Enrico Fermi may just be the luckiest man
to ever win a Nobel prize. Fermi is Italyâs top physicist. At the age of just 24 he had been made a professor
at the University of Rome, and thanks to his commanding presence his researchers had nicknamed
him the Pope. Unlike the Pope though, he was broke. Italyâs dominance in science had long fallen
off since the days of Galileo. If they needed a piece of equipment, they
built it from homemade scraps. If they needed protection from radiation,
they would sprint back and forth down the hall to avoid getting a lethal dose of whatever
chemical concoction they had just made. You see, they were trying to do the unthinkable. They were trying to make a new element. The periodic table back in Fermiâs time,
looked like this. Similar to what youâre familiar with, but
with lots of pieces missing. Youâll notice a few gaps in the middle regions. Specifically, elements like Technetium, Francium,
Astatine, and Promethium. But the biggest missing pieces are at the
bottom. Weâre missing like, a full row and a half. What you see here right now, are all the chemical
elements that humans had found in nature, just sitting around, in the atmosphere as
gasses, in the ground in rocks, even a couple liquids. Many of them are stable. A good number of them are safe, so long as
you donât eat, inhale or drink them. A decent portion however are not, and are
in fact, quite dangerous. Radioactive samples that are firing off millions
of invisible electrons that can penetrate into your bloodstream. Radium, discovered by Marie Curie, almost
certainly killed her. Her daughter, Irene, very likely died from
exposure to Polonium, the other element discovered by her mother. So maybe you understand now why Fermi didnât
mind having to sprint up and down his lab if it meant extending his lifespan by a few
years. So how does one go about making a new element? Well, on paper itâs simple. You add or remove protons. Hydrogen has 1 proton. Helium 2. Lithium 3. And if you keep doing this, count all the
way up the periodic table, youâd eventually get to the heaviest element in the known world
up to that point. Element 92. You know it as Uranium. Hereâs the other part of the picture. An element is determined entirely by its proton
number, but the number of neutrons can vary. That neutron number makes certain elements
more stable than others. Carbon-12 with 6 protons and 6 neutrons is
extremely stable. It will stay in that form, untouched, for
billions of years. Carbon-14 with 6 protons and 8 neutrons, is
radioactive. Itâs got an energy imbalance that it wants
to rectify. And at random it will convert one of its extra
neutrons into a proton, and fire off a dangerous electron [and a neutrino] to account for the
energy imbalance. We call this beta-minus decay. What youâre left with is an element with
one extra proton. Thatâs 7 protons, AKA Nitrogen. Look at that! Purely by having one too many neutrons, the
Carbon destabilized, and transformed into a entirely different element. Fermiâs idea was to go to the furthest edge
of the periodic table, Uranium, element 92, and fire neutrons at it to try and artificially
induce beta decay. If it worked, youâd be upgrading element
92 into 93. And if he could do it twice in a row, possibly
even 94! But hereâs a fun problem, how do you even
know if youâve made a new element? After all you donât know what it looks like,
or what its chemical properties are. In this case Fermi and his team had to rule
things out, by verifying which elements they hadnât created. They compared their result with the chemistry
of all the known elements down to lead, element 82, and couldnât find a single match. Unstable elements often lead to something
called an alpha decay chain. Thatâs when a nucleus spits out two protons
and two neutrons. It leads to a leapfrog effect, where element
94 turns into element 92, then to 90, 88, and so on, until they reach a stable element,
which is often lead. The other possibility was that they had actually
succeeded! They had made elements 93 and 94 for the very
first time! The discovery catapulted Fermi into overnight
fame. He was Italyâs pride and joy, and obviously
he got first dibs on naming those two elements. Although he was under a lot of pressure to
name the element after a symbol of ancient Rome. Fascium, from the word Fasces. Recently however, the symbol had taken on
an entirely new and terrifying meaning. It was the symbol of Fascism, and the man
pushing for the name was none other than Benito Mussolini. Yeah. Fermi did not follow the suggestion. Four years go by. It is November 10th 1938. Two things happen that day. In Germany itâs the Night of Broken Glass. In Italy, a wave of anti-Semitic laws are
introduced. Fermiâs wife Laura was Jewish and her passport
was on the edge of being revoked. So when the phone call came that day at 6pm,
that Enrico Fermi had won the Nobel prize in physics, their family didnât think twice. Fermi, his wife and his children packed their
bags, and immediately travelled to Sweden. They did not return to Italy, and instead
settled in the United States. And almost immediately after they arrived
there, Fermi got the news. He had been wrong. He hadnât created elements 93 and 94. He had done something much crazier. He had made an atom explode. When Fermi declared that he had made new elements,
he did so because the chemical properties didnât match up with anything as light as
lead. Turns out, he should have looked even lighter. A group in Berlin had repeated his experiment,
and they saw something really unexpected. They were seeing Krypton and Barium. Two elements that were far too light to be
the result of an alpha decay chain. But, if you add up their proton numbers, 36,
and 56, you get 92. Uranium. Fermi had split an atom in 2, a process that
releases an absurd amount of energy. In reality Fermi had discovered nuclear fission. A discovery that would go on to fundamentally
reshape the upcoming war that he had just fled from. A discovery that would go on to dictate a
global power struggle that would last for half a century. Entirely by accident, Fermi had falsely claimed
the discovery of two new elements. And a half century later, one man would make
a similar false claim, but entirely on purpose. This is a story about Victor Ninov, and the
race for the periodic table. I gotta show you something. This is the periodic table. Iâm betting you recognize it. But it doesnât show the whole picture. Each element has a unique number of protons. But each element can have any number of neutrons. We call these nucleides. Some are more stable than others. There are dozens of elements. But there are thousands of nuclides. Hereâs what youâre looking at. The X axis is the number of neutrons. The Y axis is the number of protons. Each square is a possible nucleus. This is Hydrogen. Exactly 1 proton. This is Helium. 2 protons, 2 neutrons. Every possible proton-neutron combination
that has ever been observed is present on this chart. Every time we go up a row, thatâs a new
element. I donât think my audience has a ton of overlap
with football fans, but if it does for some weird reason, think of this as scorigami,
but for the chemistry. A checklist where we mark off things that
didnât exist before, and maybe never will again. See, inside a nucleus is a pair of competing
forces. On the one hand you have the strong nuclear
force. At extremely short ranges it is able to glue
together protons and neutrons into bundles. But on the other hand you have the repulsive
electromagnetic force. Protons all have a positive charge, and thus
