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What's the heaviest stable element? · Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe

0:08
Speaker 1: Hey, Jorge, what image do you have in your mind
0:11
Speaker 1: when you think about an atom? I guess I probably
0:14
Speaker 1: think of you know, that image of the little balls
0:17
Speaker 1: going to run and who orbits around a little cluster
0:20
Speaker 1: of other little balls. It's amazing how compelling that picture is,
0:23
Speaker 1: even though it's totally wrong. What do you mean the
0:26
Speaker 1: universe doesn't agree with me? It's not that cooperative, and
0:30
Speaker 1: that image is mostly about the electrons. What do you
0:33
Speaker 1: think about when you think about the nucleus of the atom?
0:37
Speaker 1: I guess I always just picture like little proton and
0:40
Speaker 1: neutron little balls just clustered together, kind of like you
0:43
Speaker 1: take a bunch of marbles and then stick it together. Well,
0:45
Speaker 1: as you might have guessed, I'm gonna tell you that's
0:47
Speaker 1: also wrong. Hi am or handmade cartoonists and the creator
1:05
Speaker 1: of PhD comics. Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist,
1:09
Speaker 1: and I'm doing my best to make the universe cooperate.
1:12
Speaker 1: It's generally uncooperative. It doesn't just tell you it's secrets,
1:16
Speaker 1: you know, just just lay out for you the facts
1:19
Speaker 1: about nature. It makes you go on a hunt, it
1:21
Speaker 1: makes you ask the hard questions. But doesn't that make
1:24
Speaker 1: the answer is more worth it, you know, when you
1:27
Speaker 1: have to fight for it. I don't know. I'm the
1:28
Speaker 1: kind of person who reads the last page of a
1:30
Speaker 1: mystery novel first because I just want to know who
1:32
Speaker 1: did it? And then why do you read the rest
1:34
Speaker 1: of the book? I don't know. He's well, there you go.
1:38
Speaker 1: Maybe the universe wants you to read all of it
1:41
Speaker 1: before you find out the answers. That's right. The universe
1:44
Speaker 1: has an agent and it wants me to read every
1:47
Speaker 1: single arc of the novel. Yeah. I mean, it's been
1:49
Speaker 1: fourteen billion years making it. You're just gonna jump to
1:52
Speaker 1: the end. Quite a build up. Quite a build up.
1:55
Speaker 1: But welcome to a podcast. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe,
1:58
Speaker 1: a production of I Heart Radio, our podcast in which
2:01
Speaker 1: we try to skip you to the end and bring
2:04
Speaker 1: you the answers to the biggest questions about the nature
2:07
Speaker 1: of the universe, how things are built, what they're made
2:10
Speaker 1: out of, how they work on the tiniest little level,
2:13
Speaker 1: and how that comes together to make our incredible, inexplicable,
2:17
Speaker 1: bonkers universe. That's right, because it is a pretty complicated
2:21
Speaker 1: and mysterious universe. There's a lot of nuances and details
2:25
Speaker 1: and a lot of hidden things that we still haven't discovered.
2:29
Speaker 1: That's right. The things that we see around us in
2:31
Speaker 1: the universe are not like the fundamental elements of the universe.
2:34
Speaker 1: They are not the things that make up nature at
2:37
Speaker 1: its deepest level. We have to take them apart and
2:39
Speaker 1: understand what that's made out of, and then what that's
2:41
Speaker 1: made out of, and then what that's made of, and
2:44
Speaker 1: you can just keep going deeper and deeper. Yeah, it
2:47
Speaker 1: seems like the human species we've been sort of breaking
2:49
Speaker 1: matter down little by little over the centuries, right. I mean,
2:53
Speaker 1: before we thought that things were made out of like water, air, earth,
2:56
Speaker 1: and then we found out about particles, and then atoms,
2:59
Speaker 1: and then and sub atomic particles and sub subatomic particles.
3:03
Speaker 1: It seems like we're breaking things down more and more.
3:06
Speaker 1: That's right. We are digging deeper into the nature reality.
3:08
Speaker 1: And that's fascinating because we wanted to know, like what
3:11
Speaker 1: is the universe at the most basic level, if there
3:14
Speaker 1: is even a basic level. But there's also another direction
3:17
Speaker 1: that's really interesting for thinking about this problem, which is
3:20
Speaker 1: going the other way. Starting from the smallest bits, what
3:23
Speaker 1: can you make like if the universe is made out
3:26
Speaker 1: of legos? What kind of stuff can you build? Yeah,
3:29
Speaker 1: because it's pretty mind blowing, I guess when you realize
3:32
Speaker 1: that all of the crazy variety of things that is around.
3:38
Speaker 1: This taught me out of the same little tiny bits, right,
3:41
Speaker 1: quarks and electrons, you know, like airr and dirt and
3:46
Speaker 1: you know metal, they're all made out of the same things.
3:48
Speaker 1: They just sort of behave totally different depending on how
3:50
Speaker 1: many and how they're arranged, these little tiny bits. That's right,
3:54
Speaker 1: it's really just the arrangement. In fact, the number is
3:57
Speaker 1: about the same. You have about one proton to one
4:01
Speaker 1: electron to one neutron in everything, even if it's lava
4:05
Speaker 1: or hamsters or ice cream. So there's something really deep
4:09
Speaker 1: and fascinating about the arrangements of particles. How you put
4:13
Speaker 1: them together determines what they are, and as you're saying,
4:16
Speaker 1: not just by a little bit. Like it determines whether
4:18
Speaker 1: it's metallic, or whether it's insulating, or whether it's shiny,
4:21
Speaker 1: or whether it's dull, or whether it melts at room
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Speaker 1: temperature or not. All these properties determined just by how
4:27
Speaker 1: those bits are put together. Yeah, whether it's tasty or
4:29
Speaker 1: whether it will kill you, or whether it'll be tasty
4:33
Speaker 1: and kill you at the same time. That's the different
4:36
Speaker 1: element there. You don't think it's possible for something to
4:39
Speaker 1: be tasty and not kill you. I think it's totally possible,
4:42
Speaker 1: but it hasn't quite taken off. But yeah, the difference
4:44
Speaker 1: is very small, right, I mean, like if you have
4:46
Speaker 1: twelve protons and electrons and it behaves like one thing,
4:49
Speaker 1: but if you have sixteen of them, it pays like
4:51
Speaker 1: something totally different. Yeah, it's totally different. And for a
4:55
Speaker 1: long time, we thought those differences were fundamental, that they
4:58
Speaker 1: were elemental, you know, that Harbin really was something totally
5:02
Speaker 1: different from Neon. But now that we know that you
5:04
Speaker 1: can take them apart and that they're made out of
5:06
Speaker 1: the same bits, we wonder things like, what else can
5:09
Speaker 1: you make out of these little bits? What else can
5:12
Speaker 1: our little universe lego kit put together? Yeah, Like if
5:15
Speaker 1: you keep adding more and more of them, what happens?
5:17
Speaker 1: Or if you arranged them in a different way, do
5:18
Speaker 1: you get a totally different element with maybe magical and
5:22
Speaker 1: interesting new properties. Yeah, it's like you could create something
5:26
Speaker 1: totally new, something that has never existed in the universe before,
5:29
Speaker 1: or at least something that no human has ever experienced.
5:32
Speaker 1: Imagine creating a new substance with a completely different set
5:36
Speaker 1: of properties. When it comes to like how it reflects light,
5:39
Speaker 1: is it transparent, is it pink? Is it kind of translucent?
