Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseDaniel and Jorge take a trip to the theoretical Island of Stability and talk about super heavy elements
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Hey or Hey, what image do you have in your mind when you think about an atom?
Hmmm?
I guess I probably think of you know, that image of the little balls going to round in hula hoop orbits around a little cluster of other little balls.
It's amazing how compelling that picture is, even though it's totally wrong.
What you mean, The universe doesn't agree with me.
It's not that cooperative, and that image is mostly about the electrons. What do you think about when you think about the nucleus of the atom?
M 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 get I'm going to tell you that's also wrong.
I am More Hamm, a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics.
Hi. I am 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 answers more worth it, you know, when you 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 always 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 spent fourteen billion years making it. You're just gonna jump to the end.
Quite a build up. Quite a build up.
But welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
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 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 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 yeah, it seems like a human species, we've been sort of breaking madder down little by little over the centuries, right. I mean, before we thought that things were made out of like water, air, earth, and then we find out about particles, and then atoms and then subatomic particles and subsubatomic particles. It seems like we're breaking things down more and more.
That's right. We are digging deeper into the natural reality, and that's fascinating because we want to know, like, what is the universe at the most basic level, if there 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 this taught mede out of the same little tiny bits, right, quarks and electrons, you know, like air 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 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, 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, 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 behaves like something totally different.
M Yeah, it's totally different. And for a long time we thought those differences were fundamental, that they were elemental, you know, that carbon really was something totally different from neon. But now that we know that you 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 arrange 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 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 lit Yeah.
And as you add more 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've 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 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 leafs can we add? Can we invite as many people as we want over for dinner?
Do you need a kiddie table. They need to eat outside and who has them any chairs?
Anyways, maybe the universe should just have a picnic.
Or you know, have a zoom dinner or something as is popular 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? What's the most massive element you can make out of these little bits?
Yeah, because not every combination sticks together. Sometimes you have a serving of neutrons and a serving of protons and are serving electrons and you try to stick them together and they just blow apart. They're not stable. 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 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's sort of fickle things, protons and neutrons. That's kind of what it's about, right. The elements in the 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.
It's all about the protons and the neutrons because they feel a strong force. They have strong feelings about what hangs out and what breaks down. Is that why it was called the strong force, because it's so 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, like are you carbon or are you neon? Is determined by the number of protons and the nucleus, 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 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 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 bit clue in the beginning. People started measuring the atomic numbers of these elements and putting them together in the table and realizing, oh, there are gaps. Is there something there? And then they went and they specifically tried to make those things and figured 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 of stability. Now, Daniel, that sounds like a i don't know, like a new age spa maybe in an island, tropical island somewhere where you go and stabilized your karma or something, But it's actually a pretty heady physics topic.
It is a heavy physics topic. It has all to do with this question of heavy elements and whether or not they can hang out for a long time.
Yep.
So I don't know how many people out there have heard of the island 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 lent their voice to this question. If you'd like to volunteer, please don't be shy. Send us an email to questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com.
Here's what 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 always there. So in the sea of static I have not heard of that before.
Are there are elements with high atomic number on the periodic table where the pruits on to neutron ratio makes them have long lifetime, so they have a lot half life. I think those are the atoms that I said to form the island of stability.
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. It's Switzerland, definitely. And as for the rest of the universe, it makes 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 engine, 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 where there's.
Not much movement or spinning of anything. Possibly the center of the universe where nothing expands from.
I don't know. It kind of sounds like an equilibrium of some sort, kind of on the razor's edge. Very unlikely. Finely tuned can't wait to find out.
Is the island of stability in Washington, DC.
It has something to do with quantum fields 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 field is organized such that a particle like an electron or something 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 now, and nobody wants to sign up for your getaway weekend there.
Yeah, I know what's not to like.
You go somewhere and you, you know, stabilize a little bit.
You come back feeling centered, that's right.
Yeah, you align your your chakras, you know, and.
A thousand dollars poorer.
Yeah, but a million dollars richer in your soul.
What a deal? What a deal?
I like the person who equated it to the Uncanny Valley. That's like a totally uh 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 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 elements or been able to fabricate them in the laboratory, that's the question.
Oh, that's the mystery.
Can we just skip 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 the journey Daniel.
Yeah, exactly, Then you miss all these great jokes.
All these heavy jokes.
All right, So the periodic table can keep going possibly, and it's been changing a lot in the last few decades, right, like we keep adding the 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 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 all 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 for you to call it an element. If you take, for example, element ninety nine and element twenty, 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 of repel each other and never come together.
That's another element, right, Bronium. Bronium.
It's the tastiest element. It's the reason brownies are so good.
