THE ROMANCE RESONANCE: FUN WITH FLAGS AND ELEMENTS

In “The Romance Resonance,” Season 7, Episode 6, Sheldon thinks he’s discovered a new chemical element.

“There’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,

And hydrogen, and oxygen, and nitrogen, and rhenium

And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium

And iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium

Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium

And lanthanum, and osmium, and astatine, and radium

And gold, protactinium, and indium, and gallium,

And iodine, and thorium, and thulium, and thallium

There’s yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium

And boron, gadolinium, niobium, iridium

And strontium, and silicon, and silver, and samarium

And bismuth, bromine, lithium, beryllium, and barium

There’s holmium, and helium, and hafnium, and erbium

And phosphorous, and francium, and fluorine, and terbium

And manganese, and mercury, molybdenum, magnesium

Dysprosium, and scandium, and cerium, and cesium

And lead, praseodymium, and platinum, plutonium

Palladium, promethium, potassium, polonium

And tantalum, technetium, titanium, tellurium

And cadmium, and calcium, and chromium, and curium

There’s sulfur, californium, and fermium, berkelium

And also, mendelevium, einsteinium, and nobelium

And argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc, and rhodium

And chlorine, carbon, cobalt, copper, tungsten, tin, and sodium

These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard

And there may be many others but they haven’t been discovered”

—“The Elements Song,” Tom Lehrer, Tom Lehrer in Concert (1959)

Elementary, My Dear Sheldon

Pride comes before a fall. And Sheldon learns this all too well in “The Romance Resonance.” At first, we see him in the apartment, deep in his whiteboard calculations. Sheldon believes he’s discovered a new and stable superheavy element of the periodic table, that tabular arrangement of the chemical elements, which can also sometimes be seen on the apartment’s shower curtain. Later, however, Sheldon can’t get over the fact that his greatest scientific breakthrough is based on a blunder.

The mention of a team of scientists from China in the same episode, who help test Sheldon’s elemental discovery, is the spark we (don’t really!) need to launch a quick game of “fun with flags and elements.” In a quirky riff on the periodic table, we can map out the flags of the countries where the scientists were working when they discovered the relevant element. And, in the course of the game, we might find if there were any other blunders in the discoveries of other elements in the table.

Now, the very aim of chemistry is to grasp the complex materials that constitute everything in existence since the big bang. That’s a tall order! As we discuss elsewhere in this book, the cosmos emerged mostly out of the two elements of hydrogen (H) and helium (He), with a dash of lithium (Li) in the mix. Today, we know of 118 elements. Some have been known since before written history, such as gold (Au), silver (Ag), copper (Cu), lead (Pb), tin (Sn), and mercury (Hg), while elements 99 to 118 have only been relatively recently synthesized in laboratories or nuclear reactors. The key to understanding the elements is the periodic table, a pattern embedded in nature, which was miraculously discovered in a dream! So, what’s the story of “fun with flags and elements?”

Greek Beginnings

First up is a false start from the ancient Greeks. Aristotle thought there were only four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. He had borrowed the idea from another Greek, Empedocles, but pitched the concept with a little more poetry. Think about, Aristotle says, a stone falling into a pool. The stone plunges to the pool’s bottom because its constituent, earth, is the heaviest of the four elements and down is its natural place to be. The bubbles that appear stuck to the stone on its descent are made of air. As the stone plummets, the bubbles are drawn up through the water to their own element of air, as up is air’s natural place. If you were now to light a fire beside that pool, you would watch as the flames from the fire appear to go upward.

So, Aristotle’s idea was that the four elements each had their own natural resting place. And his evidence for this would be the very picture he paints beside that pool. Now as ideas go, that’s quite a big blunder, though an understandable one, as Aristotle was living in the 300s years BC, yet his idea held sway over science for more than two thousand years. For one thing, Aristotle’s definition of an element still stands today: an element is an entity to which other bodies can be resolved, but which cannot itself be resolved into anything simpler. And for another, earth, water, and air represent the three states of matter: solid, liquid, and gas; they’re observable qualities that can easily be seen by everyone. What’s more is that the application of heat appears to provide evidence that these elements flow from one into the other. Followers of Aristotle were, of course, aware of solids such as gold, silver, and copper, but they believed the transmutation of such elements could be achieved by simply adjusting the amounts of fire or earth or water that they contained. Such ideas led to alchemy.

Blunder to Alchemy to Chemistry

From trying to transmute one classical element into another, alchemists experimented with materials. Distillation (turning a liquid into a gas and then making it liquid again by cooling), fractionation (separating constituent quantities from a mixture), and crystallization (turning a liquid into a crystalline solid) were all the developments of the alchemists, so chemistry goes way, way back before the modern days of the ideas of atoms and elements, even if we didn’t always call it by the name chemistry.

Even after the scientific revolution, difficulties still presented themselves. Some elements were identified that later turned out to be compounds, and the whole painstaking process moved very slowly. The revolution associated with Galileo and Newton was one of physics and was also a revolution in measurement. Nonetheless, for burgeoning chemists, it’s very tricky measuring the nuance of chemical composition, or the vagaries of color, smell, and other characteristics that chemical materials might possess.