5:42
Speaker 1: Does it glow? Maybe it blinks? Who knows? But the
5:44
Speaker 1: universe is the limit. Yeah, And as you add more
5:47
Speaker 1: and more of these little bits, the elements get heavier
5:50
Speaker 1: and heavier, Right, they get literally like heavier and more
5:53
Speaker 1: massive and sometimes more unstable. Yeah. So we have the
5:56
Speaker 1: periodic table the elements that records the ones we found
5:59
Speaker 1: and the few that we've built. But a question that's
6:02
Speaker 1: existed since we've had that table is how far does
6:05
Speaker 1: that table go? Yeah? Is it like a super long
6:08
Speaker 1: table like they have in those big houses or is
6:10
Speaker 1: it like a small kitchen table. We don't know, right,
6:13
Speaker 1: it's a mystery of the universe. How many leaves can
6:15
Speaker 1: we add? Can we invite as many people as we
6:17
Speaker 1: want over for dinner? Do you need a kittie table?
6:22
Speaker 1: They need to eat outside? And who has that many chairs? Anyways,
6:25
Speaker 1: maybe the universe should just have a picnic or you know,
6:28
Speaker 1: have a zoom dinner or something, as is popular in
6:31
Speaker 1: these days. But anyway, that begs the question that we're
6:34
Speaker 1: going to tackle here today. So today on the program,
6:36
Speaker 1: we'll be asking the question what is the heaviest possible element?
6:46
Speaker 1: Meaning what's the most massive element you can make out
6:48
Speaker 1: of these little bits? Yeah, because not every combination sticks together.
6:52
Speaker 1: Sometimes you have a serving of neutrons and a serving
6:54
Speaker 1: of protons and serving electrons and you try to stick
6:57
Speaker 1: them together and they just blow apart. They're not stay.
7:00
Speaker 1: But some configurations do hang out. Then they can last
7:03
Speaker 1: for days or years or billions of years. And so
7:07
Speaker 1: it's curious, like why can some of these things hang
7:10
Speaker 1: out together? What makes them stable? How big an element
7:13
Speaker 1: can you make and have it hang out and have
7:15
Speaker 1: it be stable, have it like really be a thing
7:17
Speaker 1: you can play with, right there? Sort of fickle things
7:20
Speaker 1: protons and neutrons. That's kind of what it's about, right,
7:23
Speaker 1: The elements need periodic table of the elements kind of
7:26
Speaker 1: depend on the protons and the neutrons, right, I mean,
7:29
Speaker 1: the electrons are sort of fluid and they don't matter
7:31
Speaker 1: as much, but it's all about the protons and the neutrons.
7:34
Speaker 1: It's all about the protons and neutrons because they feel
7:37
Speaker 1: the strong force. They have strong feelings about what hangs
7:40
Speaker 1: out and what breaks down. Is that why it was
7:43
Speaker 1: called strong the Force because it's so dramatic. The Universe's
7:49
Speaker 1: agent suggested that name. But you're right. It's the number
7:52
Speaker 1: of protons that tells you sort of what element it is,
7:55
Speaker 1: like are you carbon or are you neon? Is determined
7:58
Speaker 1: by the number of protons and the new is and
8:00
Speaker 1: then you can have various isotopes because you can add
8:02
Speaker 1: neutrons or remove neutrons as you like without changing the
8:05
Speaker 1: identity of the element. And then the electrons typically follow
8:09
Speaker 1: the number of protons. So yeah, you're right. The number
8:11
Speaker 1: of protons and the number of neutrons tell you what
8:14
Speaker 1: it is and how heavy it is, and that determines
8:17
Speaker 1: whether or not it hangs out or breaks apart. Right,
8:20
Speaker 1: And you know, if you look at a periodic table,
8:23
Speaker 1: it seems pretty filled out down there at the bottom,
8:25
Speaker 1: Like as you go lower in the periodic table, that's
8:28
Speaker 1: where you have the heavier and heavier elements, and it
8:31
Speaker 1: seems pretty complete, like you can add one more proton
8:34
Speaker 1: and neutron and you get another element, and you add
8:36
Speaker 1: another one and then you get you know, there aren't
8:38
Speaker 1: any big gaps there so far. Yeah, that's sort of amazing.
8:41
Speaker 1: You know that there's a place for every element and
8:43
Speaker 1: an element for every place. And that was a big
8:46
Speaker 1: clue in the beginning. People started measuring the atomic numbers
8:50
Speaker 1: of these elements and putting them together on the table
8:53
Speaker 1: and realizing, oh, there are gaps. Is there something there?
8:56
Speaker 1: And then they went and they specifically try to make
8:59
Speaker 1: those things and figure out, oh, yeah, there is something
9:01
Speaker 1: an element forty three technetium. It turns out it can
9:05
Speaker 1: be made. And so organizing them in this way shows
9:08
Speaker 1: us where to look for new elements, where to aim
9:11
Speaker 1: for and constructing new kinds of stuff, right, And it
9:15
Speaker 1: also has to do with this new concept that we're
9:17
Speaker 1: also talking about here today, which is called the island
9:21
Speaker 1: of stability. Now, Daniel, that sounds like, I don't know,
9:24
Speaker 1: like a new age spa maybe in an island, tropical
9:29
Speaker 1: island somewhere where you go and stabilize your karma or something,
9:34
Speaker 1: But it's actually a pretty heavy physics topic. It is
9:37
Speaker 1: a heavy physics topic has all to do with this
9:39
Speaker 1: question of heavy elements and whether or not they can
9:42
Speaker 1: hang out for a long time. So I don't know
9:44
Speaker 1: how many people out there have heard of the Island
9:46
Speaker 1: of stability, but we were wondering how popular this term
9:49
Speaker 1: is out there in the general public. So as usual,
9:52
Speaker 1: Daniel went out there into the wild to the Internet
9:54
Speaker 1: to ask random people what is or where is the
9:58
Speaker 1: island of stability. So thank you in advance to everybody
10:01
Speaker 1: who participated and lend their voice to this question. If
10:05
Speaker 1: you'd like to volunteer, please, they'll be shy. Send us
10:07
Speaker 1: an email to questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com.
10:11
Speaker 1: Here's some people had to say. Is it something like
10:13
Speaker 1: the Uncanny Valley? So maybe it's if you look into
10:20
Speaker 1: particles a lot into the readouts and there are little
10:24
Speaker 1: islands of data that are like stable points that are
10:29
Speaker 1: always there, so in a in the sea of static.
10:33
Speaker 1: I have not heard of that before. There are elements
10:36
Speaker 1: with high atomic number on the periodic table where the
10:40
Speaker 1: protons and neutron ratio makes them have long lifetime, so
10:45
Speaker 1: they have a large half life. I think those are
10:48
Speaker 1: the atoms that I said to form the island of stability.
10:52
Speaker 1: Maybe it has something to do with stable orbits within
10:55
Speaker 1: the Solar system, so it could be kind of where
10:59
Speaker 1: the gravity from the Sun makes the stability of the
11:03
Speaker 1: Earth's orbit more stable. For Europe it's quite easy Switzerland, definitely.
11:09
Speaker 1: And as for the rest of the universe, it makes
11:13
Speaker 1: me think of a particular region, a small region that
11:18
Speaker 1: would be very peaceful, very quiet, with no disorder in
11:22
Speaker 1: the middle of a huge chaos. It's something that I
11:25
Speaker 1: would ask my travel engent, I want to go there
11:28
Speaker 1: that I don't know. Where is it? Yes, it sounds
11:31
Speaker 1: like it could be something out in the universe um
11:34
Speaker 1: where there's not much movement or spinning of anything. Possibly
11:39
Speaker 1: the center of the universe, where nothing, nothing experienced from
11:42
Speaker 1: I don't know. It kind of sounds like an equilibrium
11:46
Speaker 1: of some sort, kind of on the razor's edge. Very unlikely.
