Do you remember the days when there were 103 or 104 elements in the Periodic Table, maybe 105 or 106, if you believed those Russian physicists? Things were pretty well settled with the Periodic Table.
The other day, I read in The New York Times that a team of Russian and American scientists, "made up of scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, said they had produced three atoms of the new element in six months of smashing lighter elements together and trying to make them stick."
Okay ... three atoms. One-thousandth of a second.
The New York Times reported: “This considerably expands the borders of the existing material world,” Dr. Yuri Oganessian said in an e-mail message.
I'm sorry, but I'm skeptical. I'm trying to figure out how the manufacture of three atoms in some laboratory has expanded "the borders of the existing material world" at all, let alone something approaching "considerably."
Three atoms. One-thousandth of a second.
Does that mean anything at all to anyone outside the lab?
Posted by Bill at October 23, 2006 04:52 PMSounds like a recipe for yet another bomb to me.
Posted by: Anji at October 24, 2006 05:32 AMI don't know what it sounds like to me. Except that it will probably result in unobtainium sooner or later.
Posted by: Joel at October 24, 2006 04:12 PM