Periodic Table Swells as Three New Elements Named
Author: Richard Gray
Source: The Telegraph
Date published: 05 Nov 2011
Three new super heavy, unstable elements were added to the Periodic Table of Elements after The General Assembly of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) gave them approval. Physicists from 60 countries are part of this organization. Those elements are called darmstadtium (Ds), roentgenium (Rg) and copernicium (Cn). They can only be made in laboratories and they remain in a stable form only for a few hundredths of a second. Scientists know about these elements for more than 15 years. Element 112, copernicium (Cn), was named in honor of the famous Polish astronomer Nikola Kopernik who was the first to come to the conclusion that the Earth is round, and not flat as the Catholic church was teaching for ages. Element 111, roentgenium (Rg) was named in honor of Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen, a German scientist and Nobel prize winner, who discovered X rays in 1895. Element 110, Darmstadtium (Ds) was named after the city of Darmstadt in Germany where it was produced.
This article connects with the unit we are studying because it is about the Periodic Table of Elements. This is probably good for human society, but bad for student society, because we will now have to study 112 elements instead of 109. I chose this article because it was very interesting. It shows that in science there is no final things, because science is an always changing category. We could expect even more new elements to be discovered in the future and become a part of the Periodic Table.
NOTE: In the text it says that Nikola Kopernik is called Nicolaus Copernicus. It also says that this Polish scientist in Prussian.
ReplyDeleteTHEY ARE WRONG!!!
NIKOLA KOPERNIK IS A POLISH SCIENTIST!!!