11:51
Speaker 1: Finally tuned, can't wait to find out. Is the island
11:54
Speaker 1: of stability in Washington? D C has something to do
11:58
Speaker 1: with quantum yields and how they can be arranged in
12:03
Speaker 1: such a way that a stable particle is present as
12:06
Speaker 1: opposed to just the energy in the field. I'm guessing
12:10
Speaker 1: that it has to do with some sort of parameters
12:14
Speaker 1: about how the fields are organized such that a particle
12:20
Speaker 1: like an electron or something can can live. I seem
12:24
Speaker 1: to remember there was discussion about the Higgs boson and
12:28
Speaker 1: how it's at a higher energy because it kind of
12:31
Speaker 1: got stranded on an island, as it were, and if
12:35
Speaker 1: it ever got tipped off of that, whole bunch of
12:37
Speaker 1: bad stuff could happen. All right, Not a lot of
12:40
Speaker 1: people know where it is or what it is. No,
12:43
Speaker 1: and nobody wants to sign up for your getaway weekend
12:46
Speaker 1: there ran, Yeah, I know what's not to like. You
12:48
Speaker 1: go somewhere and you, you know, stabilize a little bit,
12:54
Speaker 1: you come back feeling center. It's right, Yeah, you're align
12:57
Speaker 1: your ear chakras, you know. And a thousand dollars poor, yeah,
13:02
Speaker 1: but a million dollars richer in your soul. What a deal?
13:06
Speaker 1: What a deal? I like the person who equated it
13:08
Speaker 1: to the Uncanny Valley. That's like a totally interesting connection,
13:14
Speaker 1: there is it, though I'm not sure exactly how that's connected.
13:17
Speaker 1: We're going to have video games with heavy elements in
13:19
Speaker 1: them that don't look quite right. I think you're just
13:22
Speaker 1: thinking of like geological features. Maybe we should have like
13:25
Speaker 1: the Canyon of Complexity or the cliffs of insanity. There
13:30
Speaker 1: you go. All right, So let's jump into this topic
13:33
Speaker 1: and let's talk about how this island of stabilities related
13:36
Speaker 1: to making the heaviest possible element in the universe basically, right,
13:41
Speaker 1: I mean, because the periodic table kind of goes on
13:43
Speaker 1: and on, and at some point I noticed that it
13:45
Speaker 1: doesn't go on forever. Well, that's the question. We don't
13:47
Speaker 1: know if it doesn't go on forever because there's nothing
13:50
Speaker 1: else to make, or we just haven't yet found those
13:53
Speaker 1: elements were being able to fabricate them in the laboratory,
13:56
Speaker 1: that's the question. Well, that's the mystery. That's Can we
13:59
Speaker 1: just get to the end of the book Daniel here,
14:01
Speaker 1: and I guess those of you listening could skip to
14:04
Speaker 1: the end of the podcast to find out, But then
14:06
Speaker 1: what's of the journey? Daniel, Yeah, exactly, Then you miss
14:09
Speaker 1: all these great jokes, all these heavy jokes. Alright, So
14:13
Speaker 1: the periodic table can keep going possibly, and it's been
14:17
Speaker 1: changing a lot in the last few decades, right like
14:19
Speaker 1: we keep adding heavier and new elements. That's right, we
14:22
Speaker 1: keep fabricating heavier and heavier elements by combining smaller ones.
14:26
Speaker 1: Because the question we have is how far up can
14:29
Speaker 1: we go? Is there a limit to how far you
14:31
Speaker 1: can go? And if you go far enough do you
14:34
Speaker 1: get to some like new region where things are surprisingly stable.
14:38
Speaker 1: I guess that's two different questions, like what can you
14:40
Speaker 1: put together theoretically physically in terms of the physical loss
14:44
Speaker 1: of the universe. And there's also the question of how
14:47
Speaker 1: stable it is, like how long will it stay in
14:49
Speaker 1: that configuration? Right? That's right? And you know it sort
14:52
Speaker 1: of has to be at least a little bit stable
14:54
Speaker 1: for you to call it an element. If you take,
14:56
Speaker 1: for example, element and element winting, you smush them together
15:01
Speaker 1: to make element one nineteen, if it doesn't like settle
15:05
Speaker 1: into a state that you can really call element nineteen
15:08
Speaker 1: at least for a few milliseconds before it explodes, can
15:11
Speaker 1: you really say you've done it right? You haven't really
15:13
Speaker 1: mixed the ingredients to make your brownies if they sort
15:16
Speaker 1: of repel each other and never come together. That's another element, right,
15:20
Speaker 1: brownium brown Um, it's the tastiest element. It's the reason
15:24
Speaker 1: brownies are so good. It's quite heavy too, depending on
15:28
Speaker 1: how much butter you you put into it. But yeah,
15:31
Speaker 1: it's it's a question of stability and is there sort
15:33
Speaker 1: of a threshold and physics like it has to last
15:36
Speaker 1: for X number of milliseconds or microseconds before you can say, okay,
15:40
Speaker 1: that's an element. Yeah, that's a great question. When they
15:42
Speaker 1: do these experiments, they only detect these atoms if they
15:46
Speaker 1: see characteristic stuff that flies out of that atom. So
15:50
Speaker 1: it's not like there's a minimum amount of time it
15:52
Speaker 1: has to exist in order for them to like declare
15:55
Speaker 1: it having been an element. But they need to see
15:58
Speaker 1: its products, the things that it can only make, and
16:01
Speaker 1: so for that to happen, there must be some sort
16:02
Speaker 1: of minimum amount of time for an element to sort
16:05
Speaker 1: of like relax and stabilize and come together from all
16:09
Speaker 1: of its ingredients swooshing around. But that's going to be
16:11
Speaker 1: a very very small time, much smaller than anything we
16:13
Speaker 1: can measure. All right, Well, let's break it down, Daniel.
16:17
Speaker 1: I guess the first topic we can talk about here
16:19
Speaker 1: is this question of stability, like what makes an atom
16:22
Speaker 1: stable and not stable? Yeah, it's fascinating, like why can't
16:26
Speaker 1: you just put any number of protons and neutrons together
16:30
Speaker 1: and get an atom and call it a day, And
16:32
Speaker 1: why does some of them break apart and some of
16:34
Speaker 1: them last forever? It's really a fascinating question, and it
16:38
Speaker 1: turns out like usual it's complicated, you know, you might
16:42
Speaker 1: turn it around and instead of asking like, why are
16:45
Speaker 1: some of these things unstable, you might ask like, why
16:47
Speaker 1: is any nucleus stable? Because the nucleus has in it
16:51
Speaker 1: what protons and neutrons. And protons are positively charged, so
16:55
Speaker 1: they repel each other, and the neutrons are just neutral.
16:58
Speaker 1: So you might ask like, well, why doesn't the nucleus
17:01
Speaker 1: break apart every single time? I have a strong hunch
17:04
Speaker 1: about this. It's related to the strong force. It's related
17:08
Speaker 1: to the strong force exactly. We know that protons and
17:11
Speaker 1: neutrons are just a little bags of corks that are
17:14
Speaker 1: held together by gluons, and so they are tied together
17:17
Speaker 1: by the strong force, and we like to think of
17:19
Speaker 1: them as not having an overall strong force charge, being
17:23
Speaker 1: sort of neutral with respect to the strong force, because
17:25
Speaker 1: the corks inside them add up all the colors inside balance,
17:29
Speaker 1: and you get something which ostensibly is neutral from the
17:32
Speaker 1: point of view with the strong force. And that's mostly true,
17:35
Speaker 1: but the mostly is doing a lot of work there.
17:38
Speaker 1: If you get really close to a proton, you could
17:40
Speaker 1: be like closer to one of the corks than the
17:42
Speaker 1: other ones, and so the corks don't exactly balance themselves out.
17:46
Speaker 1: So when the protons and neutrons get really near each other,
17:49
Speaker 1: then like the corks inside them can start talking to
17:52
Speaker 1: each other. And so this little residual extra bit of
17:54
Speaker 1: the strong force is actually the thing that holds the
17:56
Speaker 1: nucleus together. That's enough to overcome the repulsion from the protons. Interesting.
