by Kit Chapman
This was the challenge facing the TWG. For three decades, both the US and USSR had published papers that varied in quality. Some were flat-out wrong; others contained flashes of scientific brilliance the other team refused to admit were correct. Much of the bad data hadn’t been retracted, while much of the good was hidden away in private lab records the other side couldn’t access.5
The TWG is largely considered to have been flawed from its inception. To remain neutral, IUPAC and IUPAP decided to avoid including anyone who could be biased either way. Unfortunately, element discovery has such a small community that everybody had a viewpoint. The result was a group of eminent scientists from just outside the superheavy field fronted by the UK’s Denys Wilkinson – an outstanding nuclear physicist, but someone who had no superheavy element or radiochemical expertise.
The TWG set off around the world, visiting each of the labs who had a solid claim to a new element. Politics dogged it at every turn. Originally, Dubna was due to be visited before Berkeley; in a last-minute decision that infuriated Ghiorso and Hoffman, the TWG decided to visit Dubna last. The Americans felt swindled, accusing the Russians of dirty tricks by ensuring they had ‘the last word’ and the ‘the extraordinary and highly questionable advantage of having the TWG “collaborate” with them in “retrospective re-evaluation” of the data’.
Seaborg and Yuri Oganessian started a series of back-channel discussions to try and find a compromise before the TWG forced their hand. Both Berkeley and JINR were content to agree that they had both at least contributed to the discovery of the superheavy elements. The sticking point was element 104. The Russians wanted ‘kurchatovium’, after Flerov’s mentor. The Americans wanted anything but ‘kurchatovium’. A letter Seaborg and Ghiorso wrote at the time to GSI’s Peter Armbruster underlines their feelings: ‘We would NEVER [their emphasis] agree to the naming of an element after Kurchatov,’ Ghiorso and Seaborg fumed, ‘any more than we would to the naming of an element after an American inventor of the hydrogen bomb!’
It was a complete impasse. All either side could do was wait for the TWG ruling and hope it recognised their claims and right to name the elements. In 1991 the TWG announced its findings. The first half of its remit (what constituted a new element) was relatively uncontroversial: ‘The experimental demonstration, beyond reasonable doubt, of the existence of a nuclide with an atomic number not identified before, existing for at least 10-14 seconds.’ There was muffled grumbling about what ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ meant, but otherwise the rule made sense: the required time was how long it took for the positively charged nucleus to attract negatively charged electrons, forming an atom. Fine.
Next, the TWG announced who had created each element. In a controversial move, a few of the elements were even shared between groups, the TWG reasoning that both had played a significant role in the discovery. The ruling was as follows:
101
Berkeley
102
JINR
103
Berkeley and JINR (joint)
104
Berkeley and JINR (joint)
105
Berkeley and JINR (joint)
106
Berkeley and Livermore
107
GSI6
108
GSI
109
GSI
The decision satisfied no one. The Russians and Americans both felt their work was not recognised; the Germans felt caught in the middle; and the Swedish team’s claim to element 102 had been dismissed completely.
The attacks began almost immediately. The Berkeley team attacked Dubna’s right to element 104, insisting that ‘acceptance of this conclusion would be a disservice to the scientific community’ (Denys Wilkinson didn’t take the Berkeley criticism lying down, insisting the reply ‘sits ill with Messrs Ghiorso and Seaborg’ and refusing to change the report).
Eventually, the Americans backed down; once again, political pressure was mounting to settle the argument for the good of international relations. The US team wrote to accept the TWG proposals –
although Matti Nurmia was excluded from the letter. ‘There was an agreement signed by everyone except myself,’ he recalls. ‘I was left out of it because I was known to be so critical of the Russian work I would not have agreed to the conclusions.’
But the real problem remained: elements 103 to 105. The TWG had given two groups, already using two different terms, the equal right to choose the elements’ final names.
It was asking for trouble.
Notes
1 It wouldn’t, but since when did facts get in the way of a good soundbite?
2 Not everyone supported the collaboration. Matti Leino was invited too, but felt Flerov’s way of working did not suit his style.
