Anniversary of the Periodic Table

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Hello, welcome to the Infinite.

I did a very special hello, by the way.

That was what we call the podcast hello, which means that because slightly younger people often listen to BBC Sounds for their podcasts, I go, hello.

Can I just explain who that is?

That's Robin Ince.

I'm Brian Cox, and you are listening to the BBC Infinite Monkey Cage podcast on BBC Sounds, which you know because presumably you've downloaded it.

Hello, I'm Brian Cox.

And I'm Robin Inks.

Inside the Infinite Monkey Cage, we are usually looking forwards towards the future of science.

Although, in the block universe of general relativity, it's not possible to arrive at a global definition of simultaneity, and therefore, the difference between the past and the future is not well defined.

This means, in turn, that this introduction is not well defined, and I shouldn't really have said it.

This, by the way, is one of the reasons that Brian is very rarely on any BBC Two or Channel 5 nostalgia shows, right?

If you try and put him on something like I Love the 70s, you go.

So tell us a little bit about the Nolans.

Well, I don't know.

Did that happen in the past or the future?

Were they in the mood for dancing then, or will they be in the mood for dancing in a different nature of the space structure?

Can you just tell us about the first time you saw Linda Nolan?

Well, I can't really, because when we had Jim Al Khalili on, he talked about Brotherhood of Man and he was brilliant.

He even did the dance moves, right?

Anyway.

As I said, we are usually looking into the future, but today we will be looking into the past to celebrate one of the great scientific achievements of the 19th century: the 150th anniversary of the periodic table of the elements.

How was the periodic table discovered?

How did it revolutionize our understanding of chemistry?

And what does it tell us about the building blocks of the universe?

Joining us to discuss the periodic table, we have three people who are made of antimony, arsenic, aluminium, selenium, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, rhenium, nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium, iron, meritium, ruthenium, uranium, europium, zirconium, litanium, vanadium, vanthoma, lots of them, bismuth, brominum, and lithium, beryllium.

In fact, they're not, because if you were made of those things, you may well have exploded already.

And they are.

So I'm Andrea Sela, I'm professor of chemistry at UCL.

And for me, I should mention my most underrated element is mercury.

And that's, if you remember, Bruce Lee said, I am, you know, be water.

Well, I think if you really want to protest things, then be mercury, because then you've got power.

I'm Professor Polly Arnold, I'm from the University of Edinburgh, and I think that Neptunium is the most underrated element.

It's not naturally occurring, and it's an important part of nuclear waste.

But it sits between uranium and plutonium, and you can't make a bomb out of it, and therefore a scary film.

I'm Katie Brand, and I'm a comedian and writer.

I think the most underrated element for me is neon,

because it always gave me a frisson of excitement in chemistry lessons, which I largely didn't understand at all.

Because whenever neon was mentioned, I could get all excited and think about Las Vegas and my showbiz dreams.

And this is our panel.

Right, Polly, I feel under no pressure whatsoever because when we had a little kind of run-through beforehand, check the mics, and I accidentally said neodymium, and you said, please don't do that again.

You did that four years ago, but no pressure now that is a memory of a chemist

so neodymium first of all but secondly the periodic table what is it what is the periodic table it's it's the thing that means I don't have to memorize stuff it's what makes my job easy and it's what made me choose chemistry as the subject as I grew up it's the one that allows you to

look at any particular formula or any particular element and go yeah I think I know how that's going to behave that's going to fit and I know how many bonds I'm going to be able to make to it, and what I can make from it, and what it might be useful for.

Whether it's magnetic, maybe, whether it's shiny,

whether it will

not explode.

And can you describe it?

Because this is clearly a radio programme, so many people will know the periodic table, but could you talk us through roughly how the elements are arranged?

Yeah, so basically, if it's almost a simple rectangle, and if you read it from left to right and then top to bottom, as you would read a book in the Western world,

everything it reads in order of increasing nuclear mass by one.