18:02
Speaker 1: I guess it's kind of like if you have a
18:05
Speaker 1: positive charge in a negative charge and you stick them together,
18:08
Speaker 1: they're not gonna really attract or repel anything around them
18:11
Speaker 1: because together they're neutral right to everyone around them. But
18:15
Speaker 1: if you get really really close to them, you might be,
18:18
Speaker 1: you know, closer to the plus or to the miners,
18:20
Speaker 1: in which case you would feel an attraction or repulsion. Yeah, precisely.
18:24
Speaker 1: So you had two of those things that had a
18:26
Speaker 1: plus and minus inside of them, and you brought them
18:28
Speaker 1: close together and inverted the orientation so that the plus
18:31
Speaker 1: of one was close to the minus of the other,
18:33
Speaker 1: then they would feel an overall attraction. And so that's
18:36
Speaker 1: a great example for how you can put something together
18:39
Speaker 1: which has an overall neutral charge and still have it
18:42
Speaker 1: attract itself. And that's the thing that holds these nuclear together.
18:46
Speaker 1: That's the reason that they don't bust apart. That's why
18:49
Speaker 1: helium and calcium and all the things that make up
18:51
Speaker 1: your dinner tonight hang together. It's the strong force, right,
18:54
Speaker 1: and so that's what's happening with the corks inside of
18:56
Speaker 1: the protons and neutrons. Like the corks sort of attract
18:59
Speaker 1: and repair all each other. But once you get three
19:02
Speaker 1: of them that are stable, they're sort of neutral together, yeah, exactly,
19:05
Speaker 1: And then you mix these things together and they can
19:07
Speaker 1: hang out. But because it's the strong force, it's complicated.
19:11
Speaker 1: Like the strong force is just a mess. When we
19:13
Speaker 1: try to do calculations with a strong force is a
19:15
Speaker 1: disaster because the strong force is so powerful that it's
19:19
Speaker 1: very sensitive to small changes of distance. So we need
19:22
Speaker 1: like massive supercomputers to figure out what's stable and how
19:26
Speaker 1: these things work and the masses of particles. It's really
19:28
Speaker 1: kind of a nightmare to do any calculations with. It's
19:31
Speaker 1: a heavy endeavor. It's a heavy endeavor. But we've noticed
19:34
Speaker 1: a few things, like we don't really understand how to
19:37
Speaker 1: predict these things, but we've noticed some patterns. We've noticed
19:40
Speaker 1: sort of like what is stable and what is not.
19:43
Speaker 1: If you just sort of count the number of protons
19:45
Speaker 1: and neutrons that are in the nuclei of stable atoms.
19:48
Speaker 1: You notice some really interesting patterns. Yeah, you get sort
19:50
Speaker 1: of like a magic sequence of numbers, right, They feel
19:54
Speaker 1: almost sort of like supernatural. Yeah, exactly. All right, Well,
19:57
Speaker 1: let's get into this magic sequence of number and let's
20:00
Speaker 1: talk about how to make a really stable heavy atom.
20:03
Speaker 1: But first let's take a quick break. All right, we're
20:18
Speaker 1: talking about the heaviest possible element you can make in
20:21
Speaker 1: the universe. How many protons and neutrons can you stick
20:25
Speaker 1: together and still be stable? And we're talking about the
20:28
Speaker 1: stability of these things, and it has to do with
20:30
Speaker 1: some sort of magic number, right, Daniel. Yeah, it turns
20:33
Speaker 1: out that certain numbers of protons and neutrons are more
20:36
Speaker 1: stable than other configurations. And it's really kind of analogous
20:40
Speaker 1: to the way we think about electrons filling up their orbitals.
20:44
Speaker 1: You know the picture you were describing earlier of a
20:46
Speaker 1: nucleus with electrons around it, And we know that, like,
20:50
Speaker 1: you can have two electrons in the lowest orbital and
20:53
Speaker 1: then a certain number in the next and a certain
20:54
Speaker 1: number in the next and they sort of fill up
20:56
Speaker 1: these shells, and as they fill them up, they get
20:59
Speaker 1: more interact they are less interactive, etcetera. It turns out
21:02
Speaker 1: that the protons and the neutrons inside the nucleus also
21:06
Speaker 1: have these kind of shells, and you can get like
21:08
Speaker 1: two neutrons at the inner shell, and then six in
21:11
Speaker 1: the next shell, and twelve in the next shell, and
21:14
Speaker 1: eight in the shell after that. So we've noticed these
21:17
Speaker 1: trends that if you have just the right number of
21:19
Speaker 1: neutrons to like fill up a shell, then the atom
21:23
Speaker 1: becomes much more stable. Interesting, you mean, the nucleus of
21:26
Speaker 1: an atom has layers like an onion or the sun.
21:29
Speaker 1: It's really kind of hard to visualize. It's not like
21:32
Speaker 1: there are physical shells. These are sort of energy levels.
21:36
Speaker 1: These are like how many neutrons you have filling up
21:38
Speaker 1: energy levels. The best way to visualize it is still
21:41
Speaker 1: like a ball of marbles, but they're all sort of
21:43
Speaker 1: like moving around and swishing, and different ones have different
21:46
Speaker 1: amounts of energy. You see. Is it kind of like
21:49
Speaker 1: electron clouds, like they're in different configurations and their quantum
21:54
Speaker 1: you know shape, Yeah, exactly. That's a good way to
21:56
Speaker 1: think about it. You know, like they're filling up these
21:58
Speaker 1: energy levels, and as you get to like a complete shell,
22:02
Speaker 1: then they sort of fit together very nicely in a
22:04
Speaker 1: way that supports each other. And so if you have,
22:06
Speaker 1: for example, uh, six neutrons and the third shell, then
22:10
Speaker 1: they fit together really nicely. And the next shell needs
22:12
Speaker 1: twelve neutrons, the next one needs eight, and the next
22:14
Speaker 1: one needs twenty two. And these aren't numbers that we understand.
