by Kit Chapman
Also available in the Bloomsbury Sigma series:
Sex on Earth by Jules Howard
Spirals in Time by Helen Scales
A is for Arsenic by Kathryn Harkup
Herding Hemingway’s Cats by Kat Arney
Death on Earth by Jules Howard
The Tyrannosaur Chronicles by David Hone
Soccermatics by David Sumpter
Big Data by Timandra Harkness
Goldilocks and the Water Bears by Louisa Preston
Science and the City by Laurie Winkless
Bring Back the King by Helen Pilcher
Furry Logic by Matin Durrani and Liz Kalaugher
Built on Bones by Brenna Hassett
My European Family by Karin Bojs
4th Rock from the Sun by Nicky Jenner
Patient H69 by Vanessa Potter
Catching Breath by Kathryn Lougheed
The Planet Factory by Elizabeth Tasker
Wonders Beyond Numbers by Johnny Ball
Immune by Catherine Carver
I, Mammal by Liam Drew
Reinventing the Wheel by Bronwen and Francis Percival
Making the Monster by Kathryn Harkup
Best Before by Nicola Temple
Catching Stardust by Natalie Starkey
Seeds of Science by Mark Lynas
Eye of the Shoal by Helen Scales
Nodding Off by Alice Gregory
The Science of Sin by Jack Lewis
The Edge of Memory by Patrick Nunn
Turned On by Kate Devlin
Borrowed Time by Sue Armstrong
Love, Factually by Laura Mucha
The Vinyl Frontier by Jonathan Scott
Clearing the Air by Tim Smedley
Contents
Prologue
Introduction
PART I: CHILDREN OF THE ATOM
Chapter 1: Modern Alchemy
Chapter 2: The Secret of Gilman Hall
Chapter 3: How to Build a Nuclear Weapon
Chapter 4: Superman vs the FBI
Chapter 5: Universitium ofium Californium Berkelium
Chapter 6: The Death of Jimmy Robinson
Chapter 7: Presidents and Beetles
PART II: TRANSFERMIUM WARS
Chapter 8: Nobelievium
Chapter 9: From Russia with Flerov
Chapter 10: The East and the West
Chapter 11: Xanthasia and the Magic Numbers
Chapter 12: Life at the Edge of Science
Chapter 13: The Atoms That Came in from the Cold
Chapter 14: Changing the Rules
Chapter 15: How to Name Your Element
PART III: THE END OF CHEMISTRY
Chapter 16: After the Wall Came Down
Chapter 17: The Ninov Fraud
Chapter 18: A New Hope
Chapter 19: Beams of the Rising Sun
Chapter 20: The Edge of the Unknown
Chapter 21: Beyond Superheavy
Epilogue
References
Acknowledgements
Index
Prologue
In January 2016 I picked a fight with a radio DJ. A few weeks earlier, I’d been listening to a podcast when the BBC’s Simon Mayo was asked how many chemical elements there were. ‘118,’ he replied on instinct.
I remember furrowing my brow. Despite being a science journalist, my knowledge of the freaky end of the periodic table – where the elements existed for fractions of a second and didn’t seem to count – was poor. However, I was certain there were only 114: the elements up to 112, then 114 and 116 out on their own. I went home and checked.
The answer was 114. Mayo was wrong.
Then, the discoveries of four new elements were confirmed – all the way up to element 118. I didn’t have much to do, so I hassled Mayo over Twitter about his prescience. ‘The story has been around a long time!’ he fired back. Annoyed at myself, I started brushing up on the new elements – if only so I could send more snippy messages to DJs in the future. A few hours later, I realised that I’d been missing out on one of the greatest untold sagas in science. For three generations, modern element discovery has seen heroes, villains, natural disasters, motor races, crash landings and giant particle cannons. It has given us nuclear power, atomic weapons, cancer treatments, smoke detectors and Kentucky Fried Chicken (really). It has united countries and driven Cold War rivals apart.
The superheavy elements – the elements from 104 and beyond – might only last for seconds, but that’s what makes them so cool. When an atom of a superheavy element is created, it is probably the only atom of that element in existence in the galaxy. It’s a science for pioneers and dreamers.