So the reason it forms a table and a structure is because there are only so many orbitals we can put electrons.

Every time you increase the nucleus by one, you have to add an electron as well.

So your nucleus has a bunch of protons and neutrons, and then it has enough electrons to balance the protons.

So as you start to fill from hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, et cetera, et cetera, I'm not going to sing it because it's in the wrong order, and that really bothers me actually.

It's quite embarrassing.

Quite embarrassed.

I really hate that song.

I used to really squirm, and my mother used to try and sing it to me

because we were bonding, right?

It's a weird song.

That Tom Leara song is a lullaby.

It's not that.

And I love the fact you thought you were bonding.

That's very true.

Anyway, we've gone off topic already.

already, and I haven't done this before.

So, the thing that stops it from being a perfect rectangle is because as you get heavier, you don't just put your electrons in simple spheres, simple circular orbits around your nucleus.

You start to put them into different orbitals, and those orbitals have shapes.

So, they become more and more flower-like as you get heavier.

So, the first orbital you can put a couple in, and then you put a couple more, and then you start to put the next set, and you can put six in those.

And so, that's why, when you look at the periodic table, you'll see that it's the particular one that we all the wheel that I learned love

has those structures where it's narrower on the edges and then it gets bigger in the middle.

And that's because as you get to the larger ones, you can start to use really interesting orbitals, which are the d orbitals and the f orbitals.

And those have wonderful shapes.

And you can put tons of electrons in those.

And then the electrons can do what they like in a way.

They can start to move between orbitals

without really affecting the molecule that you started with.

And then you get really cool properties like electrical properties and magnetic properties.

And you can make flat-screen TVs out of them.

You can make quantum magnets.

It's an interesting picture.

So, really, what we're seeing is the increasing complexity and the shapes and the numbers of electrons around

nuclei and so on.

Yeah.

But which is remarkably interesting because we're talking about something that was first written down before we knew even of the existence of atoms.

Yeah, so the guys who made it who put it together and Mendeleev, who saw the structure of it, they did a ton of work, not knowing what they were working with, to put everything into this shape.

And as a result, I don't have to do that ton of work because I can predict how things are going to react just by looking at where the thing is on the periodic table.

So they made my life much easier.

So is there anything, Andrea, on the periodic table, which does not fit into?

I mean, generally, is that an acceptable rule of thumb?

If it's in that line there, if it's there, then this means the reaction will be similar to the one nearest to it.

Or is there something where you go, ah, now that one I wasn't expecting and now I have to glue my eyebrows back on?

Well,

I mean, the marvel of the periodic table is that when you look down the columns of it, then you know that the chemistry is going to be pretty related.

So lithium, sodium, potassium, rubidium, those, you know, you know that they're going to react pretty violently with water.

But the

first column.

So that's the first column on the left, or for example, the last column on the right, the noble gases.

And you mentioned neon earlier.

Those elements are kind of famous in a way for the fact that originally they didn't seem to have any chemistry at all.

And so what you find is that they're all kind of similar in each column.

Now

the table was kind of put together based on these observations.

And that's a really important point is that when the periodic table was actually assembled, it was simply a descriptive scheme.

It was something which took what seemed to be a jumble of elements.

And the first person really to write down the list of all the elements was Lavoisier who wrote a book with his wife although she didn't get credit for it or authorship but he and Madame Lavoisier Marie they wrote this book which was called the Traité élémentaire de chimie the elementary treatise of chemistry so a good pun thrown in there too and they listed all the all the elements that existed at the time but it was simply a list What were the connections between them?

How did they work?

How many might there be?

That was a complete mystery.

And when the periodic table was put together, there was suddenly this scheme which caused everything to fit together, but without an explanation.

And that's the thing that didn't come until the 20th century.

And so the periodic table is this triumph of organization of the elements.

They fit all together very neatly, but why?

