This is the race for the periodic table
November 18, 2022 3:20 PM   Subscribe

Bobby Broccoli brings you the tale of the the man who tried to fake an element (a 1 hour and 19 minutes long YouTube essay).
posted by Pendragon (8 comments total) 8 users marked this as a favorite
 
Good stuff, this one.
posted by wierdo at 4:43 PM on November 18, 2022


Also, if watching this doesn't satisfy all your element discovery needs, PBS Space Time's most recent video speculates about the possibilities of the island of stability and talks about what makes certain elements radioactive.
posted by wierdo at 4:46 PM on November 18, 2022 [3 favorites]


A bit of a wormhole. I tried not to but started to crawl down and found ... the G.O.O.S.Y. manual. This is the software used to look at the data for confirmation of elements. DECNet and Motif and PL/1 oh my.
posted by Richard Upton Pickman at 7:51 PM on November 18, 2022 [4 favorites]


I found this a few months ago (not sure where, maybe here?) but I much prefer the look and feel of a valley rather than a mountain peak. And this narrator does an excellent job explaining how it all works.
posted by Meatbomb at 1:47 AM on November 19, 2022 [1 favorite]


OK, I'm enjoying this so far, but can someone please tell me I'm not the only one who had a bodily reaction to hearing "technetium" pronounced with a hard 't' like that?
posted by solotoro at 1:20 PM on November 19, 2022


I see hear your techniTium and raise you nuclei as a singular cell centre.
I won't say that my chemistry education stalled when I left High School 50 years ago but my internalized periodic table stops at 103 Lw, so this was a handy update and infill for me.
posted by BobTheScientist at 1:36 PM on November 19, 2022 [1 favorite]


Another great video series by Bobby Broccoli is the one about the Superconducting Super Collider. It's almost three hours long though.
posted by Pendragon at 2:27 PM on November 19, 2022 [2 favorites]


I see hear your techniTium and raise you nuclei as a singular cell centre. .

Completely off topic, I'm afraid, but the one that really has me snarling and gritting my teeth is "bacteria" for a single bacterium. I suspect this is the sort of language shift you can't do much about though, and only really notice if you are pretty old.
posted by Fuchsoid at 1:23 AM on November 20, 2022


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