want to push each other apart. Only when the strong nuclear force can overcome
the electromagnetic force can you have a stable nuclei. The neutrons, which are electrically neutral,
serve as a kind of packing material. Because they donât repel each other, they
can act as a buffer for the protons, making a nuclei more stable. Notably, the same element can have different
numbers of neutrons, with some being very stable, and some decaying immediately. We can actually see those stable nuclei quite
clearly. They are the tall pillars in brown. The height on this chart represents the half-life
of a given nuclei. A single half-life is the time it takes for
a sample to be reduced by 50%. The taller it is, the more stable it is. One thing you can see is that for the lightest
element, the most stable combinations are those where the proton number equals the neutron
number. See this line? Perfectly balanced. You can trace this line from Hydrogen up until
about Calcium, and then the trend starts to diverge. For most elements it's actually more stable
if you have more neutrons than protons. If we followed this path all the way weâd
end up at lead. This is the path of stability, the safe path
along the mountain. As soon as you stray even a little bit from
that path you plunge into the realm of radioactivity. The red pillars here is essentially stable,
with half lives in the billions of years. But by the time you make it to the oranges
you have a half-life in the minutes. A couple hours go by and a sample could be
reduced to nothing. And if you touch the water, in blue, those
are half-lives in the seconds. And the deep blue? Well, thatâs milliseconds, or in the worst
cases, the half-life is so short we canât even measure it. For some of the nuclei, thereâs a good chance
thereâs only ever been one of them in existence at a time, in the entire universe. A nuclei so unstable it could never occur
on its own, and yet we forced it to. The beauty of this chart is that to me is
that itâs almost like a topological map of our journey through the periodic table. Like a mountainous peninsula surrounded by
a raging sea of radioactivity. The sea even has tides. Way up here in the chasm, youâll often get
swept away in an alpha decay chain. Thatâs when an element spits out two protons
and two neutrons. It moves two spaces diagonally downwards. Like this. A cascade that doesnât stop until you reach
a stable element. On the south side of the mountain pass thereâs
a different type of tide. Fermiâs beta-minus decay. You lose a neutron, but gain a proton. Like this. If youâre smart, you can use it to go up
a step, potentially creating a new element. But on the other hand, to the Northern side
of the mountain pass, thereâs beta-plus decay. You lose a proton, but gain a neutron. No matter where you are however, every part
of this sea is fighting you. The tides of radiation always lead you back
to the same place. No matter where you started you eventually
get pushed back to shore, to the main path of stable nuclei. Some people refuse to accept this. They push back, trying to explore more of
the sea and potentially uncover more land. Enrico Fermi was one of the first. Fermi began his journey here, and he made
it as far as the Uranium chasm. Over the course of the next 50 years several
different labs would make the same pilgrimage up this mountain, and every new pilgrimage
would fill more and more of this chart. The protagonist of our story, the intrepid
explorer Victor Ninov, claimed he had made it up to here. That's pretty far huh? To meet him weâve got a bit of journey ahead
of us, and weâre going to need some help. To cross this sea weâre going to need a
captain. Fermi would go on to do important things. His most well known achievement is building
the first nuclear reactor under the stands of a Chicago football field. But he stopped pursuing the hunt for new elements. That chase would be taken up by an entirely
different team. The discovery of the real element 93 was weirdly
un-ceremonial. On the West Coast of America at the University
of California, Berkeley, American physics was in full âgo big or go homeâ mode. Berkeley at the time was home to the worldâs
biggest cyclotron, the best tool in the biz for element hunting. A cyclotron is a type a particle accelerator,
it uses magnets to rapidly spin charged particles around in circles, and then smashes them into
targets. Now this isnât one of the multi-mile rings
that youâre probably thinking of, those are actually too powerful for making new elements. For this you need something a bit more delicate. Berkeleyâs state of the art tool was 60
inches in diameter and it could pelt a Uranium target with neutrons, again, hoping for Fermiâs
predicted beta decay. And one day, after finding a radioactive lump
that matched no known samples, element 93 had been officially confirmed. We now know it as Neptunium. The credit for this discovery went to Edwin
McMillan and Phil Abelson, but the celebration was short lived. Their publication was met with silence from
the academic community. No one dared acknowledge the breakthrough
lest it give the Germans any inspiration. Although America hadnât yet joined World
War 2, they were preparing to, and so McMillan and the rest of the labâs top scientists
were soon drafted into the war effort, working on radar, or in some cases, the Manhattan
project. That left a vacant seat to take over the element
hunt. Thatâs where our captain comes in. Glen Seaborg. As the descendant of Swedish immigrants, they
had left their home country with the last name Sjoberg. Upon reaching Ellis island, an immigration
official decided that their new name would be Seaborg, and it stayed that way. This customs officer had no idea that his
half-assed spelling attempt would one day make it on to the periodic table. Glen from a young age went the tides of life
took him. After his family decided to move from icy
Michigan to sunny California, an 11 year old Glen decided to add an extra âNâ to his
first name because it looked cool. I canât argue with that Glenn. And on another day, as a 24 year old chemistry
student strolling through the Berkeley campus someone from the Radiation lab stopped him
and asked he could help them separate out some chemical samples. He was just the first chemist they found on
campus. Seaborg would eventually work his way up through
the lab, and with Edwin McMillan gone, he asked if he could take over the new captain
of the element hunt. With bigger war related things on his mind
McMillan gave the go ahead. Although McMillan never got to try it out,
he had come up with a recipe for element 94, and good old Glenn would get the first crack
at it. If you add one neutron to Uranium, it beta
decays into element 93. But say you fired a proton *and* a neutron. The proton would immediately bump it up to
element 93, and then the extra neutron would have a chance at beta decaying, upping it
one more time to element 94. It really is like an absurdly delicate game
of jenga. So yeah. Thatâs how you make Plutonium. Itâs safe to say that the discovery of Plutonium
was kind of a big deal. Itâs actually an even better fuel for a
bomb than Uranium, which was the original plan for the Manhattan project, and thus Seaborg
and his team were drafted to Chicago to work withâŚoh hey, itâs Fermi! There they spent months artificially making
enough Plutonium to flatten a city or two. It was difficult and hazardous work, and at
one point a lead brick fell and broke a beaker, and 25% of the worldâs entire Plutonium
supply was soaked into a copy of the Chicago Times. But the Manhattan project is a story thatâs
