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  • Seventh Period complete with Discovery of Four New Elements

    Seventh Period complete with Discovery of Four New Elements

    When Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev formulated his Periodic Law and created his version of the Periodic table, he never imagined that one day the Periodic Table will have more than 100 elements. Mendeleev classified the elements by their increasing Atomic Weights and thus created a table with many gaps of unknown elements. It helped to in the discovery of many unknown elements. Chemistry notebooks are going to be rewritten again.

    Chemists will have to add four more new elements in their periodic table. As of now they will be known by their working name- ununseptium and ununtrium — two of the four new elements whose discovery has been officially verified. These elements have an atomic number 113, 114, 115, 117, and 118 according to IUPAC and will soon have a new and permanent name soon.

    It has been four years since the discovery of elements 114 (flerovium, or Fl) and element 116 (livermorium or Lv) which were then added to the periodic table. The 7th period is complete as per IUPAC.

    The elements were discovered in laboratories across Japan, Russia and the United States. The element 113 was discovered by a team at the Riken Institute.

    Paul Karol, chair of the IUPAC’s Joint Working Party, announcing the new elements said that it was not an easy task since these new elements decay into completely unknown isotopes.

    According to International guidelines for choosing a name, any link to a mythological concept, a mineral, a place or a country, a scientist can be used.

    It brings to the question –Why are scientists looking for new elements? The answer is they are hoping to find an element or a series of elements that are stable and useful for people. The quest for new elements also leads to a better understanding of the way atoms are joined and behave in different circumstances.

  • A Century since Albert Einstein Proposes his General Theory of Relativity

    A Century since Albert Einstein Proposes his General Theory of Relativity

    Newton put forth the theory of relativity, and it was accepted without much rancor.  It remained unquestioned till the beginning of this century. It is exactly 100 years ago when Albert Einstein shook the very foundation of physics with his General Theory of Relativity. Einstein’s theory proved that Newton’s Three Laws of motion were only partially correct. It became erroneous as speeds reached the velocity of light. Newton’s Law of Gravitation also was approximately correct and broke down in the presence of strong gravitational force.

    Einstein already had carved a niche for himself with a string of accomplishments to his credit. He had proposed the corpuscular theory of light and said that light did not travel in waves but is composed of individual bundles of energy called photons. This explained the phenomenon of Photoelectricity that until now was unexplainable.

    Einstein’s groundbreaking theory was soon verified, and this got him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921. Having explained the phenomenon of photo electricity with his theory Einstein then published what is now known as the Special Theory Of Relativity. The theory explained many previously unexplained phenomenon such as time dilation, i.e., the slowing down of time as one approaches the speed of light, and the equality of mass and energy, represented by the now-famous equation E = mc2. All his theories were experimentally verified in the coming decades.

    The General Relativity theory successfully explained the slight drift in the orbit of Mercury. The prediction that light will seem to bend when passing through the gravitational field of a massive object was experimentally proved during the total solar eclipse on May 29, 1919.  Pictures taken during the period of totality when Earth’s shadow completely covered the sun showed that the apparent locations of the background stars beyond the sun had shifted in the same way as had been predicted by General Relativity. This property of light is used to the phenomenon of gravitational lenses where close by massive objects will bend the light and make them more visible.

    What Albert Einstein had discovered was much beyond his time. When he proposed his groundbreaking theory, he was just 26 and had never been to any university. The theory is amazing and the conditions of the times when it was proposed make it even more amazing.