The Blues Elements

The word of the day at Scott's Post-Hip is "Joliotium", which sounds like it ought to be a name of an element, but I've never heard of it before. Naturally we start speculating on the origin of the name and the only thing we can think of is Joliet Jake, and if an element has been named for him, can Elwoodium be far behind?

Turns out the name Joliotium comes from Frédéric Joliot-Curie, who was an assistant to Marie Curie and married her daughter, Irene. He and Irene won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1935 for their work in trying to figure out the structure of an atom. Joliot also won the Stalin Peace Prize. The Stalin Peace Prize? Isn't that like an oxymoron?

But the name Joliotium didn't get picked as the name of element 105. Seems to have been a bit of an issue. The Russians wanted to name element 105 for a Danish physicist, while the Americans wanted to name it for a German chemist. Neither of those guys got picked either. Element 105 was eventually dubbed Dubnium (what? They named it namium? You know, like "I dub thee Sir Dub") after the town of Dubna, Russia, (about 50 miles North of Moscow) where the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research  is located.

The picture is supposedly of Seaborgium, which was discovered around the same time. I don't know how you could tell, I think it's just an artist's concept anyway. It certainly doesn't have enough balls to represent all the hadrons in a nucleus of Dubnium, and if those are supposed to be atoms, well, they are all different sizes, which does not make sense. Could be actual macroscopic balls of the material, but I don't think they ever made enough that you could make a picture of it.

While I was looking for a picture for this post I came across an interactive chart of the electron structure of atoms. It's kind of cool. I also found a page of mysterious French charts about a bunch of the heaviest atoms. They don't mean anything to me, but if you need to baffle someone with bullshit, they might come in handy.