3 A similar process happened with time. Ship’s captains needed the exact time to establish their position at sea, which drove the British Admiralty to develop accurate clocks. The advent of railways also made a set time essential – before then, nobody was able to travel quickly enough to notice that London was four minutes behind Cambridge or two minutes ahead of Southampton.
4 The obvious question is ‘How do you measure the Planck constant?’ Scientists did it in two ways. First, they used a very precise device called a Kibble balance, which measures weight using electric current and voltage. Second, they made a series of 93mm silicon spheres – the most perfectly circular objects ever created – which contained a known number of atoms, and which also allowed them to eventually work out the Planck constant. Fortunately, the numbers agreed: making the definition of the Planck constant – and therefore the kilogram – accurate to a few parts per billion.
5 The TWG wasn’t the first attempt to unpick the transfermium wars. In 1974 a neutral committee – plus three members from the US and USSR – was asked to decide who had discovered which element. Ahead of its first meeting, the chair had asked both sides to put forward their case. For the US, Darleane Hoffman recommended that all elements be awarded to Berkeley; the USSR team walked away. The committee never held a meeting.
6 GSI is recognised as having priority for element 107, although Oganessian was invited to be the ‘godfather’ of the element because of his contribution to its discovery.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
How to Name Your Element
In 1993 Al Ghiorso received a phone call from the New York Times. Fifty years earlier, his only claim to fame had been illegally breaking a ham radio record. Thanks to the TWG ruling, he was officially credited with the discovery of 11 elements. This had beaten a 185-year-old record for element discovery held by the British chemist Humphry Davy. Albert Ghiorso, the bootlegger’s son with a bachelor’s degree, was the most successful element hunter of all time.
For Ghiorso, the sweetest triumph was recognition that Berkeley had discovered element 106. It had taken 20 years, but finally the team could pick a name. Ghiorso had been thinking of ‘alvarezium’, after his friend and colleague Luis Alvarez. Other inspirations included Frédéric Joliot-Curie (mainly because the Russians had been considering it for element 102); famous figures of the past such as Isaac Newton, Leonardo da Vinci or Christopher Columbus; and the mythical sailor Odysseus. Matti Nurmia had pressed for an alternative: finlandium. ‘At the time,’ Nurmia reasoned, ‘there were two Americans and three Finns in the group …’
The names were still rumbling in Ghiorso’s mind as he picked up the phone. The reporter on the line was Malcolm Browne. Browne had started out life as a chemist but had turned to journalism after being drafted in the Korean War and assigned to the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. He’d risen steadily and was eventually appointed chief correspondent for Indochina for the Associated Press. There, he had won the Pulitzer Prize for his haunting image of the death of Thích Quảng Đức, a Buddhist monk who had set himself on fire in an act of protest. Since 1977 Browne had mixed war reportage with the science beat. When it came to element discovery, there wasn’t much difference.
&n
bsp; ‘What are you going to name element 106?’ Browne asked, mischievously probing for a scoop. ‘Ghiorsium?’
Ghiorso laughed. He’d first heard the suggestion in 1957, at a Christmas party, when Glenn Seaborg had given him a large bottle labelled: ‘110 – Ghiorsium: a worthless metal … can only be prepared between the hours of midnight and 6 a.m. … spontaneously inflammable … just generally falls apart in a hell of a hurry. Also has an automatic transmission.’ Ghiorso didn’t share the anecdote with Browne. Instead, he deflected the question, chatted amiably for a while, then put the phone down.
But Browne’s comment had sparked something in Ghiorso’s mind. No element in history had ever been named after a living person. However, there was no rule against it – just an unofficial chat with the Russians that such an idea would be avoided. Still, Ghiorso had an idea, and told the rest of the discovery team. They all agreed. On 2 December 1993 Ghiorso created a special cover for his folder charting the story of element 106 and made his way to Glenn Seaborg’s office. At Ghiorso’s prompt, his friend and colleague of 50 years opened it and read the inscription.
