements with vast atomic numbers – some might even be the size of a star. Consider, for instance, a neutron star, one made almost entirely of neutrons, which forms when a larger star collapses under its own gravitational attraction. Neutron stars are incredibly dense: about forty trillion pounds per square inch (100