It's quite heavy too, depending on how much butter you put into it. But yeah, 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, that's an element.
Yeah, that's a great question. When they do these experiments, they only detect these atoms if they see the 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 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 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 do 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 some of these things unstable? I 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 punch about this. It's related to the strong force.
It's related to the strong force exactly. We know that protons and neutrons are just a little bags of quarks 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 quarks inside them add up all the colors inside balance 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 quarks than the other ones, and so the quarks don't exactly balance themselves out. So when the protons and neutrons get really near each other, then like the quarks inside them can start talking to each other. 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 and a negative charge and you stick them together, they're not going to really attract or repel anything around them because together they're neutral right to everyone around them.
Yeah, but if you.
Get really really close to them, you might be you know, closer to the plus or through 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 a 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, 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 nuclei together 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, And so that's what's happening with the quarks inside of the protons and neutrons. Like the quarks sort of attract and repel each other, but once you get through 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, it's a 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 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 a supernatural.
Yeah, exactly.
All right, Well, let's get.
Into this magic sequence of numbers and let's talk about how to make a really stable, heavy item. But first, let's take a quick break.
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All right, we're 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, I know.
Yeah, it turns out that certain numbers of protons and neutrons are more stable than other configurations. And it's really kind of analogous 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 of 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 interactive or less interactive, et cetera. It turns out that the protons and the neutrons inside the nucleus also have these kind of shells, and you can get like two neutrons of 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 becomes much more stable.
Interesting, I 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 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 they're 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 way that supports each other. And so if you have, for example, six neutrons in 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 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 twentieth one and things like that.
Yeah, it's a little bit more complicated because you count the 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 atum.
Oh, interesting, 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, 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, is that it 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 width.
Mmm. I see, all right, So it's sort of quantized by these magic numbers. But 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, it's a stable number twenty twenty eight, fifty eighty two, one twenty six, one eighty four. Potentially, how far can you go? 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 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'll 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 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 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 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, 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 one hundred, one hundred and five hundred and 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. I see, Well, we can try to predict, right, we can put these magic numbers together and we can say, well, what if we could make this element like one twenty six that's called oonbihexiom, this one would be doubly magic because as a proton number one twenty six, which is magic, and then one hundred and eighty four neutrons, which is also magic. So it would be this huge, massive nucleus, super duper heavy element one twenty six. But you know, we haven't seen it yet, or we haven't 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 one hundred and eighteen is hypothetical. One hundred and eighteen is the heaviest thing we've ever fabricated. Everything above that is just speculation. We don't know if it can't exist and what it would be like I.
See eighty two is the heaviest we've seen in nature, like that naturally seems to occur. That's stable. But you can imagine heavier elements, and you can give them 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. I see, because up to one eighteen they have sort of more interesting names, and above that they have these sort of placeholder names. I see.
Can I stick my claim and a number, like, you know, it's five hundred and seventy three taken? Can I call that chamium?
Do it?
Man?
There you go, chamium five seventy three?
Are you stable? Are you feeling stable today?
Jorge?
Don't decay?
I mean my brownie first?
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 in nuclear physics is 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 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 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 neutron 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 plutonium to make you know, I don't know what it's called double plutonium 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 unbihexium exists, and it's somewhere out there, very 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 we talk about this thing and it's not fundamental, right, it's a special circumstance. It's something that appears in a special 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 calcut 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 once, like what's inside a black hole? And we called it black holeum 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, what's the limiting factor? Why can't we just keep smashing these heavier and heavier elements together to make super heavy element.
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've smashed them together to try to make heavy elements. But it's not easy, right. 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 berkeleum which is ninety seven into calcium which is twenty, and there's not that much berkeleum around. It took them two years of dedicated running just to make twelve milligrams of berkeleyem, which is like the minimum you need to make this target to shoot calcium at. 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 and make heavier stuff. But it's not easy that you can't just like order these ingredients on Amazon.
Which is probably gonna have its own element soon, amazonium.
Sure, they're all just going to be bizosium, bizosium one, bezosium two. He owns everything anyway.
Yeah, 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, then you get ninety four plus ninety four, then you get you know, one hundred and eighty eight.
Yeah. So the second reason it's hard is that if you smash them together, you just get a bunch of little bits. You got to do this thing which is sort of gentle. You got to push them together hard enough for them to merge, but not so hard that you destroy the outcome. Right, you shoot two pluton need 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 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 out of legos, you don't just get one bigger thing made out of legos, even just get a big best on your floor.
Probably.
Yeah, but you know, if you take one brownie and you smash it, 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 you're in the laboratory instead of the kitchen, Daniel, that's the problem.