been told many times by people better equipped to tell it than me. The story we care about involves Glenn Seaborg
and Berkeley. By this point they have enough Plutonium for
their bomb, so Glenn and his team had free time to ponder some other questions. Why stop at 94? Surely the periodic table didnât end at
such a weird number! And they didnât even have to re-invent the
wheel. Instead of starting with Uranium, just start
with Plutonium and fire neutrons at that. To go back to the jenga analogy, youâre
trying to build a taller tower, but the bottom rows are radioactive, and they keep disappearing
on you. But as long as youâre building the tower
faster than itâs disappearing, you can maybe find a new element. Now at this point we're going to pick up the
pace a bit. There are still a lot of missing pieces here
to get us up to our friend Victor Ninov, and not all the details are important. If you want to read more I highly recommend
the book Superheavy by Kit Chapman. Essentially though, the timeline went like
this. Element 93, discovered by Berkeley. Element 94, Berkeley. Element 96, discovered by Berkeley members
in Chicago. Element 95, discovered by Berkeley members
in Chicago. Two atomic bombs are then dropped on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, killing upwards of 250,000 in the immediate blast and poisoning the ground
and air for decades after. Next up was element 97, once again found by
Berkeley, and since theyâd definitely earned it at this point, they named Berkelium. Element 98, hey guess what? It's Berkeley again, they named it Californium
this time. With 4 elements in a row the New York Times
joked they should have just gone with Universitium ofium, californium, berkelium. It was at this point that Nobel academy finally
acknowledged Berkeleyâs achievements, and so Edwin McMillan and Glenn Seaborg shared
the Nobel prize in chemistry. Next up was elements 99 and 100, and this
is going to sound extremely stupid and I swear Iâm not making it up. America dropped a nuclear bomb in the middle
of the pacific ocean, sent fighter jets through the very very top of the mushroom cloud to
collect samples, raced like hell to get the rapidly decaying lumps back to Los Alamos
in New Mexico, where they were then analyzed to see if they had made any new elements. Yes. And unbelievably, they did. Since Berkeley helped out with the analysis,
they were co-credited with the discoveries of 99 and 100. These were named after two of the fieldâs
greatest minds. Einstein, and Fermi. Both of them had passed away just months earlier. And soon enough there was element 101, again,
found at Berkeley. Named to honour the creator of the modern
periodic table. It truly was one of the most dominant streaks
in scientific history. Every other lab was left playing catchup and
could do nothing but watch as Berkeley added nearly half a row to the periodic table. And there was nowhere else to go, except further
and further up. As of 1945 the 4 earlier gaps in the table
had been filled. Elements 43, 87, 85, and 61 had all been isolated. If there were more elements out there, it
was only going to get harder and harder to find them. They would be come to be known as the superheavies. As for Glenn Seaborg he was once again going
where the tides of life took him. His career took a turn when he received an
out of the blue phone call from John F Kennedy. He was about to be the next head of the Atomic
Energy Commission. Later he would become a close confidant of
Lyndon B. Johnson, and they were apparently such good friends that Seaborg was regularly
invited to the White house to just, hang out. After he had made the fuel for the first atomic
bomb, Seaborg would push hard for treaties that would limit the spread of nukes. This is not an attempt to absolve him of his
role in that, but to contextualize it. This is where Seaborg diverges from our story,
but Berkeley does not. Every element in the streak from 93 to 101
had been discovered by a team with some sort of tie to Berkeley. From this point on it would not be so clear
cut, and the controversy would play out on a geopolitical scale. There are a lot of famous Einstein quotes
out there, but there is one I saw for the very first time while researching this video. This is what Einstein had to say on the topic
of making new elements. âIt would be like shooting birds at night,
in a country with not that many birds". So true bestie. And heâs not wrong, element hunting is essentially
like gambling. The basic setup is easy enough to describe. You have a target, and a bullet. Except both the target and the bullet are
so small that theyâre invisible, and also the target is almost certainly radioactive. And even if you do make a direct hit, thereâs
a good chance youâll break apart or even destroy parts of your target. So this is less like aiming a gun at a target,
and more like a game of roulette with the absolute worst odds imaginable. If you take just one spin, the odds of hitting
the exact right pocket are not good. But, if you take 5 million cracks at the roulette
wheel, suddenly your odds go from basically impossible, to just barely within the realm
of possibility. Sure, the odds are terrible, but sooner or
later youâre bound to get a hit. For element hunters, this means aiming a beam
at a target, and leaving it firing for literal months, which you can imagine, gets very very
expensive. Depending on the lab, firing a beam continuously
for an entire day can cost somewhere in the tens of thousands of dollars. A few months of beam time then is easily in
the millions of dollars. We have a lot of Uranium on Earth, about 5.5
million metric tons, and even the shortest half life is still 25 thousands years, so
getting a large enough Uranium target to fire neutrons at for months on end is no problem. So making Plutonium is easy enough. But then for the next level, your target needs
to be Plutonium. And then after that itâs Curium, Einsteinium,
etc., and each time your targetâs half life is getting shorter and shorter. A gram of Uranium costs about 13 cents. A gram of Einsteinium costs about $27 million
dollars. Most casino go-ers canât afford that kind
of buy-in. But in theory, if youâve got unlimited time,
and unlimited money, element hunting gets a hell of a lot easier. Berkeley, situated in the richest state in
the richest country in the world, had the most money and the best equipment, so no wonder
they had the leg-up. But thatâs the beauty of the casino. It was just a matter of time until another
lab got lucky. While the Americans were busy building a bomb,
the Soviets were lagging behind, embarrassingly so. Admittedly they were very occupied holding
off the Germans on the Eastern front, and had focused all their scientists on metallurgy. The Soviet nuclear program owes its start
to one random volunteer lieutenant on the Eastern front. Georgy Flerov. Prior to the war he had been following the
topic of nuclear fission quite closely, only for all publications to abruptly stop mentioning
it in 1939, of all years. Hmm. He found this bizarre as the ability harness
the power of an atom was like the most exciting development in physics in decades. He soon connected the dots. âOh my god theyâre all making bombsâ. Flerov against all conventional wisdom, wrote
directly to STALIN and basically demanded that the Soviets devote as many resources
as they could to nuclear technology. Flerov was, surprisingly, not punished for
this insubordination, but instead made a key player in the Soviet nuclear program. Following the war however, Flerov changed