Hey, that would come later.

What are your memories of it, Katie?

Because everyone, I think, remembers the periodic table from school.

And everyone remembers sitting there and almost learning the topic.

I think we had to memorize some of it, not all of it, fortunately, but some of it.

Yeah, we, well, I mean, my memories of chemistry are kind of hazy because I spent most of it outside of the classroom because I'd been sent out.

Mainly because I would join in with the boys who spent most of the chemistry lessons having a competition to see who could hold their hand in a buns and flame for the longest.

So there was that kind of atmosphere going on.

So, as I think I've said before, because I wasn't really taught maths till I was eight or nine, because I went to this Catholic school, we were taught by nuns and we just did art and Jesus.

They didn't really, they suspected maths, they treated maths with a high level of suspicion.

So I was always behind.

So then by the time we got to chemistry, I was just completely at sea with it.

And the periodic table, I remember being given it, and the first thing that has annoyed me about it was why couldn't they just make it a neat rectangle?

Just move those, they just slot in nicely and make a nice neat rectangle around it.

I'm trying to explain that it's because of the structure of the electrons around the well now.

I know that.

But at the time, I just remember saying, and thinking, why does everything come back to 12, not 10?

And I would ask that, and my chemistry teacher said, oh, you can't ask why in science.

And then

so I would just, oh my God, one guy actually that I knew tried to help me and he gave me a book to try and explain chemistry and all about this sort of notion that it all comes down to the number 12 and all of this.

But the illustrations in the books explained everything via the medium of bags of rats.

I know I sound like I'm making this up, but there were all these diagrams.

It was like, say scientist one has a bag of 12 rats.

I was just like, hang on, but now we're into rats.

I don't even understand.

So it seemed like a weird...

They weren't rats.

Oh, okay, what were they?

They were moles.

Oh.

They were moles.

So that was a pun.

Oh, you right now.

Okay.

Yeah.

I'm so glad that I do this show.

It's like my whole life just comes into focus here.

The mole, the mole, which comes from the Italian word mole, meaning quantity.

And molecola is a a little mole, a little quantity of matter.

This is a beautiful moment for me.

It's not rats at all.

That's magnificent.

You've gone on through all these years thinking that it was about little animals in the back.

What I liked was the initial reaction from this audience, because they're younger than the average Radio 4 audience, was a kind of anti-pun moment.

And then they've gone, oh, it's real.

He really was.

We just presumed it was going to be a pun.

Last week we did a show about the science of dreaming, and we were actually hearing about Mendeleev that was in a dream.

He spent days and nights trying to get the sense of the periodic table that he ultimately achieved.

And it was actually within his kind of dream work that he then found the pattern he was looking for.

Is that true?

I mean, that's always the legend.

And actually in chemistry, there are quite a few legends about people having dreams and daydreaming and so on.

And sometimes I think those are after-the-fact rationalizations.

I mean, Mendeleev wasn't working completely in a vacuum.

and there were others who had started to see patterns well before that.

I mean, the first was a man called Derberiner, who's really important because he's the first guy to invent the cigarette lighter.

And so he really sort of set us up for the future.

But

Derberiner is quite interesting because he was an early chemist and you know, as many German intellectuals at the time, he was a Freemason and therefore interested in numbers.

And he became fixated on the number three and the fact that he could find three elements and he could link three elements at a time.

So he could link chlorine, bromine, and iodine.

He could link lithium, sodium, and potassium.

He could connect nitrogen, phosphorus, and arsenic.

And what here, again, numerology, yes, they came in threes like Mozart's magic flute, which is his great Masonic opera.

But

the interesting thing is that he took the atomic weights, and that was the only thing thing that people knew about elements, apart from their properties, was the atomic weight.

And if you took the

light.

I'm going to define what atomic weight is.

Okay, so the atomic weight is really a reflection of what the mass of the atom is.