22:18
Speaker 1: It's not like we can sit down and figure out
22:20
Speaker 1: why you need twenty two or why you need eight,
22:22
Speaker 1: But it's just sort of an observation we've made. As
22:25
Speaker 1: you put these things together, the nucleus becomes more stable
22:28
Speaker 1: if you have these magic numbers of neutrons and protons. Interesting,
22:32
Speaker 1: so you see this pattern in the periodic table, like
22:35
Speaker 1: you know, the first two heavy elements are stable, then
22:37
Speaker 1: the next most stable is the eighth one, and then
22:40
Speaker 1: the most stable is the one and things like that. Yeah,
22:43
Speaker 1: it's a little bit more complicated because you count the
22:45
Speaker 1: neutrons and the protons separately, Like if the protons have
22:49
Speaker 1: their magic number, then it's stable. If the neutrons have
22:52
Speaker 1: their magic number, it can be stable. And then you
22:55
Speaker 1: could have doubly magic elements things where both the neutrons
22:58
Speaker 1: and the protons have their magic number, and those are
23:01
Speaker 1: the most stable. But as these things sort of fit together,
23:04
Speaker 1: you can get different amounts of stability per atom. Interesting,
23:07
Speaker 1: you have two variables here that you need to match
23:10
Speaker 1: to get the most stable element. Yeah, exactly. And it's
23:12
Speaker 1: all sort of related to the quantum nature of these particles,
23:16
Speaker 1: you know what I mean, Like, because they're a wave
23:18
Speaker 1: and they have to fit within a certain energy level
23:20
Speaker 1: or space, they sort of click in certain integers. Yeah,
23:23
Speaker 1: these guys are all trapped inside this potential well in
23:27
Speaker 1: the nucleus, this strong force which wants to hold them together,
23:30
Speaker 1: and it's mostly successful for a stable atom, you know,
23:33
Speaker 1: but some atoms are more stable than others. What happens
23:36
Speaker 1: when an atom is breaking apart? You're right, it's a
23:38
Speaker 1: quantum effect. It's like you have a particle stuck in
23:41
Speaker 1: a potential well, but that potential well doesn't have infinite sides,
23:45
Speaker 1: and so occasionally it can slip out. So the way
23:48
Speaker 1: that a nucleus breaks apart, the way that it decays,
23:51
Speaker 1: is that a quantum tunnels from one state where it's
23:54
Speaker 1: trapped inside this well outside of it into a state
23:58
Speaker 1: where you have two separate pieces, and so to do
24:00
Speaker 1: that you have to quantum tunnel, and the likelihood of
24:03
Speaker 1: that happening depends sort of like on the height of
24:05
Speaker 1: the potential barrier. And also it's with I see all right,
24:09
Speaker 1: so it's sort of quantized by these magic numbers. But
24:12
Speaker 1: I guess the question we're trying to answer today is
24:14
Speaker 1: is there a limit like you can have? You know,
24:16
Speaker 1: two is a stable number. Eight's a stable number eight two. Potentially,
24:23
Speaker 1: how far can you go, you know, how far can
24:25
Speaker 1: you keep you know, putting these protons and neutrons together
24:28
Speaker 1: and still get you know, the double magic stability numbers. Yeah,
24:31
Speaker 1: it's really interesting. The heaviest stable thing that we have
24:34
Speaker 1: ever found in the universe is lead. Lead is totally stable,
24:38
Speaker 1: and it's element number eighty two. And you know, if
24:41
Speaker 1: you make lead, we think it will just stick around forever. Really, Yeah,
24:44
Speaker 1: that's the heaviest stable thing there is. It's like it
24:47
Speaker 1: hits the two magic numbers, like the protons are super
24:49
Speaker 1: happy together and the neutrons are super happy together. Yeah,
24:52
Speaker 1: exactly eighty two is one of the magic numbers. And
24:56
Speaker 1: that's we think is what makes lead so stable. Now,
24:59
Speaker 1: there is other stuff out there. For example, uranium, Right,
25:03
Speaker 1: Uranium is the heaviest element that we find in nature,
25:06
Speaker 1: but of course we know that it's not stable. It
25:08
Speaker 1: tends to decay down to lighter things. So there are
25:11
Speaker 1: processes out there in the universe, like the collisions of
25:14
Speaker 1: neutron stars that can make these heavy elements, some of
25:17
Speaker 1: which are very long lived. You know, they live for
25:19
Speaker 1: thousands or millions or even billions of years. But lead
25:22
Speaker 1: is the heaviest stable thing that we've found. And so
25:26
Speaker 1: you can ask really fun questions like is it possible
25:29
Speaker 1: that there are heavier elements up there much further down,
25:32
Speaker 1: deeper into the periodic table where you combine these magic
25:35
Speaker 1: numbers to get like really big numbers that could like
25:39
Speaker 1: click together in a stable way, like a super duper
25:41
Speaker 1: heavy lead or something. Yeah, exactly, exactly an element that
25:45
Speaker 1: makes lead feel lightweight. Yeah, And I guess is there
25:49
Speaker 1: anything like after lead, what's the next you know, heaviest
25:52
Speaker 1: but also sort of stable element that we know about.
25:55
Speaker 1: You know, there's really nothing above lead that's very stable.
25:57
Speaker 1: You know, uranium is up there, plutonium is up there,
26:00
Speaker 1: but nothing up there really has much stability at all.
26:02
Speaker 1: But we can look at the trends, and we can
26:04
Speaker 1: get a sense for like as we go up, as
26:06
Speaker 1: we crank up the number A hundred hundred, five hundred fifteen,
26:10
Speaker 1: are things getting more or less stable, and that can
26:13
Speaker 1: help us sort of predict whether or not there's going
26:16
Speaker 1: to be stuff up there. But we can try to predict, right,
26:19
Speaker 1: we can put these magic numbers together and we can say, well,
26:22
Speaker 1: what if we could make this element like one twenty
26:24
Speaker 1: six that's called n b hexi um. This one would
26:28
Speaker 1: be doubly magic because as a proton number six, which
26:32
Speaker 1: is magic, and then a hundred and eighty four neutrons,
26:35
Speaker 1: which is also magic. So it would be this huge
26:38
Speaker 1: massive nucleus, super duper heavy element one. But you know,
26:43
Speaker 1: we haven't seen it yet or we have been able
26:45
Speaker 1: to make it yet, so we just don't know if
26:47
Speaker 1: it's stable or not. It's a hypothetical element, yes, exactly.
26:51
Speaker 1: Everything above A hundred and eighteen is hypothetical. D eighteen
26:56
Speaker 1: is the heaviest thing we've ever fabricated. Everything above that
26:59
Speaker 1: is just speculating. We don't know if it can't exist
27:02
Speaker 1: and what it would be like two is the heaviest
27:04
Speaker 1: we've seen in nature, like the naturally seems to occur.
27:08
Speaker 1: That's stable. But you can imagine heavier elements, and you
27:11
Speaker 1: can give him names like you're allowed to do that.
27:14
Speaker 1: You can name things that don't exist yet. They've named
27:16
Speaker 1: a bunch of these elements that we haven't actually made yet.
27:19
Speaker 1: But I think those names are placeholders, and when somebody
27:22
Speaker 1: actually makes them, then they get sort of decide the name,
27:25
Speaker 1: because up to one eighteen they have sort of more
27:27
Speaker 1: interesting names than above that they have these sort of
27:30
Speaker 1: placeholder names. Can I stick my claim in a number,
27:33
Speaker 1: like you know, it's five seventy three taken? Can I
27:36
Speaker 1: call that chammium? Do it? There? You go? Chammi? Um five?
27:44
Speaker 1: Are you stable? Are you feeling stable today? My brownie? First?
27:49
Speaker 1: All right? So we can imagine and there might be
27:52
Speaker 1: these sort of super heavy lead elements that are doubly
27:56
Speaker 1: magic and super stable, but we don't know, right, Like
27:58
Speaker 1: that's a big mystery. We don't know. It's a big mystery.
28:01
Speaker 1: And we've been sort of bad historically at understanding where
28:04
Speaker 1: the periodic table might end. And this is because this
28:07
Speaker 1: is hard, right, the strong force and nuclear physics is
28:10
Speaker 1: tough stuff. But people have been making predictions for a
28:13
Speaker 1: long time and getting it wrong. You know, for example,
28:16
Speaker 1: when we discovered plutonium, which is just element ninety four,
28:19
Speaker 1: people thought about naming it ultimium because they thought maybe
28:22
Speaker 1: it was the last element anybody would ever make. And
28:25
Speaker 1: now you know, we're more than ten elements beyond it.