Dear Glenn, the team has decided unanimously that the only name for element 106 is yours!
Seaborg was astonished. ‘I was incredibly touched,’ he later recalled in his autobiography. ‘This honour would be much greater than any prize or award because it is forever; it would last as long as there are periodic tables.’ A name scrawled into an 1867 ledger by an immigration officer who couldn’t spell Sjöberg was about to grace science’s chemical trophy cabinet.
Element 106. Seaborgium.
By the time Browne and Ghiorso had their chat, the other missing element names had started to slip into place. Element 101 was, indisputably, ‘mendelevium’. Element 102 was more or less accepted as ‘nobelium’, despite both the US and Russians agreeing that the Swedish team who’d come up with the name hadn’t discovered the element at all. Element 103 was ‘lawrencium’.
The next two elements, 104 and 105, were harder to pinpoint. The Americans were adamant they wanted ‘rutherfordium’ and ‘hahnium’. The Russians, meanwhile, insisted on their right to name the elements as ‘not only an honorary privilege for the discoverers but also an acknowledgement of their intellectual property and the expenses of the laboratory’. Their names for 104 and 105 remained ‘kurchatovium’ and ‘nielsbohrium’; maybe ‘dubnium’ as a potential compromise.
That left GSI. Their response to the TWG was the most magnanimous, acknowledging the contributions of both the Russians and Americans. Even so, Gottfried Münzenberg remembers pressure coming from both sides. ‘I got phone calls from Berkeley in the middle of the night,’ he told me. ‘They were saying things like “We’re sitting here with Seaborg and we want to propose names.” They didn’t want Kurchatov, but they did want Seaborg! It wasn’t consistent. When we announced our names, we got a phone call from Berkeley saying they wouldn’t come [and support our name choices] if we backed “kurchatovium”.’
The Germans tried to stay neutral. They backed ‘seaborgium’, but suggested element 107 should be ‘nielsbohrium’ (hoping that would ease tensions around element 105), and because they ‘fully agree[d] with the Dubna group that Niels Bohr highly merit[ed] to be honoured by the name of an element’.1
Fortunately, their two remaining elements, 108 and 109, were easy to name without controversy. GSI was in the German state of Hesse, the Latin name for which was Hassia. Seeing as how everyone else named an element after their local area, they decided to stick to tradition and proposed that element 108 would be ‘hassium’.
Münzenberg’s choice for element 109 was intended to right a past mistake. The most important German contribution to nuclear science had been the discovery of fission. Berkeley were already proposing an element after one leader of the team that had made the breakthrough, Otto Hahn. The Germans wanted the other main contributor remembered too. Lise Meitner had been overlooked because of rampant sexism in the Nobel Committee; she had been persecuted and forced to flee her home by an evil that wanted her dead because of an accident of birth. Giving her an element was a chance for atonement.
‘Meitnerium,’ Hofmann told me, ‘was a clear choice. She suffered so much as a scientist under the Nazis in the 1930s and had to escape Germany because she was Jewish. Despite this she was the main physicist in Otto Hahn’s team – at a time when women were hardly accepted.’ The GSI team couldn’t put an end to sexism in science, but they could damn well remind people that great women existed. With curium named after both Marie and Pierre Curie, meitnerium would become, to date, the only element named solely after a non-mythological woman.2
The Germans hadn’t waited around for the world to accept their elements – they had delayed for 10 years and weren’t going to sit around any longer. On 7 September 1992 they held a ceremony and made the names official.
All the teams could do was wait to see if chemistry’s IUPAC, and its physics equivalent IUPAP, would accept their choices.
* * *
Ian Fraser Kilmister isn’t someone you’ll find in a science textbook. As the leather-faced, raspy-voiced lead singer of rockers Motörhead, ‘Lemmy’ was better known for his trademark mutton chops, cowboy hat and a hard livin’ lifestyle than his skill with test tubes and a Bunsen burner. I once saw him live, on a wet, miserable evening in Manchester, UK. He belted out his hit ‘Ace of Spades’ with a sullen growl, only to come to a stop at the second verse. Then, guitar hanging loose, he walked over to the amp controls to crank them up even higher before launching back where he’d left off. My hearing didn’t recover for three days.