his focus. He wanted to hunt elements. He founded JINR in Dubna, a small Russian
town. Soon it would be America vs the USSR in the
hunt for elements. Wow, science being used as a tool by rival
superpowers to help fight a cold war? Never heard that one before. Couldnât be me. It's safe to say nearly every new element
discovery from this point on would be hotly contested, any and all evidence would denied
by either side. These were the Transfermium wars, and hereâs
how it went down. First a small lab in Sweden claims they found
element 102. Uh no you didnât says Berkeley, your equipment
is cheap and bad and your tests not thorough enough. I agree says Dubna, and then they both bullied
Sweden until basically nobody believed Sweden had actually found anything. Berkeley tried some experiments of their own,
which accidentally caused a radioactive dust spill that resulted in their lab being evacuated,
and 27 people had nearly 3 months shaved off their average lifespan. Dubna then swoops in with even better results,
and claims 102 for their own. Then, Dubna claimed 104, 103, and then 105,
so fast that all the Americans could do was try and nitpick their data and make those
same elements, but just, better. It didnât help that each side had their
own preferred types of evidence. To confirm a new element the Soviets preferred
using spontaneous fission. Their detectors were cheaper, and nuclei that
split in half were big enough that they were guaranteed to detect *something*. The Americans called this unreliable, as you
had no idea what was being split in half. They preferred to track alpha decay chains,
the long line of elements feeding into each other. Because of this split in methodology the data
from this period is a mess to make sense of. Some of it was good but was dismissed by the
other side because of bias, some of is straight up wrong but was pushed out the door due to
urgency. Itâs almost as if this sort of cut throat,
competitive structure leads to sloppy work. I sure hope that doesnât come back to bite
anyone. For now the element hunt had stalled. By the time you get up to element 102 your
half-life is less than hour. Before you could rely on other dedicated labs
to manufacture you enough of an element, they could ship it to you, and then you could start
firing your beams at it. With a half-life less than an hour, you couldnât
even get a sample across town, much less an intercontinental flight. The quantities they were working with were
getting smaller and smaller. When Berkeley claimed the discovery for Curium,
element 98, they did so after generating around 5000 atoms of it. By the time they got to element 101 they had
only created 17 atoms to claim the discovery. Soon enough it was likely that any new elements
would only be created one atom at a time. Singular atoms that would decay before another
could join it. This clearly wasnât the end of the periodic
table, but the element hunt was becoming too expensive and too impractical to continue. At least, not without a breakthrough. Out the 218 winners only 4 women have ever
won the Nobel prize in physics. The first was Marie Curie all the way back
in the ceremonyâs third year, for her studies of radiation. She would be the only woman to hold this title
for nearly 60 years. It wouldnât be until 1963 that Mario Goeppert-Mayer
would break the trend. Like many of the pioneers of nuclear physics,
Mayer was a alumni of the Manhattan project. After the war she began studying elements
and their half lives, and what at first glance appeared to be random, soon she began to see
patterns. Certain nuclei were reliably more stable than
others. It was almost as if there were âmagic numbersâ
of protons and neutrons. Maria visualized protons and neutrons as a
set of dancers engaging in a waltz. The dancers are circling around the room,
and spinning around on their feet. You can fit more dancers in the room if you
pair them up, and by having have adjacent pairs spinning in opposite directions. Certain magic numbers of dancers fit more
clearly than others. In technical terms, this results in nuclei
with a higher binding energy, which in turn gives a more stable nucleus. To date the known magic numbers are: 2, 8,
20, 28, 50, 82. In element terms, thatâs helium, oxygen,
calcium, nickel, tin, and lead. The critical way markers on the mountainous
path of stability. Notice that these magic numbers all even. This demonstrates that protons and neutrons
like to pair up to become more stable. Like dancers, pairing up for a waltz. Additionally, elements with a magic number
of either protons or neutrons tend to be extremely abundant. And finally, at the end of a naturally occurring
alpha decay chain, you will always find a stable element with a magic number. For an extra special example of this, take
lead, the heaviest stable element. Itâs considered double magic, with both
a magic proton number and a magic neutron number. Thereâs a reason itâs the very last step
on the mountain path before you get to the great chasm. And the magic numbers theory had one last
crazy prediction that gave the element hunters some hope. There was a magic island out in the middle
of the sea. This island, based on the predictions of magic
numbers, should be situated at 114 protons, and 184 neutrons. Right here. Make no mistake, this is not an island you
could settle down on. Youâre still up to your neck in water, but
your toes can just barely brush against the sand at the bottom. For just a moment, you can catch your breath,
before the tides of the sea will eventually come in and sweep you away again. And if this was true, maybe you didnât need
to work your way up from the bottom, element by element. Maybe you could do it in reverse. Start at the edge of the cliff and launch
yourself, all the way to the island. From there, whatever element you made would
likely decay into an alpha chain. And youâd generate all the other elements
on your way back down. They needed a catapult. Element 106 marked a turning point in the
element hunt. The last 4 elements were contested by both
major sides, but element 106 was found and announced by Berkeley and Dubna the same month. For once, both teams agreed that it was too
close to call. The tactics at this point had changed. Element 93 was made by slamming a neutron
into Uranium. The biggest possible target, and the smallest
possible bullet. By the 1980s the thinking had changed. Why use an expensive radioactive target, when
you could use a much cheaper and much stabler target like lead? And instead of firing something small like
Helium, fire something medium sized, like Chromium, or iron. Think about it. Lead has 82 protons. Iron has 26. 82 plus 26 is 108. Counter-intuitively, this is actually more
reliable than trying to get a single proton to join to a massive nucleus, nuclei closer
in size balance each other out, and the resulting product doesnât eject nearly as many neutrons
during the fusion process. Now if this sounds too good to be true, yes
there is a reason no one had tried this before, a source as heavy as iron would need an entirely
new beam technology designed from the ground up, and a detector that was more sensitive
than anything thing that had been invented yet. The Soviets were out of money, and had no
hope of going any further. And the Americans over in California had for
the first time run out of ideas. The stage was set for player 3. This is GSI. Situated in Darmstadt in Western Germany,
GSI had more than enough money to bankroll the new expensive equipment that the Soviet
team couldnât afford thanks to the post war West German economic miracle. Their new beam could fire elements as heavy