And so if you have a collection of a standard amount, the standard amount we call the mole, not the rat,

then

the atomic weight, you express the atomic weight in grams.

Now, all they had were weights.

Nowadays, of course, we talk about mass, but they only had balances at the time, so they were weighing things.

And so they had these weights, and so if you took lithium and potassium and took the average of them, you got a number which was very close to sodium.

If you took chlorine and iodine, you took the average, you got something that was very close to bromine.

And he suggested that there was a law of triads.

And these kinds of numerological games are something that go on all the way through the 19th century.

There's then a man called Newlands, a Londoner, in fact, and I'm leaving out lots of important people.

But Newlands proposed a law of octaves.

By then, he had more elements to work with.

And he imagined that maybe the thing that related the elements was actually, it was like music, it was like harmony, that there was, you know, every eight elements, ah, you came back to something similar to what you had before.

When he proposed this to the Royal Institute of Chemistry, he was laughed out of the place.

They shattered him down.

They told him he was a half-wit.

What was he talking about?

And of course, the point is that this was just a description.

And when two people, because although we always talk about Mendeleev, there's another man who comes up with exactly the same scheme at almost exactly the same time, they were unaware of each other, his name was Lotzar Meyer.

And he came to it in a slightly different way, but he essentially came up with the same diagram.

When they put everything together, what they had was a description, but without explanation.

Polly, could you, if we choose a column of the periodic table, and whichever one, let's say the lithium, sodium, potassium, there's three elements in the first column underneath hydrogen in one line.

Could you describe, sort of characterize those elements?

I mean,

what kind of experiments do you do?

What do you look at?

How do you say that?

In what sense are they the same?

Yeah, the moment you see them all in that row and you see where they are on the periodic table, you know that they're going to lose one electron really easily, and then they will become the cation.

And so, for sodium, for example, that would give you sodium chloride, which is salt, which is the one we think about.

And you know that if anyone tries to tell you that you can take a second one away, that's almost impossibly ridiculous because you're back at the full, complete shells underneath.

But they knew nothing about that.

I'm thinking in the 1860s when they knew before, they knew nothing about that.

Well, so in no sense, were they the same?

Because when they would react them, if they made the chloride, they would see exactly the same mass of the product they would make.

So they would make sodium chloride, or they would make potassium chloride or lithium chloride, and they'd have the same amount.

And then if they react with oxygen, they'd see exactly the same thing, and you would pick up two of each of those metals because oxygen can bind to two things.

So they all behave in the same way, like if you had sodium chloride, obviously salt.

Yeah.

If you had potassium chloride, can you just eat it?

You can, it's in low salt.

And then the same with the

rubidium quite similar.

Oh, so this is where we get to Andrea telling us how everything tastes.

If you taste them.

And remember, you know, in the 19th century, they had very few ways to, you know, chemists use the word characterize, in other words, to define the properties unambiguously.

So to characterize something, what could they do?

Well, they could see if it dissolved in water, they could see maybe if it melted, but then you would taste things.

And what you found was that, you know, salts, we call them salts, because they all have a slightly salty taste, and they vary a bit.

When I was in school, I wrote an essay on the periodic trends in the salts in the lab, and I almost got kicked out of chemistry, but it was quite interesting because there are definitely trends.

Have you eaten rubidium chloride?

I have tasted rubidium chloride.

It's quite interesting.

It's smart to get high risk to just do chemistry.

Oh, no, no, no.

Oh, yes, yes, yes.

Can I just go with

caution about that?

For radio four listeners, let's go with Polly's answer yes, yes, not no, no, as well.

So, what's the weirdest one?

So, is it francium chloride?

Francium, sorry.

What happens if you do that?

There are too few atoms of that.

Yeah, it's a wee bit radioactive.

You might want to do that.

You know, Andrea, your approach to chemistry, I think, is a very kind of hands-on, tongue-out approach.

Whereas, you know,

would you say yours is different?