28:28
Speaker 1: I see, I guess maybe a question here is what's
28:30
Speaker 1: the limitation? You know, both in nature and for us
28:34
Speaker 1: as humans, like it seems like nature doesn't like making
28:38
Speaker 1: things heavier than lead or uranium or plutonium. Is that
28:42
Speaker 1: because that's just the you know, it takes too much
28:44
Speaker 1: energy to make heavier things. It takes energy, but you
28:46
Speaker 1: also have to have the ingredients, right, to make a
28:49
Speaker 1: really heavy element, you have to have the ingredients which
28:52
Speaker 1: will also be pretty heavy. And you know, these heavy
28:55
Speaker 1: elements are rare. As you get further up in the
28:57
Speaker 1: periodic table, you need things like drawn star collisions to
29:01
Speaker 1: even fabricate enough platinum or uranium or plutonium. And so
29:06
Speaker 1: to make something which is like twice as heavy as plutonium,
29:09
Speaker 1: you need some situation where you're like smashing plutonium against
29:12
Speaker 1: plutonium to make you know, I don't know what it's
29:14
Speaker 1: called double plutonium plotium exactly. So these things just get
29:20
Speaker 1: rarer and rarer, and so you just don't have them
29:22
Speaker 1: being made at all. But one question is whether these
29:26
Speaker 1: things actually already exist out there in the universe. Like
29:29
Speaker 1: it's possible that und hexium exists and it's somewhere out there,
29:34
Speaker 1: buried deep in the Earth or in the center of
29:36
Speaker 1: a neutron star. Right, Because when these heavy neutron stars crash,
29:41
Speaker 1: I mean, can anything happen, Like could it just become
29:44
Speaker 1: one giant element with a million protons in it? That's
29:48
Speaker 1: an awesome question, and you know, sort of breaks apart
29:51
Speaker 1: this whole concept of what an element is because if
29:54
Speaker 1: we talk about this thing and it's not fundamental, right,
29:56
Speaker 1: it's a special circumstances, something that appears in a spe
30:00
Speaker 1: configuration under certain pressures and temperatures. And if you push
30:04
Speaker 1: stuff together into a neutron star, I don't think you
30:06
Speaker 1: can really call that an element because I think those
30:09
Speaker 1: neutrons are in some crazy special state where they're really
30:13
Speaker 1: crammed together. And we also don't know how to calculate
30:16
Speaker 1: the details of how that works. As a whole other
30:18
Speaker 1: field of study what's going on inside neutron stars. But
30:22
Speaker 1: we talked about this one to like what's inside a
30:24
Speaker 1: black hole, and we called it black hoolium because it's
30:27
Speaker 1: some weird state of matter where these things are squished together.
30:30
Speaker 1: So the boundaries between the neutrons and protons are probably
30:33
Speaker 1: breaking down, right interesting, And what about for us as humans, Like,
30:37
Speaker 1: what's the limiting factor? Why can't we just keep smashing
30:39
Speaker 1: these heavier and heavier elements together to make super heavy elements. Well,
30:43
Speaker 1: that's what we're doing, and there's an exciting program at
30:45
Speaker 1: Berkeley and then a lab in Russia that's doing exactly that.
30:48
Speaker 1: And that's how we've made element up to one eighteen,
30:52
Speaker 1: is that we found lighter elements and we smashed them
30:54
Speaker 1: together to try to make heavy elements. But it's not easy, right,
30:58
Speaker 1: It's not easy for a couple of reasons. One is
31:01
Speaker 1: that you just don't have that much of the ingredients.
31:04
Speaker 1: For example, you want to make one seventeen, then you've
31:07
Speaker 1: got to smash berkeley um, which is into calcium which
31:12
Speaker 1: is twenty and there's not that much berkeleum around, Like
31:15
Speaker 1: it took them two years of dedicated running just to
31:19
Speaker 1: make twelve milligrams of berkeleum, which is like the minimum
31:23
Speaker 1: you need to make this target to shoot calcium ad.
31:26
Speaker 1: So it's just not easy to get the ingredients. If
31:28
Speaker 1: we had an unlimited source of all the elements we knew,
31:32
Speaker 1: we could smash them together to make heavier stuff. But
31:34
Speaker 1: it's not easy that you can just like order these
31:36
Speaker 1: ingredients on Amazon, which is probably gonna have its own
31:39
Speaker 1: elements soon Amazonium. They're all just going to be bizosium,
31:44
Speaker 1: bizosium one, zosium two. He owns everything anyway, No, he
31:48
Speaker 1: retired to any He's just the puppet master behind the
31:50
Speaker 1: scenes now. So I guess maybe my question is why
31:53
Speaker 1: can't I just take, you know, like two plutonium atoms
31:56
Speaker 1: and smash those together, you know, and then you get
31:58
Speaker 1: ninety four plus ninety four are then you get you know. Yeah.
32:02
Speaker 1: So the second reason is hard is that if you
32:04
Speaker 1: smash them together, you just get a bunch of little bits.
32:07
Speaker 1: You've got to do this thing which is sort of gentle.
32:09
Speaker 1: You gotta push them together hard enough for them to emerge,
32:12
Speaker 1: but not so hard that you destroy the outcome. Right,
32:15
Speaker 1: you shoot two plutonium nuclei together at the speeds we
32:18
Speaker 1: have the large hadron collider, you're just going to get
32:20
Speaker 1: a huge explosion. In fact, we do that at the
32:22
Speaker 1: large hadron collider. We collide usually protons and protons, but
32:26
Speaker 1: sometimes we collide gold nuclei, sometimes lead nuclei, but you
32:30
Speaker 1: don't get a stable atom, which you get is too
32:33
Speaker 1: destroyed heavy nuclei. Oh I see. I guess if you
32:36
Speaker 1: take like one thing built out of legos and you
32:39
Speaker 1: smash it against something else that lego, you don't just
32:42
Speaker 1: get one bigger thing made out of legos. You just
32:45
Speaker 1: get a big best on your floor. Probably. Yeah, But
32:47
Speaker 1: you know, if you take one brownie and you smash
32:48
Speaker 1: and get another brownie, you kind of do just get
32:51
Speaker 1: a double sized brownie. So maybe brownie physics is the
32:54
Speaker 1: way to go. Yeah, you're in the wrong. You're in
32:56
Speaker 1: the laboratory instead of the kitchen, Daniel, that's your problem. Yeah,
33:00
Speaker 1: so you've got to bring these things together. So they
33:01
Speaker 1: formed this stable state, but not with so much energy
33:05
Speaker 1: that they destroy it. So this process is actually called
33:08
Speaker 1: confusingly cold fusion. Nothing to do with the other notorious
33:12
Speaker 1: cold fusion research that was done in the nineties that
33:15
Speaker 1: try to produce energy from hydrogen fusion. This is a
33:19
Speaker 1: totally separate process that's trying to emerge nuclei of heavy
33:22
Speaker 1: atoms sort of kissed them together, so they turned into
33:24
Speaker 1: this heavier thing, and you're just quite delicate. It's like
33:27
Speaker 1: a reboot or a rebrand. It's a totally separate line
33:32
Speaker 1: of research that actually predates the crazy cold fusion. This
33:35
Speaker 1: is like actual cold fusion. And you know it makes sense.
33:38
Speaker 1: It's fusion because they're merging together heavy nuclei to make
33:41
Speaker 1: something new, and it's cold because they try not to
33:44
Speaker 1: do it too hard. Right, Well, I guess that covers
33:47
Speaker 1: why it's hard to make these super heavy elements. And
33:50
Speaker 1: we sort of talked a little bit about what makes
33:53
Speaker 1: these heavier elements possible and stable, but we still haven't
33:57
Speaker 1: talked about why we can't make these super heavy elements,
34:01
Speaker 1: or whether or not they're theoretically or practically possible. And
34:05
Speaker 1: it all seems to have to do with this concept
34:07
Speaker 1: of the island of stability. So let's get into what
34:10
Speaker 1: this island is and whether or not it makes for
34:13
Speaker 1: a pleasant vacation. First, let's take another quick break, all right, Daniel,
34:30
Speaker 1: let's talk about the island of stability. Now, this has
34:33
Speaker 1: to do with I'm guessing some sort of like special
34:36
Speaker 1: configuration that the protons and neutrons have to be in
34:39
Speaker 1: before they can make these magic numbers happen. Yeah, we
34:42
Speaker 1: look at the pattern of the number of neutrons and
34:45
Speaker 1: the number of protons that are in various atoms, and
34:48
Speaker 1: you could ask the question, like, what happens if I
34:50
Speaker 1: put seventeen neutrons and nine protons together, or a hundred
34:54
Speaker 1: and forty four neutrons and protons, what do you get?
