Old article, but still cool. I only know about physics from pulp sci-fi novels but the "Island of stability" makes me wonder if sci-fi exotic materials sufficient to make megastructures might actually be possible.
Element 118 (Oganesson) has since been recognized after this article was published, and yeah it has a slight stabilizing effect around where the island of stability is supposed to be. It's also incredibly weird. It's the seventh noble gas, but models seem to suggest it's a solid in normal conditions and might have a metallic appearance. It's also possibly reactive. Chemistry starts to get weird after 94 protons.
The problem with the island of stability is that the superheavy atoms with the right number of neutrons will exist for maybe 0.05 seconds instead of 0.0000001 seconds.
will exist for maybe 0.05 seconds instead of 0.0000001 seconds.
Does that mean that sometime very soon Musk will claim that he's invented a limited island of stability element?
Relevant (long) YouTube video where I first heard about the "island of stability": https://youtu.be/Qe5WT22-AO8
(Check out the rest of the channel, I definitely think it's relevant to people's interests here)
Bobby Broccoli is the shit. Video essays with blender animations. Does deep dives on interesting stuff.
I'm worse than useless as far as chemistry goes, but from tiny I tell myself to understand, bigger elements are probably useless novelties for anything but fission, the real useful stuff are probably going to micro/nano engineered mega-molecules like graphene.
In 2024 Dr. Garfield will successfully create Lasagnite, which can be layered to form delicious structures
There's a theorized Continent of Stability somewhere well past mass number 300 (Oganesson, the current record densest element, has mass number 294). The Continent is a point where quark matter becomes stable and rather than quarks forming triplets and thus protons and neutrons, up and down quarks can flow freely. If it exists it's more stable than nuclear matter, so ultra-turbo-mega dense atoms would preferentially decay into quark matter instead of lighter elements. Because it's stable, quark matter wouldn't be able to decay back down into nuclear matter.