I'm definitely tongue-in on this one.

No tongues.

My group do a lot of work with the rare earths and with the actinides.

With the what, sorry?

The rare earths.

The rare earths.

Oh, the rare earths that are.

So just to put that in concept, these are the ones that I was always, because I did A-level chemistry and I was always very, we didn't do them very much.

So, this is the bit that's detached, if you remember the periodic table.

There's some bit that's always stuck on the bottom with names that I no one ever knows.

I can't even pronounce them.

Actually, you you could maybe yeah well I I actually did memorize that part of the periodic table.

Yeah, I know.

So, I would say lakepena pum some you good tub dihoya tum ya blue, but Andrea would say

late night parties lately lately college parties never produce sexy European girls that drink heavily

even though you look or something it was it was

much harder

it's mnemonic I can trace it to a particular professor who I think was

a particular logo party

too

so so so these so these names I think most people will won't have heard of any of these things

and I love them all so my children what's what's the point of them?

What do they do?

Well, that's what I got excited about at the beginning.

These are the F-block elements, right?

And there are two rows of them.

We call them the 4F and the 5F because that's the main orbitals that you're filling the electrons in.

But the 4Fs, you would have heard talk about in the media as the rare earths or the lanthanides.

And then the 5Fs, that's Berby Dragons, because that's thorium, uranium, and then all the really

good.

Exactly.

So the rare earths are interesting because

they're the spices of technology.

They're in absolutely everything that we have that is cool, but in very, very tiny amounts.

They're the things that give us colours in our mobile phone screens.

They're in the magnets in our cars, in wind turbines.

They're in the little tiny, tiny, very powerful magnets in your phones that

make them vibrate.

So very important.

Vibration, tiny things.

Is that magnets?

Of course.

I've never even thought about it.

So that's a little magnet made of an element in the phone that's that's just makes a little very simple device that vibrates.

And these are quite complicated things.

50, 60 electrons or something like that.

No, no, no.

So, you put 14 electrons in the

whole thing.

Oh, we see, yeah, but those are all in the shells underneath, so you don't have to worry about those.

You do if you're a computational chemist, because they're going to change the size and they're going to give you relativistic effects, which make the electrons go in funny places, and means it's difficult to predict their properties.

So, they worry about them.

And it we like them because that means that no one's yet worked out how they're going to react, which means we can do what we like and everything's exciting.

We always head off trying to make something we think is going to be cool, and then we'll head off in a totally different tangent when it turns green in the middle of the reaction.

I mean, if I could just say one thing: I mean,

what Polly hasn't talked about is just how technically demanding the kinds of chemistry that she does is.

To give you a kind of climbing analogy, I would regard myself as being someone who is pretty good on a climbing wall in a gym or something.

You know, she's up there in the sort of free solo, kind of

Honold

type of level.

They're incredibly difficult because they're unbelievably water-sensitive, unbelievably oxygen-sensitive.

And then she has the insane idea of going for Neptunium of all unbelievably radioactive things and try and explore that chemistry.

That's why we work on neptunium, because we don't understand it.

And we really need to, because it's a really important part of nuclear waste.

So these are, when you talk about the difficult to work with, sensitive to water, sensitive to oxygen, you mean they're highly reactive, basically.

So, if you put this thing just on the table now,

some well, neptunium is radioactive, but any

of these things, it just reacts and doesn't explode when it comes to it.

There are isotopes of neptunium that will last on the table for a million years, and that's why they're an important part of nuclear waste.

When you were talking about nuclear waste and how you manage the waste and all of that, it just reminded me of a documentary I saw a few years ago that just chilled me to the bone.

I'm sorry if this is a bit off-topic, but it was about dealing with waste that was going to be radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years and

what they were trying to do with it.

And they built this kind of lead bunker,

I think maybe in Norway, I can't remember, many, many sort of meters under the ground, all lined with lead.