as chromium, iron or even bismuth, all of which would hit a lead target. Over the course of just 5 years this led to
the discovery of 107, 109 and 108, in that order. For the first time it was a true three-way
race in the element hunt. Berkeley, Dubna, and GSI. As the 1980s came to a close, there were 9
elements that needed official names. In comes IUPAC. Now I once got into an argument with a commenter
who claimed that IUPAC isnât actually the body that decides the names for the chemical
elements, itâs the scientists who come up with the names. But only in the same way that 6 year old me
totally got to choose my own bed time, and my mom had no say in the matter. IUPAC laid out the basic rule for what can
be considered an element discovery: Namely, that an element must be stable enough to exist
for more than 10^-14 seconds. Itâs the time necessary for electrons to
form a cloud around a nucleus. But IUPACâs also had to choose who got to
name which element, otherwise weâd have separate American and Soviet names for a dozen
or so elements. And even in the rare case where they could
agree on a name, they couldnât agree on which element it should get that name. Three separate elements have at one point,
been referred to as Rutherfordium. IUPAC would foolishly spend years trying to
find a compromise that satisfied everyone, but eventually settled on a compromise that
made everyone just slightly unhappy. Among these names, for the first time, after
a lot of heated debate, was that of a living scientist. Element 106 was called Seaborgium. The captain had left a permanent mark on the
sea that he had travelled for most of his life. He passed away 2 years after the name was
made official at the age of 86. It was a fitting end, because Seaborgium would
be the last element discovered at Berkeley. The collapse of the Soviet Union hit the Dubna
lab hard. The Russian economy was a garbage fire and
even its prestigious element hunting team wasnât immune to the fallout. For a while it seemed doomed to close down. If you werenât Russian, you left the lab
for your home country, if you were Russian, you left the lab for a private sector job
where youâd actually have a salary. In the end what saved it was renting out the
accelerators to private companies, and a partnership with the unlikeliest of allies. Livermore Labs in California also had an element
hunting team, and the Russian team kept their lab alive by joining forces. For the world this was a good thing. But for Berkeley this was yet another hurdle. Their fiercest rival had just teamed up with
a fellow Californian lab. It would be outright petty to dispute any
element claims that came out of such a partnership. Dubna-Livermore first set their sights on
element 110, the next in the sequence, but their attention soon shifted. They were about to attempt something that
had only been dreamed of before this point. They were finally making that catapult, and
they were going to aim it at the island of stability. Their recipe was Calcium-48, fired at Plutonium-244. They were going to skip 3 whole rows and aim
for 114. And it 1998, it worked! 114 protons, but only 176 neutrons. Remember, the theoretical center of this island
of stability was supposed to be over to the east, with 184 neutrons. But the half-life of this atom of 114 was
in the realm of seconds. Not milliseconds, full seconds. The island of stability was real, and they
had found the beginning of its shoreline. IUPAC wasnât entirely convinced, they wanted
some more data, so the Russians kept at it. Theyâd work on trying to reproduce 114 more
reliably, maybe even aim for 116 as well. The German team at GSI had other ideas. Although the country had suffered its own
depression due to reunification they got back on their feet much faster than Russia, and
they had spent the last 5 years upgrading their equipment. But the lab at this point was being shared
by several teams with competing projects. The main accelerator had a busy queue, and
youâd often only get a few weeks with the accelerator before another team got priority. The element hunting team had already spent
a few of their precious weeks calibrating the beam intensity, and now they only had
4 weeks before the next team would bump them off the schedule. It was an extremely short window for this
sort of experiment, but they couldnât waste their slot. The team decided to swap out the beam to fire
Nickel at Lead, which should add up to 110. After just 1 day they saw the first sign of
element 110. They were unbelievably lucky. Their luck continued when they found out the
next experiment was delayed by 17 days. So they kept at it. They swapped out the lead target for Bismuth. Bam, one extra proton gave them element 111. Two elements in just as many months. A year goes by and they try firing Zinc at
lead. At first they get a weird reading, but they
keep going. In a little over a week they find 112. The German team had once again done the unthinkable. A hat-trick of three elements in a row. Move over Berkeley, the crown had officially
been lost. Berkeley at this point was nearly 20 years
out from their last element discovery. The Russians were probing the island of stability,
and the Germans were doing victory laps. They needed a secret weapon. And so, they orchestrated a coup. Enter, finally, Victor Ninov. Physics doesnât often lend itself especially
well to the idea of a rising star in the same way music or film does. Itâs a glacially paced field of study that
happens behind closed doors, and where itâs hard to find a photo of someone that hasnât
been JPEGâd into oblivion. But if physics did have a rising star, Victor
Ninov certainly fit the bill. Ninov was born in Bulgaria in 1959. As a young man his family emigrated to West
Germany. Ninov would go on to study physics at the
technical university of Darmstadt, the same city in which GSI is located. Eccentric does not do Ninov justice. He regularly signed his emails with âYour
crazy Bulgarianâ. He loved biking, and even played the violin. After he met his future wife, Caroline Cox,
she turned him into an avid hiker. He would often venture into the mountains
with colleagues and had even survived an avalanche accident that left him badly injured. His travels were not limited to the ground
however, he once sailed the Pacific ocean on a 45-foot sailboat, and somehow he had
time to be pilot, flying a single-engine, four-seat Aero Commander. However none of that holds a candle to my
absolute favourite of his antics. He and a colleague were on a quest to visit
every Italian restaurant in Darmstadt, where they would always order the spaghetti carbonara
so they could rank them all. Let me be absolutely clear. This is a grade A bit. I would also do this. This is so funny to me. A Bulgarian man ordering an Italian pasta
dish from every restaurant in a German city. Zero notes on this. Besides being well liked by the entire team
he was also essential. In 1988 GSI upgraded their computers and Ninov
took the lead on this. He was the go-to computer tech and even wrote
a custom software package called Goosy. It was one of a kind, a start-of-the-art software
for analyzing decay chains of radioactive samples. Whereas before you had to manually look for
analog detection spikes, element hunting had gone digital. He had found himself a niche in a field that
is already made up of niche experts. And over the last 10 years he was able to
add pretty sweet bullet point to his resume. âco-discoverer of elements 110, 111 and
112â. So given all this it was an outright scandal
when Berkeley headhunted him from GSI in 1996. The man who orchestrated this headhunt was
