Chapter 7 summary and reflection

Chapter 7 mainly focused on the discoveries of the last elements of the periodic table. The discoveries of the last elements started a fued between naming rights to a point where the IUPAC had to step in and give the final names of the elements. Glenn Seaborg and Albert Ghiorso together found at least one-sixth of the elements on the table. The discovery of these elements had people at UC Berkeley and Russia. Seaborg and Ghiorso worked at UC Berkeley and together discovered the most elements than anyone else in history. The experiments that came with discovering elements were doable but one mistake could ruin the experiment. One experiment was done at midnight because radioactive samples had to be transferred from one lab to another, a mile away. One of the highlights was when the team discovered element 101, when the radiation detector detected element 101, the fire alarm shrieked (Ghiorso wired the detector to the fire alarm). This happened during the cold war and the element was named mendelevium in honor of Dmitri Mendeleev. After finding element 103, the Russians stepped into the game.

The Russians found element 104 in 1964 before the Berkeley team did and later discovered element 105. But both teams found element 106 just months apart and the feud for naming rights began. The dispute ran into the 1990s and finally the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry stepped in. They studied the data of both teams and came up with a list of names. Both teams had lists of names they wanted and when the Americans didn't see seaborgium on the list, they basically denounced the names publically. Finally, the IUPAC came up with a final, no contest list of names that included: rutherfordium (104), dubnium (105), seaborgium (106), borhium (107), hassium (108), and meitnerium (109). Seaborg became the first person to have an element named after them while being alive.

I found this chapter really interesting and amusing. I found the whole name debate amusing but understandable. Learning about how the table was completed and how was very educational and enternaining because the process was something really fascinating to me. I still liked how Kean wrote this whole chapter because the way it's written makes it seem like a fast-paced action movie because you don't know who is going to discover the newest element and what the name is going to be. If I had to tell my bae something about this chapter, it would be the discovery of element 101 because I found it funny how the radiation detector was connceted to the fire alarm and how the bell shrieked a total of 17 times, when the process was repeated.