And they put this stuff in it, and they were planning to use it to put more stuff that's just going to be radioactive forever.

But what was amazing, just from someone who's a bit more comfortable in terms of the world of language rather than chemistry, was they were trying to figure out how to warn whoever or whatever exists on this planet in 100,000 years.

This is a really interesting thing.

That's what was going to be inside this, and that they mustn't open it.

Because you can't just necessarily write it in Norwegian or English or Mandarin.

Who knows?

You might have to write it in binary code.

Maybe some kind of weird deer language that the deer have evolved and that they're now the primary species.

How do you warn a species 100,000 years in advance?

We talked about

making

blue trees that glowed in the dark, and everyone would go, Oh, that's so horrific.

I'm never going to go and dig up and see what's going on.

Oh, really?

So, they have arguments about what language to write the signs in.

And has there been any decisions out of interest?

No, so the current consensus is that we should separate out all the smorgasbord of our elements and isotopes that are in our nuclear waste, and then we can separate them out and take the really nasty ones and we can bombard those with, pacify them with neutrons, and then we only have to store the waste for as long as Edinburgh Castle has been standing.

Amazing.

Well, it's gone, has it?

You know how long.

Oh, it's been standing.

In terms of what we know about the periodic table, now, I mean, you're talking, of course, now there are additions to the periodic table which have been made, constructed.

But in terms of naturally occurring elements, do we believe the periodic table is?

Because I know Mendeleev, when he first put it, he went, there's a blank there, but we're going to find that.

That will exist.

Are there still blanks within the naturally occurring?

Ah, Andrea.

We actually have some of Mendeleev's blanks here.

There is gallium and there is germanium.

I've got them here in little blocks.

Can we just describe what those are?

So you said there were blanks, missing elements in the table when it was first written.

When Mendeleev put together his periodic table, when Mendeleev and Meyer put together their periodic table, the interesting thing was that there were certain, they appeared to be gaps.

There were things that should be in that position and that weren't there.

Meyer kind of slid slid over that, but Mendeleev said very explicitly, there must be something called, and he called them Ica aluminium, he called them Ica silicon, you know, those were his kind of invented names.

And that was really something for chemists to go and look for.

And so very gradually, up until about 1930, right, the various gaps that were in the periodic table, the last one really was the element technetium, which sits right in the middle of the transition metals.

And that filled all those gaps.

But the point about Mendeleev was that he had no way of knowing how many columns there could be, how many elements might be possible.

And the answer to that came around just before the First World War from a man called Moseley who showed by shining x-rays that that number that we've called one, two, three, four, five, corresponded to the charge on the nucleus.

And so now, because you know that there are protons and there are electrons, once you have one, two, three, four, five, you can't have five and a half.

You can't have anything in the gaps.

And therefore, the only place to look for new elements is down at the bottom, right?

And now we've got to 118,

and that's where it gets kind of interesting.

I can't even read that name.

What's it called?

Organesson.

Is that the last one?

Organesson.

Yes.

So it's named after Yuri Organesson.

Organession.

Organession, yes.

So element 118, so that means it's got 118 protons, lots of neutrons, who knows,

and then 118 electrons around it.

So, that's its chemistry.

Yeah.

Which is actually the same as helium, right?

Well, huh.

Is it?

That's a really good question.

According to the.

I only said that because for the radio listeners, it's in the same column.

Yeah.

Helium argon, your favourite thing, neon.

So the same colour.

They haven't

really made enough atoms of it yet to be able to do any of its chemistry.

Who's they?

They, the super heavies, the atom smashers.

To make these ones, you have to smash atoms.

So

they're people who just sit there and make

knitting, yeah, they get their little knitting.

No, gosh, that would be nice, wouldn't it?

No, they take a ton of your taxes and they build giant cyclotrons and they smash atoms together.

The problem is that they do a lot of maths before they waste your taxes on smashing them together.