a man well into his 80s. Al Ghiorsoâs story is a wild one. One day during the mid 1940s he was installing
an intercom system to the Berkeley lab, and ended up meeting two secretaries. One of the women, Wilma Belt, would later
become his wife. The other woman, would later become the wife
of Glenn Seaborg. Through this mutual friendship, Glenn recruited
Al when he joined the Manhattan project because Ghiorso was gifted at making homemade Geiger
counters. After the war when they returned home to Berkeley,
Ghiorso was Seaborgâs right hand man, and they had been together for every element up
until 101, when Seaborg left for his political appointment. That left Ghiorso as the defacto head of Berkeleyâs
element hunt. He was meant for this job. Let me paint you a picture of this man. In the 1940s Al Ghiorso supposedly held the
world record for the longest range ham radio, he had extended his personal one so far he
could pick up stations in Ohio all the way out in California. He never collected the prize because he was
illegally operating without a radio license. Back when Berkeley had their accelerator on
one end of the campus and the chemistry lab a mile up a hill, Ghiorso would jump in his
Volkswagon beetle, and in the middle of the night, race at illegal speeds up the Berkeley
hill so that they could get their sample tested before it decayed into nothing. Once he nearly ran over a security guard who
pulled a gun on him, and he just kept driving. When Berkeley had their accidental radiation
emergency when hunting element 102, it was Al who exited the building last, after he
calmly shut down the accelerator. Nearly half a century later Al Ghiorso was
the last remaining key figure from Berkeleyâs glory days. His 2nd world record, a little more prestigious
than his radio one, was for the most elements discovered. So when Al Ghiorso calls Victor Ninov a young
version of himself, you hire that man. Ghiorso was so excited that this brought him
out of semi-retirement. Berkeley had new rising star, and an opportunity
to be on top once again. With Ninov put in charge of the data analysis
half of the experiment, they needed someone to be in charge of the equipment end. That man was Ken Gregorich. He had overseen the construction of Berkeleyâs
newest piece of tech, the Berkeley Gas Filled Seperator, a device that looks like this. Now they just needed a recipe. Dubna and Livermore had just made the claim
for element 114. IUPAC wanted more data. Already months behind, Berkeley would have
to act fast to try and scoop the element with a more convincing experiment, but they would
have to use a different recipe than Dubna. Dubna had used Plutonium-244 and Calcium-48,
neither of which Berkeley had enough of to run the experiments. Also the other problem was that the amount
of required Plutonium was actually illegal to use in the densely populated San Francisco
Bay area, so there was that whole thing. Instead they had another recent addition to
the team who had another wild idea. Robert Smolanczuk wasnât a permanent team
member, he was on a visiting scholarship from Poland. He was a theoretical physicist who had previously
run some calculations that were mildly controversial. One colleague called his calculations âsimply
mind bogglingâ. Robert was saying skip everything from 113
to 117. Aim for 118. His plan was simple, fire Krypton-86 at a
lead-208 target, both of which are easy to acquire, and better yet, not radioactive! Now conventional wisdom said that this recipe
wasâŚtoo good to be true. Yeah the protons add up to 118, but the probability
of the reaction occurring was thought to be near impossible. Not Robert though, he had published a paper
in which he showed calculations where this recipe was actually more likely to occur than
others. See going back to the roulette analogy, element
hunting is all about probability. You gotta consider what the odds getting a
hit are against the cost to keep a beam running for weeks. And to quantify this probability physicists
had come up with delightfully silly unit of measurement. A barn is a unit that something of a hybrid
between cross-sectional area, and the probability of a collision between two particles. Essentially, how likely are you to hit a given
target. It quite literally comes from the phrase âcouldnât
hit the broad side of a barnâ. Given its origin, 1 whole barn is considered
a comically large target, as in, it would be very difficult to miss a target of 1 barn. When it came to element hunting, the size
of this target had been shrinking exponentially for decades. These days reactions are measured in picobarns,
trillionths of a barn. Take a look at this chart. On the horizontal axis you see the atomic
number of the element youâre trying to create. And on the left hand side is the estimated
measure in barns. Youâll notice that this is a logarithmic
scale. As you go from element 102 to 110, the probability
has gotten worse by a factor of nearly 10 million! Talk about diminishing returns. One thing you might notice however, is the
probabilities go up very slightly around element 114. This is one of the indications that the magic
island of stability isnât just a mirage, and suggested that the Russian team were onto
something. Now element 118 though, thatâs a terrible
barn measurement. Most recipes were predicting not even a single
picobarn. When you get down to picobarn level, if you
have your beam running constantly, you might be able to produce one single atom a week,
which you might not even detect, and youâre out hundreds of thousands of dollars. Once you go below a picobarn, youâd be lucky
to get an atom for an entire month worth of beam time. And thatâs why Robertâs recipe was so
controversial. His paper argued that his recipe could give
you 670 picobarns. If he was right it would be a game changer. Not everyone was convinced, but the nice thing
was that this recipe was low risk, with a potentially high reward. And they needed a calibration test run for
their new machine anyway, so why not use Robertâs magical recipe? No one was expecting an immediate breakthrough. And yet thatâs essentially what they got. The experiment began on April 8th 1999. Most of the lab had left for Easter break. The one exception was Ninov, who stayed behind
to analyze the results. 11 days later, the lab director, Darleane
Hoffman, would get a phone call. Her first instinct was it would be bad news. It had only been 11 days. Ken Gregorich assured her that it was quite
the opposite. Darleane had every reason to assume the worst. Chemistry in the 40s was not a job intended
for women. Darleane Hoffman had to wade through years
of systemic discrimination to help change that. When her father passed away suddenly she asked
a professor if she could miss tomorrowâs quantum chemistry test to plan the funeral. The professor made her do the test on the
spot instead. This was, to use the industry term, horseshit. She wrote it with tears in her eyes. She still got a B. She persevered and got
hired as a Nuclear chemist at Los Alamos. But when she got there she was told that women
werenât hired to work in that division. While HR sat on their ass pretending to do
anything, Darleane found her soon-to-be supervisor at a party, who immediately fixed the situation. And then her security clearance magically
went missing. Wow, that's weird. It took 3 more months before Darleane got
access to the lab. But it had been 4 months of waiting, and she
had just narrowly missed out on what would have been a career highlight. Remember that atomic bomb that the fighter