34:59
Speaker 1: And most of the you get something unstable, which just
35:01
Speaker 1: breaks apart almost instantly. But this this diagonal line where
35:05
Speaker 1: the protons are increasing and the neutrons are increasing, and
35:07
Speaker 1: you get a bunch of stable items, and those are
35:09
Speaker 1: the elements that we know, right, but it sort of
35:12
Speaker 1: runs out at a certain point there's like the heaviest element,
35:15
Speaker 1: and above that things start to get really unstable, like
35:17
Speaker 1: we were talking about. But nuclear theorists suggest or speculate
35:23
Speaker 1: that deep beyond that, like far past the elements that
35:26
Speaker 1: we know, if you have the right number of protons
35:29
Speaker 1: and neutrons, there might be an island out there where
35:32
Speaker 1: if you put them together, they can actually be stable.
35:34
Speaker 1: They could last for a very very long time. Oh,
35:37
Speaker 1: I see, like there's a maybe a whole range of
35:40
Speaker 1: special combinations of protons and neutrons that is stable, but
35:43
Speaker 1: it's just not connected to sort of the range of
35:46
Speaker 1: stable configurations that we know about. Yeah, exactly, we have
35:49
Speaker 1: like a peninsula jutting out. You know, they have the
35:52
Speaker 1: pensula stability and then a gap, and you know, there's
35:55
Speaker 1: no configuration where you could assemble those protons and neutrons
35:59
Speaker 1: together to make something stay able. But then if you
36:00
Speaker 1: keep going, you keep going, you find this island where
36:04
Speaker 1: certain number of protons and certain number of neutrons, really
36:07
Speaker 1: large crazy numbers could maybe actually hang out together and
36:11
Speaker 1: be stable. Because I guess in general, it seems like
36:14
Speaker 1: the number of protons and the number of neutrons needs
36:17
Speaker 1: to be similar, right, Like you can't have an element
36:20
Speaker 1: with one proton and a hundred neutrons, just like you
36:23
Speaker 1: can't have an element with like a hundred protons and
36:25
Speaker 1: one neutrons. It seems like nature likes for those two
36:28
Speaker 1: numbers to be similar. Yeah, they do need to be similar,
36:31
Speaker 1: but they're not exactly equal, right, Like, for example, you
36:33
Speaker 1: tend to have more neutrons than protons, Like the line
36:37
Speaker 1: veers up off the diagonal. So for example, if you
36:41
Speaker 1: have eighty two protons in lead, then you have like
36:44
Speaker 1: a hundred and twenties six neutrons in lead. So we
36:48
Speaker 1: don't quite understand it, but it tends to prefer having
36:51
Speaker 1: more neutrons than protons. But you're right, it's about the
36:54
Speaker 1: same number. You can't go too far off the diet, right, right,
36:57
Speaker 1: And the two numbers are a little bit different again
36:59
Speaker 1: because of these magic numbers, like protons like to be
37:02
Speaker 1: happy in certain numbers and neutrons like to be happy
37:05
Speaker 1: in other numbers, and so it's getting the right combination
37:09
Speaker 1: that gives you the stable element. Yeah, exactly. And lead,
37:12
Speaker 1: for example, is one of these doublic magic ones that
37:14
Speaker 1: has eighty two protons, which is a magic number, and
37:17
Speaker 1: a hundred and twenties six neutrons, which is a magic number.
37:21
Speaker 1: I see, And that works for us for up to
37:23
Speaker 1: a certain point. But you're imagining that, or physicists are
37:26
Speaker 1: imagining that maybe there's you know, a whole set of
37:29
Speaker 1: combinations way out there, like you know, a thousand protons
37:33
Speaker 1: and two thousand neutrons that maybe also stable, just like
37:36
Speaker 1: let it, yeah exactly, not quite as far as two thousand.
37:40
Speaker 1: Nobody's gone that far, but it might be true. Right,
37:43
Speaker 1: It might be that these magic numbers just keep increasing,
37:46
Speaker 1: and we have not just one island out there at
37:48
Speaker 1: like a hundred and twenty protons, but another one at
37:51
Speaker 1: a d eighty four protons, another one even further beyond that,
37:56
Speaker 1: And so we find this island of stability. It might
37:58
Speaker 1: suggest that you could just keep going on making like
38:01
Speaker 1: riduculously heavy elements. I see, well, I guess the question,
38:05
Speaker 1: Danniel is, how do you know that they're the island
38:07
Speaker 1: and we're not the island? Like, what if we're the
38:10
Speaker 1: island and they're the continent. That sounds great. I'm happy
38:13
Speaker 1: to be on an island. I love islands. Islands are wonderful.
38:15
Speaker 1: But these other islands, we think they would be disconnected. Right,
38:18
Speaker 1: as the magic numbers increase, they get further and further apart,
38:22
Speaker 1: and so you can't get as far away from sort
38:24
Speaker 1: of this island of stability without falling into the ocean
38:28
Speaker 1: of decay. I guess you what we call it? All? Right, Well,
38:30
Speaker 1: all of this sounds a little bit theoretical. These magic
38:34
Speaker 1: numbers combinations might exist, and it might give us stable atoms.
38:38
Speaker 1: So what have pizzicts been doing to sort of explore
38:40
Speaker 1: this or confirm or deny this. Well, one thing they've
38:42
Speaker 1: been doing is just trying to make these things. And
38:44
Speaker 1: so they're trying to push the technology, like create heavier
38:48
Speaker 1: and heavier elements and see if there's this trend towards
38:51
Speaker 1: increasing stability. We don't have to actually get all the
38:53
Speaker 1: way onto the island to have an idea that it
38:56
Speaker 1: might be there. If as we make heavier and heavier elements,
39:00
Speaker 1: we see the stability to go up and up and up,
39:02
Speaker 1: and that suggests that we're like on the right path.
39:05
Speaker 1: We're like coming up the shore towards the island of stability.
39:09
Speaker 1: I see, we're like testing the waters kind of, yeah, exactly.
39:12
Speaker 1: And so for example, in the nineties, people were working
39:14
Speaker 1: on making this atom fleruvium, which is number one hundred
39:18
Speaker 1: and fourteen, and they worked on it for a long
39:20
Speaker 1: time and they saw one, like they made a single
39:23
Speaker 1: one of these atoms. What they could tell like, hey,
39:26
Speaker 1: we made one atom of this. It's hard to do, right,
39:30
Speaker 1: So they were smashing plutonium onto calcium and they were
39:34
Speaker 1: looking for individual ones. They are sensitive to individual atoms,
39:38
Speaker 1: which is pretty cool, and they made this one and
39:41
Speaker 1: it stuck around for like thirty seconds, which is crazy
39:45
Speaker 1: long for a heavy element. Right, it's not as long
39:47
Speaker 1: as we think the island of stability as we think
39:50
Speaker 1: those elements might have lifetimes and thousands, millions or billions
39:53
Speaker 1: of years, but it's much longer than the lighter elements
39:56
Speaker 1: just before. So it's sort of like this trend we
39:58
Speaker 1: were looking for. I see. So they try to make
40:01
Speaker 1: this element and it lasted for thirty seconds once once,
40:05
Speaker 1: and then they were never able to make it again. Right,
40:08
Speaker 1: people have been trying to make this again and again,
40:11
Speaker 1: but they just haven't been able to and so we
40:13
Speaker 1: don't know if that was wrong or if they got lucky.
40:16
Speaker 1: And it's just really really hard. Sometimes these experiments can
40:19
Speaker 1: go for years without making one and then get like
40:21
Speaker 1: two atoms made in a single week. It's just sort
40:24
Speaker 1: of up to luck. Wow, that's crazy. What must it
40:26
Speaker 1: feel like to have made this. It's like finding one
40:29
Speaker 1: unicorn and then it goes away, and then you're trying
40:32
Speaker 1: to tell everyone that unicorns exists exactly. And if I
40:35
Speaker 1: made a unicorn in the large Hadron collider, I'd be
40:37
Speaker 1: pretty excited, but yeah, I'd hope it was reproducible. That's
40:41
Speaker 1: for thirty seconds and then nobody else saw it, Daniel,
40:43
Speaker 1: then I would doubt my sanity and I would book
40:46
Speaker 1: a trip to the island of stability to restore myself.