So they will calculate that they're going to need something like californium and they're going to have to bombard it with molybdenum all the other way around.

So, and to make them, the maths will often show that they have to take one particularly radioactive isotope and smash it into another particularly radioactive isotope or of two different elements.

And so, it's quite a lot of work to get to this point.

We've discovered the easiest ones basically.

So, the people who are getting to these now

will be

using a lot of protective gear to fire radioactive things at other radioactive targets.

So, yeah, they're pretty hardcore.

I did get the sense when you were explaining that that some of the money you feel should go into Neptunian research was going to merit.

I like the sound of Californium.

I'd have been much more into it if I'd known it.

And I've just noticed one called Livermorium, which is going to be my new toast, I think, when I have a drink.

Livermorium!

What does that do?

Tell us what Livermorium is.

We used to play the game, what would you build your spaceship out of?

But yeah, none of these are contenders for that game.

Well, definitely.

There's a lot that have been

named after California, and a lot of them were discovered in or discovered or made or smashed, yeah, the products of smashing together in Berkeley in the labs there.

They had an 88-inch cyclotron, which is still called 88-inch because they haven't gone metric yet.

And

that's where Seaborg made so many of them.

So Seaborg was the famous chemist who

they wanted to name an element after him, but at the time he wasn't dead, so it was officially not allowed.

And eventually, they finished their argument, they named the element after him, and his daughter got very distressed because she thought her father had died.

So, Organessian is in quite a nice position, so he's still alive and he has an element named after him.

So, that's cool.

This is what I want to know both your opinions on this.

About

three and a half years ago, there was a campaign to get one of the recently discovered or recently created heavy metals named after Lemmy.

Lemmy from Moted, and they wanted to call it Lemium.

And it was decided, do you feel it should have been called Lemium?

Because I feel, as a big fan of Moted, I think that would have been a wonderful way to remember the man.

Why are scientists so sniffy about that particular area of rock and roll?

I think it's the issue.

The issue is not rock and roll.

It's really whether it is wise to have a referendum to define the name of an element.

Right?

I think

it's a slippery slippery slope.

Right?

So, you think this was going to be another of those kind of, you know, potassium-potassium face kind of things?

It could be hugely divisive.

Would you, um, I met Lemmy about 20 years ago.

Would you like to hear a brief story about Lemmy that I've met?

Yeah, why not?

Yes.

Well, hello.

So, when I met Lemmy, he was very, very nice, very friendly.

He wanted three bottles of Jack Daniels in his dressing room, which were duly provided, which he steadily worked his way through.

You honestly couldn't tell.

That man could have flown a plane after three bottles of Jack Daniels.

And he told us that he had heard, I think it was Keith Richards, had had a full blood transfusion in the 60s because to try to detoxify himself from all the drugs and drink he had.

So Lemmy had gone to the doctor, he told us this directly.

He'd gone to the doctor to ask whether he himself could have one of these

to purify all of his blood and have all new blood.

And his doctor told him he couldn't because the shock of clean blood to his organs would kill him instantly.

This is the if we s if we look at this is the ingredients list, you know, terrestrial ingredients list.

Is there any thought that as we hopefully explore further into the universe, you would find in other places, in other environments, that that would mean there were occurring other elements, that this is the ingredients list of this planet, but as we go beyond it, we would find there is the possibility we would find other naturally occurring elements.

I've always thought that if I was going to talk to an alien race, then I would take the periodic table because that would be the way I would, you know, make them, you know, we would be able to communicate that.

You know, maybe with Brian as well, we could even talk.

Yeah,

this is the laws of nature written out here.

So that's why.

Well, they're universal.

But you're right.

There is a possibility that there could be more out there

beyond in the lower levels that are stable, but this is only according to calculations that are being done by only according to really difficult calculations being done by frighteningly clever theorists who suggest that there is something called the island of stability, which is one of the reasons that I'm actually very happy for my taxes to still pay for people to smash.

