Ask A Genius 1032: Elements and Informational Correspondence
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/07/28
Rick Rosner, American Comedy Writer, www.rickrosner.org
Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, www.in-sightpublishing.com
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How about the upper echelons of the table of elements? Yes, Mendeleev had the original structure, which was filled in later. Then, we started making synthetic elements beyond uranium, which is 92. So yes, uranium is 92, and plutonium is 94. And they’re up to, like, 120 now, but the higher elements only exist for a millionth or billionth of a second. They’re highly unstable and highly energetic, but they do exist for a brief period. So what is the informational equivalent of naturally made, consciously engineered new elements? Some normal universe dynamics produce most of the table, and then engineering and scientific processes produce engineered elements, but they are allowed by the rules of nature. So what is the informational equivalent when you’re going above 92 compared to those 1 to 92 elements?
Rick Rosner: I have some ideas. One of the things they were aiming for was to create new elements. Making a new element is always fun; you get to name it and receive credit. But there was supposed to be an island of stability around atomic number 120. If you look at what makes some heavy nuclei more stable than others, it’s the geometry of the packing of the protons and neutrons. It was postulated around 120 that there was excellent compactness or some arrangement that could make the nucleus more stable for a significant fraction of a second or even a few seconds.
I last looked at that stuff a long time ago. I don’t know how it turned out because that was a hope in the seventies and eighties. They would know by now if that was possible, and we would have heard about it. However, the possibility of higher elements being stable might have something to do with the scale of the universe. Many of the fundamental constants of the particles in our universe are determined by the size of the universe and the ratio of electron mass to proton mass.
I’d suspect that if you had a universe with 10 to the 85th particles and another with 10 to the 105th particles, which is a trillion times as much mass and information as we have, maybe that universe would have a different proton-electron mass ratio, and you might be able to pack more nucleons into a nucleus and have it be stable. But that’s a… I used to think about that more than I do now, but that’s mostly what I have.
Or go the other way. You’ve got a universe with a thousand particles. Could that universe have any stable nuclei beyond a hydrogen nucleus, which is a single proton? I assume that even in a small universe, you can get deuterium. But it’s something I should know and think about more.
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