40:48
Speaker 1: There you go. I guess you should have taken a
40:50
Speaker 1: selfie with it, or it didn't happen. All right. Well,
40:54
Speaker 1: let's say we do start to make these super duper
40:56
Speaker 1: heavy elements. I guess what would they be good for
41:00
Speaker 1: is making better paperweights? Well, they'd be fascinating sort of theoretically,
41:03
Speaker 1: because they would tell us that we do understand something
41:06
Speaker 1: about how the nucleus comes together, and they would help
41:08
Speaker 1: us predict like where the next island of stability is.
41:11
Speaker 1: That it's always just sort of good to learn, like
41:13
Speaker 1: at a basic level, how does the universe fit together?
41:16
Speaker 1: How can you fit these things together and can build
41:18
Speaker 1: something that hangs together? That sort of from the abstract,
41:20
Speaker 1: I just want to know area. But there are also
41:23
Speaker 1: potential practical uses. Remember that a lot of our spacecraft
41:27
Speaker 1: that we send out there to explore the universe run
41:30
Speaker 1: on nuclear fuel. For example, the Mars Rover that just landed,
41:34
Speaker 1: or Voyager and Pioneer. They're deep out into space, they
41:37
Speaker 1: have nuclear batteries on them, and super heavy elements which
41:41
Speaker 1: are not completely stable but last for a long time
41:45
Speaker 1: might be excellent sources of power for spacecraft. Oh, I see,
41:48
Speaker 1: Like you would make a super heavy element and then
41:51
Speaker 1: use the decay to like power your spaceship for a
41:54
Speaker 1: thousand years exactly. And you want your fuel to last
41:56
Speaker 1: the whole length of your trip. And so if you
41:58
Speaker 1: want to go really really far, then you need which
42:00
Speaker 1: is not totally stable. It takes a long time to decay,
42:04
Speaker 1: and so if you want to fly for a million years,
42:06
Speaker 1: then you need to find something with a half life
42:08
Speaker 1: of about a million years. I see, because if you
42:11
Speaker 1: even plutonium won't last you forever. Well, eventually all decays exactly,
42:15
Speaker 1: And the heavier elements are also denser, right, so you
42:17
Speaker 1: can carry them around in sort of smaller spaces, and
42:20
Speaker 1: you know, space is always a premium on these spacecraft. Interesting,
42:24
Speaker 1: and I guess it would also just teach us just
42:26
Speaker 1: about matter and what's possible and what corner of the
42:29
Speaker 1: universe do we exist in, Like do we exist in
42:31
Speaker 1: the the most common one? Or are we sort of
42:34
Speaker 1: a flute? Yeah, And there are crazy ideas for what
42:37
Speaker 1: these super heavy elements might look like. People have the
42:41
Speaker 1: idea that, for example, the nucleus of one of these
42:43
Speaker 1: super heavy elements like dred and eighty four protons and
42:47
Speaker 1: it might not even be spherical, you know, the way
42:49
Speaker 1: you think about like electrons having shells, and some of
42:52
Speaker 1: those things have like weird blobs in shapes to them.
42:54
Speaker 1: Some people speculate that the nucleus of a super heavy
42:57
Speaker 1: element might be sort of like a finguer eight, or
43:00
Speaker 1: it might be sort of like a bubble, like be
43:02
Speaker 1: hollow and have like no neutrons and protons inside, could
43:06
Speaker 1: be sort of like an actual physical shell. Interesting, but
43:10
Speaker 1: you would only see that if you drill down to
43:11
Speaker 1: the nucleus of this atom, right, yeah, exactly. You have
43:14
Speaker 1: to make a bunch of them and then somehow probe
43:16
Speaker 1: them by shooting particles at them. So you'd make your unicorn,
43:20
Speaker 1: and then you kill your unicorn in doing experiments on it.
43:24
Speaker 1: What if the nucleus looks like a unicorn? That's theoretically possible,
43:27
Speaker 1: isn't it. It's theoretically possible. There must be some magic
43:30
Speaker 1: number for that. It would make it very hard to
43:32
Speaker 1: shoot particles at it because it would be so cute.
43:34
Speaker 1: People like, oh, let's not study this thing, let's just
43:36
Speaker 1: let it go. Be a tragedy to see a decayed
43:39
Speaker 1: And then there are also folks who are just looking
43:42
Speaker 1: for this stuff. They think, let's not build this, let's
43:44
Speaker 1: see if it exists in nature. As you were saying,
43:47
Speaker 1: sometimes crazy stuff happens at the core of neutron stars.
43:50
Speaker 1: How do we know that these crazy heavy elements haven't
43:53
Speaker 1: already been made and just like lying in the ground
43:56
Speaker 1: waiting for us to find them. Interesting, So there's a
43:59
Speaker 1: pretty amazing possibilities out there. There are really crazy possibilities
44:02
Speaker 1: out there. And there's even a guy from Hebrew University
44:04
Speaker 1: who claimed in two thousand and eight to have discovered
44:07
Speaker 1: some of these things. He didn't see them directly, but
44:10
Speaker 1: he saw a bunch of crystals with like weird radiation
44:13
Speaker 1: damage that he claimed could only have been made by
44:15
Speaker 1: the decay of a super duper heavy element. But then again,
44:18
Speaker 1: of course other people look for the same sort of
44:20
Speaker 1: patterns and didn't spot them, so it's not really reproduced interesting,
44:24
Speaker 1: I guess. Then the hunt goes on for the heaviest
44:27
Speaker 1: element possible in the universe, both theoretically and experimentally. Yes, exactly,
44:32
Speaker 1: it's just another way we can continue to explore the
44:35
Speaker 1: nature of the universe that we find around us. We
44:38
Speaker 1: can put these building blocks together and try to create
44:40
Speaker 1: new stuff, become like masters of the universe and make
44:44
Speaker 1: new weird elements that we could then use and build
44:47
Speaker 1: stuff out of it, and also just gain insight into
44:50
Speaker 1: how matter works. Cool. Well, I've always been curious about
44:53
Speaker 1: how heavy I can get, and um, I'll let you
44:56
Speaker 1: know how that goes. Just keep shooting brownies at yourself
44:59
Speaker 1: and eventually happen. Just keep colliding brownies with my mouth.
45:04
Speaker 1: It's an experiment. It's an experiment. I promise it's for science. Yeah,
45:10
Speaker 1: all that teems like a foregone conclusion about what's gonna happen. Well,
45:13
Speaker 1: eventually you might just decay. Well, eventually we all decayed, Daniel.
45:17
Speaker 1: The question is how many brownies will you have eaten
45:20
Speaker 1: before that happens to you? I think it's an ancient
45:23
Speaker 1: question in philosophy. All right, Well, keep thinking about the
45:27
Speaker 1: universe and keep thinking about what kinds of matter could
45:29
Speaker 1: exist out there. There could be who knows, magic number
45:33
Speaker 1: figure eight elements out there that maybe look like unicorns.
45:37
Speaker 1: That's right, and we will continue to explore the universe
45:40
Speaker 1: and try to understand this stuff. Not just taking stuff
45:43
Speaker 1: apart and figuring out what it's made out of at
45:45
Speaker 1: the smallest scale, but putting it back together and trying
45:47
Speaker 1: to make new crazy stuff for us to experience, to
45:51
Speaker 1: fly us around the universe, and to make delicious new
45:53
Speaker 1: kinds of desserts. For warning, I would appreciate that. Thank
45:57
Speaker 1: you in my island of stability. Who says particle physics
46:00
Speaker 1: has no applications? All right, Well, we hope you enjoyed Dad,
46:03
Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us, See you next time. Thanks for listening,
46:13
Speaker 1: and remember that Daniel and Jorge explained. The Universe is
46:16
Speaker 1: a production of I Heart Radio or more podcast. For
46:20
Speaker 1: my heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
46:24
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.