Superheavy is about more than the elements themselves. Too often, science is viewed as the purview of old white men. My hope is that, by reading this, you’ll realise this is untrue. The superheavy element discoverers were a mix of ages, nationalities, ethnicities and genders. Too few people know that in 1952 a 28-year-old pilot, Jimmy Robinson, died on a mission that led to the discovery of two elements; that an African American, James Harris, was a key part of the team that discovered element 104; or that it was a woman, Darleane Hoffman, who led the discovery of the rarest natural element deposit ever found on Earth. Science doesn’t care what you look like or where you come from.
This tale has been a global endeavour. To tell it, I’ve travelled to eight countries on four continents. The people I’ve met are more than scientists: they are explorers. For them, discovering a new element has the same thrill as setting foot in an uncharted land. Already, the superheavy elements are rewriting the laws of atomic structure. They have reached a point where the periodic table loses its meaning; perhaps they will soon end chemistry as we know it.
In the twentieth century, scientists made elements and helped to expand the periodic table. In the twenty-first, they could make the elements that will break it.
This is their story.
Introduction
Kenneth Bainbridge had the worst job in history. As the man in charge of the world’s first atomic test, if something went wrong it was his duty to walk up to the bomb and poke it. Bainbridge wasn’t a weapons specialist or army officer. He was just a scientist whose research had become very interesting indeed.
In the dawn twilight of 16 July 1945, Bainbridge stood in a cramped wooden shelter deep in the New Mexico desert, the flimsy hideaway protected by concrete and soil. An inhospitable stretch of wilderness used by the US Air Force to train bomber crews, the conquistadors had called this vast expanse of nothing the Jornada del Muerto – the ‘journey of the dead man’. It was well named: there wasn’t a drop of water that side of the shadowy Oscura Mountains until you hit the Rio Grande.
About 9km (5.6 miles) from the front of Bainbridge’s bunker was a pylon. At the top sat the ‘Gadget’: the first of three nuclear bombs created by the Manhattan Project, the Allied attempt to end the Second World War with a super-weapon. Also in the desert were the project’s VIPs: Robert Oppenheimer, head of the scientific effort; Leslie Groves, generally running the show; and James Chadwick, father of the neutron and there to represent the British. Scattered around the desert – most with Groves at base camp 10 miles to the south west or, like Chadwick, watching from a hill some 20 miles away – were other scientists and generals, all anxious to witness the test. The detonation was code-named Trinity.
A countdown began at 5.10 a.m. ‘My personal nightmare,’ Bainbridge remembered in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists as he recalled the minutes ticking down some 30 years later, ‘was knowing that if the bomb didn’t go off or hang-fired, I would have to go to the tower first.’ It wasn’t the first horror he had experienced since joining the project. He had made a similar walk only weeks before, while inspecting a live bomb that had b
een peppered with high-explosive rounds to see what would happen if the Japanese air defences got a lucky hit. The target had started to smoke, sending Bainbridge sprinting back to his shelter or else risk being blown apart.
There was also the problem of creating a secret camp at the northern tip of a live military bombing range. ‘In the middle of May, on two separate nights in one week,’ he wrote, ‘the Air Force mistook the Trinity base for their illuminated [training] target. One bomb fell on the barracks building which housed the carpentry shop, another hit the stables.’ Bainbridge had asked Oppenheimer if, on the next bombing pass, he could return fire.
Then came the lack of understanding from the brass in charge about the true power of a nuclear weapon. Five days earlier, the core of the bomb had arrived at the nearby McDonald ranch house. This was a squat, single-storey adobe home with a few empty rooms – the sort of isolated homestead that gets attacked in western movies. It had been surrendered to the military, and the farmer’s boudoir had been turned into a makeshift clean room, a vacuumed lair with the windows sealed by electrical tape. As the core was carried inside, one of the scientists, Robert Bacher, stopped the test in its tracks. Technically, the metallic sphere of pure radioactive death – weighing just over 6kg (13lb), about the size of a softball – was the property of the University of California. Unable to allow several million dollars of the rarest material on Earth to vanish in a nuclear blast, Bacher had turned to the highest-ranking man in the room, Brigadier General Thomas Farrell, and asked for a receipt.