Yeah, So you've got to bring these things together so they form this stable state, but not with so much energy that they destroyed. So this process is actually called confusingly cold fusion. Nothing to do with the other notorious cold fusion research that was done in the nineties that try to deduce energy from hydrogen fusion. This is a totally separate process that's trying to merge in nuclei of heavy atoms, sort of kiss them together so they turned into this heavier thing. You're just quite delicate.
It's like a reboot or a rebrand.
It's a totally separate line 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 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 a pleasant vacation. First, let's take it other quick break.
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You slept through your alarm, missed the train, and your breakfast sandwich ugh cold.
Sounds like you could use some luck.
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All right, Daniel, let's talk about the island of the now. This has 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 one hundred and forty four neutrons and ninety two protons? What do you get? And most of them you get something unstable which just breaks apart almost instantly. But there is this diagonal line where the protons are increasing, the neutrons are increasing, and you get a bunch of stable atoms 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, and above that thing 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, 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 peninsula of stability and then a gap, and you know, there's no configuration where you could assemble those protons and neutrons together to make something stable. 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 with one proton and one hundred neutrons, just like you can't have an element with like one 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 have eighty two protons in lead, then you have like one hundred and twenty six neutrons in lead. So we don't quite understand it, but it tends to prefer having more neutrons than protons. So I see, But you're right, it's about the same number. You can't go too far off the diagonal.
Right, right, And the two numbers are a little bit different again because of these magic numbers, like protons like to be happy in certain numbers and neutronsy like to be happy in other numbers, and so it's getting the right combination that that gives you the stable element.
Yeah, exactly. And lead, for example, is one of these doublic magic ones. It has eighty two protons, which is a magic number, and one hundred and twenty six neutrons, which is a magic number.
I see the that works for us for up to 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 may be 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, and we have not just one island out there at like one hundred and twenty six protons, but another one at one hundred and eighty four protons, another one even further beyond that. And so if we find this island of stability, it might suggest that you could just keep going on making like ridiculously heavy elements.
M I see, well, I guess the question, Daniel is, how do you know that they're the island 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 of decay. I guess you would call.
It all right, Well, all of this sounds a little bit radical. These magic numbers combinations might exist, and it might give us stable atoms. So what have physicis 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 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 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.
Mm I see, we're like testing the waters kind of.
Yeah, exactly. And so for example, in the nineties, people were working on making this atom glerovium, 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 them onto calcium and they were looking for individual ones. They are sensitive to individual atoms, which is pretty cool. And they made this one and it's 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 is. We think those elements might have lifetimes in thousands, millions or billions of years, but it's much longer than the lighter elements just before it. 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. And it's just really, really hard. Sometimes these experiments can go for years without making you 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 one. It's like finding one unicorn and then it goes away, and then you try to tell everyone that unicorns exist exactly.
If I made a unicorn and a large hadron collider, I'd be 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 just 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. And 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 build something that hangs together. That's sort of from the abstract, 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, sample 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 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 fuel which is not totally stable but takes a long time to decay. 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.
Oh, I see, because if even plutonium won't last you forever, right, exactly, Well, eventually all decay.
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 about matter and what's possible in 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 fluke?
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 one hundred and eighty four protons in 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 and shapes to them. Some people speculate that the nucleus of a super heavy element might be sort of like a finger eight, or it might be sort of like a bubble, like be hollow and have like no neutrons and protons inside, but be sort of like an actual physical shell. Oh.
Interesting, But 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'd 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 number for that.
It would make it very hard to show particles at it because it would be so cute. People like, oh, let's not study this thing, let's just let it go.
Yeah, it be a tragedy to see it 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 already been made and just like lying in the ground waiting for us to find them.
Interesting. So there's 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 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, just another way we can continue to explore the nature of the universe that we find around us. We can put these building blocks together and try to create new stuff, become like masters of the universe and maybe 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 I'll let you know how that goes.
Just keep shooting browniest yourself, and eventually it will happen.
I'll just keep colliding brownies with my mouth.
It's an experiment. It's an experiment. I promise it's for science.
Yeah, all that seems like a foregone conclusion about what's going to happen.
Well, eventually you might just decay.
Well, eventually we all decay, Daniel. The question is how many brownies will you have eaten before that happens to you.
I think that'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 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 hoege.
I would appreciate that. Thank you in my island of stability.
Who says particle physics has no applications.
Right, Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us, See you next time.
Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
There are children, friends, and families walking riding on paths and roads every day. Remember they're real people with loved ones who need them to get home safely. Protect our cyclists and pedestrians because they're people too. Go Safely California from the California Office of Traffic Safety and Caltrans.
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