A towering figure in the experimental philosophical community in London in the 1660s and the associated transformation from alchemy to chemistry was Anglo-Irish natural philosopher Robert Boyle. Best known for Boyle’s Law and the seventh son and fourteenth child of the fabulously wealthy and landed Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of Cork, Boyle wrote The Sceptical Chymist in 1661. Published in the form of a dialogue, the book presented Boyle’s Atomist ideas. He questioned the limited belief in just the four classical elements of Aristotle. Boyle’s hypothesis was that matter was made of atoms or clusters of atoms in motion, and that every phenomenon in the cosmos was the result of collisions of these atoms. This sounds like the ancient Atomists, and yet the pious Boyle wouldn’t have dreamt of anything as ungodly as atheistic Greek Atomism. Boyle’s book became one of the most widely cited works and encouraged artisans and tradesmen to engage in experimental chemistry, providing a vision of the kind of projects they might achieve, as well as inventing the very experimental method that modern science has used ever since. Arriving early in the game led to the United Kingdom being the country that secured the largest a number of elemental discoveries (nineteen) in “fun with flags and elements,” including magnesium (Mg, in the year 1755), hydrogen (H, 1766), nitrogen (N, 1772), Titanium (Ti, 1791), and a whole slew of other elements in the 1800s, including almost all of the noble gases.

Another nobleman, Antoine Lavoisier, was a huge influence on both the history of chemistry and the eighteenth-century chemical revolution. Widely considered to be the father of modern chemistry, Lavoisier’s considerable contribution to chemistry mostly stems from his changing the subject from a qualitative to a quantitative one. Consequently, Lavoisier is noted for his major discovery of the role oxygen plays in combustion. He identified and named oxygen (O) in 1778, and hydrogen (H) in 1783. Lavoisier also compiled the first extensive list of elements and helped reform chemical nomenclature, so that all chemists globally began to call known elements by the same standardized names. He predicted the existence of silicon (Si) in 1787 and in 1777 was also the first to establish that sulfur (S) was an element and not a compound. Interestingly, at the height of the French Revolution, Lavoisier was charged with tax fraud, and selling tainted tobacco, and was guillotined in 1794. Nonetheless, France has amassed a total of sixteen elemental discoveries in “fun with flags and elements,” including bismuth (Bi, 1753), chromium (Cr, 1797), beryllium (Be, 1798), and boron (B, 1808).

Despite Sweden being one of the largest countries in Europe, stretching northward into the Arctic Circle and at one time also encompassing most of Finland, its achievements in science often escape attention. Yet from the beginning of the eighteenth century, especially after the end of absolute monarchy in 1718, there was a belief that scientific methods could help improve and develop Swedish mining, metallurgy, and agriculture. A new Sweden signaled an age of democracy, which fostered the rise of such science. So, the importance of Swedish chemistry in the eighteenth century is undisputed, though often neglected, and incredible considering that science wasn’t officially accepted in the country until near the end of the 1700s. Forty percent of the chemical elements found since the Middle Ages were discovered in Sweden, among them barium (Ba, 1772), cobalt (Co, 1735), nickel (Ni, 1751), oxygen (O, 1771), chlorine (Cl, 1774), lithium (Li, 1817), silicon (Si, 1823), and manganese (Mn, 1774).

Fun with Flags and Elements: Final Score

In time, chemists began to discover certain patterns among the elements. The most crucial development came from Russian chemist and inventor Dmitri Mendeleev. His cunning innovation was not just to identify patterns among the elements and their behavioral characteristics, but, just as important, to identify where there might be gaps, belonging to as yet unidentified elements. He forecast that these gaps would be filled in the future. The order in which elements appear in the table is based on their atomic weight. Mendeleev forecast what new elements would be discovered and also forecast their properties and weight. He was even cheeky enough to suggest that elements that didn’t quite fit his schema must have had their weights wrongly measured by other chemists! Indeed, Mendeleev had been working so hard on his prototype periodic table that he claims to have conjured up a vision of the complete arrangement of the elements in a dream: “I saw in a dream a table where all elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper, only in one place did a correction later seem necessary,” as quoted in the publication Soviet Psychology in 1967.

All told, a dozen elements were known before the modern day. Twenty-two elements were discovered between 1650 and 1799, twenty-five between 1800 and 1849, twenty-four between 1850 and 1899, fourteen between 1900 and 1949, fifteen between 1950 and 1999, and the rest during the course of the present century. Of the discovered elements, nineteen were discovered in the UK, eighteen in Sweden, eighteen in Germany, sixteen in France, eleven in both Russia and the United States, and a total of sixteen elsewhere.

Finally, a word of warning in case anyone should try to use these data in the name of political cause, rather than mere historical accident. Consider the discovery of polonium, the first element to be discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie. They were working in a glorified shed, with substances so dangerously radioactive their experimental notes are still too active to be handled safely. They finally isolated the element and later named it polonium, after Marie’s home country. A country, it should be noted, that rejected her pursuit of education, as she was a politically active female. It was Marie’s hope that by naming the element after Poland, she could inspire interest in her country’s campaign for independence from Germany, yet her personal victory came under the French flag, where Marie was working at the time. It remains to this day the only element to be named after an overt political cause.