The atom factories Making new elements

So how many elements are there I do not know, and neither does anyone else. Oh, they can tell you how many natural elements there are - how many we can expect to find at large in the universe. That series stops around uranium, element number 92. But as to how many elements are possible - well, name a number. We have no idea what the limit might be. 

Chemists and physicists have collaborated since the middle of the twentieth century to make new elements substances never before seen on Earth. They are expanding the Periodic Table, step by painful step, into uncharted realms where it becomes increasingly hard to predict which elements might form and how they might behave. This is the field of nuclear chemistry. Instead of shuffling elements into new combinations - molecules and compounds - as most chemists do, nuclear chemists are coercing subatomic particles (protons and neutrons) to combine in new liaisons within atomic nuclei. 

It is alchemy s goal realized at last the transmutation of one element to another. The ancient alchemists were doomed to 

Pierre and Marie Curie called Becquerel s radiation radioactivity . They found that another heavy element, thorium, was also radioactive, and deduced that natural uranium ore (pitchblende) contained other radioactive elements, which they called polonium (after Marie s native country) and radium (because it glowed). After two years of sifting through tonnes of uranium ore, they isolated salts of these new elements. The work left both the Curies with hands badly scarred from radiation bums, and it no doubt hastened Marie s death from leukaemia in 1934. Pierre might have met the same fate had he not been tragically killed in a road accident in 1906. 

Marie Curie, who became a masterful analytical chemist, was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1903, along with her husband and Henri Becquerel, for their work on radioactivity. Ernest Rutherford the physicist (Fig. 10) always considered it a royal joke that his Nobel Prize, in 1908, was in chemistry. But it was a strange and novel kind of chemistry that Rutherford did. 

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