But in spite of his absent scientific pedigree, Lemmy also inspired the most popular suggestion for an element name in history. The singer had the fortune – or misfortune – of dying in late 2015, just as a new batch of elements were confirmed. The announcement inspired the public to get involved in suggesting possible names, and Lemmy’s was at the top of the list. By the time the element’s names were settled, a petition of 157,438 supporters demanded that element 115 be ‘lemmium’. What better name could you have, they argued, for a superheavy metal?
Sadly, a new element could never have been named after Lemmy. After the chaos of the transfermium wars, IUPAC had put together some guidelines about just what could have an element named after it. In 2016 the recommendations became official. The categories were broad but defined. First, an element should end in ‘-ium’ (unless it was a halogen, like chlorine or iodine, in which case it got an ‘-ine’, or a noble gas, like neon or krypton, which earned itself an ‘-on’). Next, elements could only be named after five things: a scientist; a property of the element; a mineral the element came from; a place; or a mythical creature. This is basically just tradition – but the categories are broad enough to let scientists go wild if they wish. There is one final rule, designed to dispel any confusion: you cannot use a name already given to a chemical element, or that was once given and used widely before it was retracted.
The rules put paid to Enrico Fermi’s ‘ausonium’ and ‘hesperium’ (they were widely used) and ended Lemmy fans’ dreams of their hero appearing on the periodic table: while his status borders on legendary, Stoke-on-Trent’s favourite rock god3 doesn’t qualify as a mythical creature. ‘IUPAC has to be very neutral,’ explains Lynn Soby, IUPAC’s executive director. ‘We just manage the process of working with the assigned laboratories and scientists. There are limits, guidelines if you will. But it’s still broad if one thinks about mythological characters. There are lots of different creative opportunities for names.’
Today, the IUPAC process for recognising a new element is simple. A panel assesses all claims and decides which, if any, have enough evidence to prove an element has been made. The panel then announces which lab – or labs – have priority: the right to call themselves the discoverer. As the discoverer, the lab gets the honour of suggesting a name for the new element to IUPAC. If they don’t do it within six months, they lose out and IUPAC has to name the
element. In an effort to avoid a repeat of the transfermium wars, in the case of a joint discovery where the laboratories fail to agree on a name within this time period, the honour again defaults to IUPAC.
IUPAC doesn’t have to approve the suggested name automatically: since 1947, the final decision has rested with IUPAC’s council. In theory, it is possible for IUPAC to reject the name and put forward their own choice – although this, Soby muses, is a last resort.
Provisional name selected, the next part is the public consultation. This is basically a sense check to make sure the name isn’t stupid or offensive to a global audience. ‘One never knows what the general public will bring,’ Soby says. ‘One issue is that the name is going to be used in multiple languages. We need to check whether it has any negative connotations, whether it is pronounceable in all languages and whether it is sensitive in any way.’ Just because a name seems harmless in English and French doesn’t mean it isn’t rude in Turkish. ‘We want people to look at the proposed names, really evaluate them in their native language and see if there are any problems.’ For example, given its dirty meaning in German, it’s unlikely ‘wixhausium’ would be approved.
It’s only after this public consultation that the element names are finally accepted; even then, it still takes a few months before IUPAC and IUPAP’s joint working party ratifies the decision. Once that happens, the names are locked in forever – even if it’s later shown that the element was discovered by someone else.
At least, that’s what’s supposed to happen. In 1994 IUPAC’s announcement of the new names didn’t go smoothly. The suggestions from Berkeley, Dubna and GSI had been gathered up, considered and put in front of a 20-strong panel of chemists from around the world. Faced with competing names from groups with equal priority, the working party decided to try and strike a compromise and blend the American, Russian and German choices together.