Bainbridge could only watch in horror as the general opened the case and insisted on his money’s worth. ‘If I was going to sign for it, shouldn’t I take it and handle it?’ Farrell later recalled. ‘So I took this heavy ball in my hand and felt it glowing warm. I got a sense of its hidden power […] for the first time I began to believe some of the fantastic tales the scientists had told about this “nuclear power”.’ As he became aware of what he was fondling, much to Bainbridge’s relief Farrell stopped playing hot potato with an atomic bomb and signed.
Bainbridge’s patience had even been tried the night before the Trinity test. Another of the scientists, Enrico Fermi, had gone around taking bets with the guards on whether the bomb would accidentally set the sky on fire. Bainbridge had been furious – the soldiers didn’t know Fermi was (mostly) joking. Yet all those memories paled next to the wait as the test counted down. Finally, a little before 5.29 a.m., the one-minute warning rocket fired. Bainbridge left his bunker and lay down on a rubber sheet, donning welder’s goggles and looking away from the blast. The others hit the deck.
Silence.
Then came a blinding flash, a ‘foul and awesome display’ that faded to ominous purple, green, then white. At ground zero, the explosion carved a hole 1.2m (4ft) deep and 73m (240ft) wide, melting the desert sands into green glassy rock and vaporising any creature nearby. The blast, equivalent to some 20,000t of TNT, was the greatest explosion ever to have been caused by humans.
Most of Trinity’s witnesses had been told to lie face down on the ground. Few did. Instead, the observers stood, stunned into silence as they felt the heat of the fireball and bore witness to the world’s first mushroom cloud. Half a minute later the blast’s shock wave roared past, covering everything in a fine layer of silica dust. As far as 190km (120 miles) away, windows were shattered; for the next few days, army officials had to drive around telling locals that a munitions storage area had accidentally exploded.
It’s a popular myth that the first words after the test were Oppenheimer’s, quoting Hinduism’s holy book the Bhagavad Gita: ‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’ Oppenheimer merely thought of the passage; the person who spoke was Bainbridge.
‘Now,’ he sighed, ‘we are all sons of bitches.’
The Trinity test wasn’t just the moment the world entered the age of atomic warfare; it was the moment heavy elements were unveiled to the world. The nuclear core of Gadget, the silvery radioactive sphere Farrell had juggled to the horror of the watching scientists, was forged from a substance nobody else knew existed.
It was called plutonium. And it was made in America.
* * *
The chemical elements are the basic ingredients of the universe. To date, we know of 118 of them, arranged neatly on the periodic table. Our best guess is that there are at least 172 possible elements, even if they have never existed in the universe. If that’s true, we haven’t found a third of the periodic table’s pieces yet. Or, rather, we haven’t made them.
All atoms in the universe heavier than lithium – so, all stuff that didn’t emerge from the Big Bang – came about through atomic hijinks, either by atoms smashing together, capturing particles or shaking themselves apart. Every night, we can witness the process in action. Stars are effectively cosmic fusion reactors, stellar forges that build all the lighter elements up to iron before, after billions of years, they explode in a supernova that showers the universe with its heaviest components. To create an element is to follow a roadmap that takes us far beyond the reaches of Earth and recreates the processes responsible for our existence.
I’m following a roadmap of a different kind. Today I’m a pilgrim on New Mexico’s lonely highways, baking under the sun’s heat and seeking a tale of scientific wizardry in the creation of the most destructive weapon in the world. The final 26 elements known to humanity are, for most scientists, irrelevant: most labs don’t have a nuclear reactor or costly particle accelerator on hand to create them. The superheavy elements – the final 15, element 104 and beyond – have only ever existed in quantities so small they can’t be seen by the human eye and can last for less than a second. They have never been detected outside of the laboratory. They have no known use. A few are so unstable no one has ever managed to conduct an experiment on them. Chances are, unless neutron stars are colliding as you read this, most of these elements do not exist anywhere in the galaxy at present. They are chemistry’s unicorns.
I’m on a quest to find out how and why these superheavy elements were made – and what we might be able to do with them in the future. It’s the greatest scientific race most people have never heard about. Gadget was its starting gun.