jets flew through? They went to Los Alamos, the because of the
bureaucratic nonsense, she missed out on being part of the team who discovered elements 99
and 100. A loss that filled her with rage that she
funneled into her work. She was beloved by nearly every chemist she
came into contact with. And now, as entered her 70s, she was in charge
of Berkeleyâs element hunting team. So, yes. She wanted an element. She wanted it a lot. Just a few minutes after the phone call, Gregorich,
a visiting professor named Walter Loveland, and Victor Ninov had come to her office. Ninov had found something incredible in the
early results, although notably, Ninov didnât want to show Darleane the result at first. But he was outvoted, because why wouldnât
you? To better illustrate what he had observed,
Ninov drew his colleagues this diagram. Three picture perfect alpha decay chains that
ended at element 106. If we overlaid it here, it would look like
this. If this was legit, the team had found not
just 118, but 116, and 114 as well. With the IUPAC decision still out on 114,
this was two, potentially three new elements that belonged to Berkeley. Their first in 25 years. Darleane Hoffman was going to get her wish,
three times over. Ninov, in as much disbelief as everyone else
jokingly asked âDoes Robert talk to God?â Now they didnât immediately announce to
the world their finding. They took a few weeks and ran another experiment,
and one more alpha decay chain was found. Of the four they had now, the team reasoned
that one may be fluke, but that the other three were legit. Not only that, they sent the results to GSI. They also gave the greenlight. In June 1999 Hoffman and Ghiorso, two titans
of the element hunt, held a press conference and announced their two new elements. The eventual paper was submitted to Physical
Review Letters on May 25th 1999. Everyone from the semi retired Ghiorso to
the fresh-faced grad students got to be on it. Victor Ninov was first author. Given how successful Robertâs recipe had
been, Ken Gregorich thought the next logical step was to simply swap out the lead target
for bismuth, which has one more proton. With that extra proton, maybe they could also
find element 119. Now make no mistake, if an element was going
to be named after someone in the group, it wasn't going to be Ninov. The obvious choice, the one already being
thrown around, was Ghiorsium. Al was the current world record holder and
the only person who had a legacy comparable to his late friend Seaborg. But Ninov clearly had a bright future ahead
of him. With potentially 5 elements under his belt
he was clearly ready to carry the torch. He didnât get to carry it for long. GSI, missing their star researcher but still
on top of their game, were eager to get caught up with Berkeley. However when they took a crack at repeating
Robertâs magical recipe, they didnât see the alpha decay chain that Ninov had recorded. Similarly before the end of 1999 teams in
France and Japan also came up blank. This was very odd, as all those labs had tried
their best to replicate the Berkeley conditions as closely as possible. Robertâs recipe was thought to be a longshot,
yes, but the benefit of it was it was low risk with a potentially high reward, as the
two recipe ingredients were comparatively easy to acquire and set up. Something was off. Ninov was doing the conference circuit at
this time and again, was bizarrely reluctant to talk about his breakthrough. He continually deflected questions about his
potentially career defining discovery. The Berkeley team is perplexed at this point. They re-run their own experiment in Spring
of 2000. They canât reproduce the event either. This is a problem now. Assuming the same conditions, the 2nd run
in 2000 should have produce around 3 more atoms of 118. By summer 2000 Berkeley established an independent
team to re-run the same experiment, under the supervision of I-Yang Lee. Completely different team of people, but the
same lab and conditions His studies wrap up by Fall 2000. They too saw no evidence of the 118 decay
chain. Following this Berkeley overhauls their detector
system and clamps down on their operation procedures. Weâre talking, checking the purity of the
Helium gas, the resistance of the coils, everything you can think of. They even considered whether their beam was
actually made of Krypton, and not contaminated by some other element. It was in fact, almost entirely Krypton, but
by this point you couldnât take anything for granted. The year 2000 came and went with not a single
hint of 118. By April 2001 they are ready to begin testing
again with their new setup. By May, they finally got what they were hoping
for, another detection of 118. There was only one single alpha decay chain
detected. And the reporter, once again, was Victor Ninov. Now in 1999 Ninov had been the only person
to analyze the data, as he was the only one familiar with the GOOSY analysis program he
had brought over from Germany. But since then it had been nearly 2 years
and several people had taught themselves GOOSY as well. A postdoc named Don Peterson, was among them. He and Ninov would run the program on the
exact same data, and yet come up with completely different results. Donâs results said 118 wasnât there. The dread had set in. Berkeley by this point knows itâs in hot
water and meticulously documents every single step from here on out with multiple rounds
of bureaucracy, which I have to imagine, is for legal reasons as much as it is for technical
reasons. In June 2001 Darleane Hoffman assembles a
working group to comb through every bit of data relating to the detection of element
118. They were going to sift through every raw
data file as far back as 1999. This working group, based on their findings,
leads to a new independent review committee, which then leads to a 3rd committee, and then
a 4th, the last of which had the official name âThe Committee for the Formal Investigation
of Alleged Scientific Misconduct.â Over the course of three committees the investigation
had gone from âwhy arenât we able to repeat the experimentâ to âokay someone is getting
firedâ. A big thank you to Kit Chapman for providing
me with nearly 200 pages from Berkeleyâs internal investigation, which he obtained
thanks to Californiaâs Public Records Act. As you can imagine the three committees cover
a lot of the same ground, so Iâll be summarizing their main arguments into 3 categories. 1. Statistical â what is the likelihood that
these measurements were genuine? 2. Technical â Is there evidence that the raw
data was tampered with, either intentionally or by accident? 3. Identity â If anyone, who is to blame? Weâll start with statistics. When the other labs attempted to verify the
Berkeley results they found nothing. This was odd because those labs actually had
setups with better beam luminosities, they actually had a higher chance at producing
element 118 than Berkeley. Berkeley was capped at 1.6 x 10^18 Krypton
ions. GSI and RIKEN had a combined total of 4.9
x 10^18, nearly 3 times as many. If you interpret that statistic in the most
generous way possible, thatâs like being able to spin the roulette wheel 3 times as
much. Together they should have seen around 3 times
as many atoms of 118. Again, just like a roulette wheel, this doesnât
mean it canât happen, just thatâs it statistically unlikely. Another physicist, H.K Schmidt, ran an analysis
on the decay chains from an earlier study of element 110 as well as element 118. Itâs important to remember that an elementâs
half-life is a statistical quantity. If you measure a random atom a radioactive