It's the island of stability.

Yeah, it's got a great

novel, I think.

Well, maybe we could become the island of stability again one day.

Yeah, there are people who say that you might be able to get to

a really, really large number of protons and neutrons in a land far away, in some shells,

where

you would reach a stable nuclear configuration again.

So there might be elements that we can fuse together that will last long enough that we can actually do chemistry with them.

And so this means going beyond number 118 to 119, 120, 121.

People are going this already, they're already looking.

People are desperately trying to do this, right?

I mean, it's a fascinating quest.

But one of the interesting questions is: will the periodic table actually still hold?

In other words, will the chemical properties still fit the pattern?

In other words, if you get something that is below francium, and that would be element 119,

will that be something that very easily loses one electron, that forms a nice one-to-one salt with chlorine.

And you can't eat it.

And you're the one

that will taste salty if you eat it.

Is it all about seasoning for you?

I just want to put a disclaimer on the end of this programme because it's played out, I should say, the first time during the school run on Monday.

So we should just say, don't taste the chemical elements in the lab.

without permission, written permission from somebody.

Hopefully though they haven't got the keys to the lab.

I mean hopefully, if they're going into the lab, hopefully, there's someone else with them that's going to give them that advice.

Okay, I'm being overly sensitive.

So, anyway, we asked the audience a question as well, and as we always do, and today we asked them, if you discovered an element, what would you name it after and why?

And unsurprisingly, the first answer is Brian, because it would be absolutely amazing.

And I'm doing that with the number of A's that were placed in that, by the way.

I love this one from David, a current affairs answer.

Prime Ministerium, the element of transience.

Oh, yeah, because each of its newly discovered isotopes has an ever-decreasing half-life.

That's from David.

Have you got any there?

I've got some here, yes.

I've got Chesteroneum.

This one was anonymous.

A special ginger element named after my ginger cat.

So that's nice.

Yeah.

Auditorium, but I would not want to make a song and dance about it.

That's from board dry.

It's a lovely one from Aiden.

My mum, Isabel, an element on her own, stable enough, but needs careful handling.

I'd name it Shellium for gender equality with helium.

Next week is the final episode in the series, and we end roughly as we began.

We kind of began with a while ago with the 50th anniversary Apollo special, and we end with another space exploration special with our two British astronauts.

We have Helen Charmin and Tim Peake on the show, and

it is going to be very exciting.

We are going to find out basically if anyone here, any of us have what it takes to be an astronaut.

And I think we're all hoping that we have goblin takes because never have people wanted to leave the planet Earth as much as they do now.

So we'll see you next time.

Bye-bye.

In the infinite monkey cage.

Till now, nice again.

Thanks very much for listening.

We hope you enjoyed the podcast.

We hope you understood it.

They will have enjoyed it.

Well, they might not have done.

There might have been a point where you said something that was confounding, or one of our guests said something which made them go, this is much harder than I thought.

So why would they have listened all the way to the end if they didn't enjoy it?

Just to impress their friends.

All right.

Well, anyway, if you did enjoy it, then there are lots of other Infinite Monkey Gage podcasts you can download on BBC Sounds.

If you didn't enjoy it, you can download somebody else's podcast on BBC Sounds.

We leave the choice to you.

I say we leave the choice to you, but as I've told everyone before, Free Wheel's an illusion.

You think you've got choice.

Go on, choose something else you're not really choosing.

Anyway, enjoy the podcast you believe you've chosen next.

Hello, I just wanted to tell you about my new podcast.

It's called Classical Fix, and it's basically me, Clemmy Burton Hill, each week talking to a massive music fan.

I mix them a classical playlist.

They have a listen, they come in, and we just see where the conversation goes.

If you'd like to give classical music music a go, but you haven't got a clue where to start, this is where you start.

To subscribe, go to BBC Sounds and search for Classical Fix.

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