Today the Trinity site is a visitor attraction, a beacon in a scrub desert alive with cactuses, yuccas and lizards. Still part of the US army’s White Sands Missile Range, the spot is only open to the public on two days a year. Getting there means a long, dusty drive past giant radio telescopes and lonely settlements. To the west sit a few weather-beaten shacks called Pie Town, and the National Science Foundation’s Very Large Array, its dishes pointed at the sky in search of black holes. South lies a town called Truth or Consequences, named after a game show as an April Fool’s Day prank, and home to Earth’s only spaceport. To the east, Roswell’s UFO seekers look for strange things in the sky. In between lies 8,300km2 (3,200 miles2) of military isolation.
Breaking from the highway, past a loose band of nuclear protesters, is a straight dirt track. Up ahead, fellow visitors queue to pass the checkpoint into the range, the chrome bodywork of their pickup trucks shimmering in the heat’s haze. Here the road whips out into nothing, cutting the same path Bainbridge used the morning he and the other members of the Manhattan Project changed the world. After Trinity, he’d driven back to the barracks in a state of shock, ‘swerving off the road only once’, where fellow scientist Ernest Lawrence had slipped him a bottle of bourbon. Clutching it to his chest until he could appreciate it, Bainbridge had climbed into bed and collapsed into deep sleep. I don’t blame him at all.
The bomb site is another 8km (5 miles) into the desert void. Here, cheery US Navy staff sweltering in digital-blue camouflage fatigues wait to direct the bomb’s fan club.
‘Aren’t you a little far from the sea?’ a visitor drawls to the nearest sailor.
‘Eh,’ she shrugs in reply, too chilled to explain that the range is used by all branches of the armed forces to test America’s latest toys. ‘There was a flash flo
od here last week. That’s good enough for me.’
Despite the friendliness, Trinity is probably the weirdest tourist trap in the world. Stray off the road and the navy will shoot you. Signs and high wire fences cover the area, warning of radiation, of rattlesnakes, of penalties for pilfering trinitite – the name given to those strange glassy rocks caused by the bomb’s fury more than 70 years ago. The mineral, buzzing-hot with radiation, remains scattered across the landscape; the local ants are obsessed with it, and their nests are tracked down regularly with Geiger counters and cleaned out. It’s a federal crime to take the rocks away from the site, though plenty of locals sell them by the side of the highway regardless.
There’s not too much to see at Trinity. Desert sands filled the bomb crater long ago. The only evidence of a nuclear blast is a small lump of concrete and twisted metal – the remains of Gadget’s pylon. Next to it, the military have put up a black obelisk to mark ground zero, its ominous shadow nullified somewhat by the queue to have your photo taken standing at its side.
Guest speakers are on hand to tell the history of the site. One has even brought along a replica of Gadget’s ‘Fat Man’1 design strapped to the back of a trailer. Painted brilliant white – the original was mustard yellow to make debris easier to spot – the replica’s swollen belly is as tall as a person, a giant egg with stabiliser fins. It’s almost comical, the kind of thing Wile E. Coyote would use to try and finish off Road Runner. Further away sits a hollow pipe of rusted metal, the gaping maw some 3m (10ft) wide. It’s all that’s left of ‘Jumbo’, a massive 214t container designed (though never used) to contain a nuclear blast. Now it’s yet another spot for an atomic selfie, conveniently located next to a hot dog stand, a barbecue pit and a row of Portaloos.
For a nuclear bomb site, Trinity is surprisingly radioactive-free. An hour’s visit is worth about 1 millirem, the radioactive equivalent of eating 100 bananas at once.2 Its impact, however, will be with us forever. The radioactive material mankind created here has drifted across the world in our atmosphere, raising the background radiation of Earth. Today, all modern steel is contaminated by Trinity and the later atomic tests; the process to make it requires large quantities of air and inevitably sucks in some of this radioactive debris. If steel with low background radiation is needed – such as for highly sensitive Geiger counters – the only option is to use steel made before 1945. Usually, it’s plundered from sunken battleships, such as the German fleet that was scuttled after the First World War.