sample, it will decay after a completely random amount of time. It could be a microsecond, it could be minutes. You need to analyze several atoms and then
plot those decay times on a probability distribution. An ideal distribution would see many very
short decays, and fewer and fewer long decays. Data for element 110 agrees with this behaviour. When the same test is applied to the 3 atoms
shown in the element 118 paper, they rise up sharply, with most decays clumping in the
middle of the graph. This data was straight up goofy. Three more Berkeley team members privately
performed statistical analyses of their own. Out of 1 million random trials, only 0.82%
gave decay distributions that matched the element 118 data. There was almost no chance this data was real. Next the technical argument: The program used
to detect the decay events was called Goosy. Goosy was known to be unreliable at times. It would occasionally glitch, and data could
be corrupted in the shared memory database. This corruption could manifest as incorrect
histograms, misaligned array indices, or truncated arrays. The problems were frequent enough that an
aura of superstition had arisen around GOOSY. It took someone experienced with the program
to even realize that GOOSY had glitched in the first place, much less decipher what had
really been measured. But what they were seeing in the data was
too perfect to be a glitch. To quote the New York Times: âIt was as
though Microsoft Word had crashed and, like the proverbial monkeys banging on typewriters,
tossed off sentences from Shakespeare.â The idea that GOOSY had crashed, and dozens
of lines of measurements had perfectly corrupted to give 5 pristine alpha decays chains was
absurd. Weâre talking time measurements, energy
measurements, location measurements, all synching up to give not just one rogue decay chain,
but 5? With file corruption ruled out, the only remaining
explanation was that the raw data files were manipulated in some way. Whether intentional or accidental, something
had happened to the data files that wasnât random. The investigation became hyper focused on
the events that originally showed 118. In 1999 there were two runs of interest. Run 013, from April 8-12th detected 3 alpha
decay chains. 2 of those made it into the published paper. A couple weeks later run 015 from April 30th-
May 5th also detected an alpha decay chain, which also made it into the paper. And finally in 2001 there was run 045 from
April to May 2001 which showed just a single alpha decay chain. The committee determined by checking the relevant
system log files that all the data from these runs was in fact original. The raw cassettes had not been altered. That being said, the original data tape that
should contain run 045 was missing. There is no explanation for where this tape
went. Could be intentional, or an accident. Fortunately, a disk file was found that was
believed to contain an exact copy of run 45, and this disk copy was analyzed as well. The committee took these raw data files and
used GOOSY to analyze them all. No hits for element 118 were found. Now that is really odd. Their next step was to look deeper into the
log files. GOOSY outputs a massive running log where
a bunch of data is grouped in columns like this. The left-most column is time. Each line is considered a separate âeventâ
which is when the detector receives an energy reading somewhere. Weâre working with extremely fast physical
phenomena here so thereâs a few dozen events in a single second. This block of events here were supposedly
a string of three alpha particle decays. You can tell because the location where they
hit the detector are all quite close together, and their energy readings match predictions
for element 118. However, they checked much later in the log
file after GOOSY had been run multiple times, and these perfect numbers were no longer there. Huh. The signs of tampering are completely invisible
unless someone is extremely experienced with GOOSY. A printout from GOOSY will typically contain
somewhere between 63-68 lines of text. During the investigation 5 exceptions were
found. One of those exceptions was a detection of
118, which was 76 lines long. Almost as if extra lines had been added to
the readout somehow. The event at 12:54 states that a 200 Mb file
was read and analyzed in 5 seconds. However the computer GOOSY runs on would not
be capable of processing a file at 40 Mb/s. The only explanation is that a file wasnât
actually being analyzed. If you look at the 2nd column for the event
at 12:54 you see two dashes â- -â. The following event, 15:03 shows a â$ANLâ
instead. The committee noted that two dashes only appear
in the 2nd column when a command is run to type the contents of another file into the
log file. So, say someone takes the raw data, and runs
it through GOOSY for analysis. GOOSY then outputs a bunch of analyzed data. That text is then copy pasted into a text
editor, and the text is manually altered, line by line, until the numbers show what
appear to be perfect alpha decay chains. This text is then saved to a file, a command
is run in GOOSY, as indicated by the â--â line, which overwrote GOOSYâs logfile to show
the amazing evidence of a new element. So the 2001 log file had clear evidence of
tampering. But, what about 1999? Well it turns out they had just been looking
in the wrong place. The log files showed all the correct outputs,
but when you compared those tables to those that made it into the published paper, there
were some major differences. Energy values and time values were altered,
some entirely new events were added. Values tweaked just enough to suggest alpha
decay chains. The entire fundamental basis for the paper
was made up. It didn't match the data from GOOSY. This blatant manipulation could occur if say,
only one person had actually seen the original log files, and that person just so happened
to be the first author on the paper.The committee later found that every suspicious log file
belonged to the same user account. VNinov. Argument 3: Identity. You would think at this point itâs an open
and shut case. That the user account name settles the argument
as to who exactly tampered with the log files, but Berkeley had to cover their bases. Throughout the course of the investigation,
as more and more signs pointed to Ninov as the culprit, he was placed on paid administrative
leave. He also hired legal council. He wasnât going down without a fight. Even without the smoking gun of the of the
user account name, there were plenty of indications that Ninovâs involvement in the project
wasnât entirely above board. Notably, when Ninov had announced the detection
for the 1999 event, there was not nearly as much scrutiny over the raw data files. Back they submitted the paper, the original
data had only been analyzed three times, all by Ninov. When the committee went digging for the raw
data, they discovered that basically no electronic copies of it existed, and that the only record
of a detection of 118, was on two hand-drawn pieces of paper from Ninov. And yet, no one had double checked where any
of these numbers came from. Later when one of the committees asked Ninov
to reproduce figure 2 in the paper, Ninov was able to produce approximate version of
A, B and C, but he was unable to reproduce figure D using any analysis program, instead
saying that he had originally made it by hand. Interesting that of these 4 graphs, only one
of these would be easy to generate by hand. Ninov maintained his innocence throughout
the entire investigation. Ninov was specifically asked by the committee
whether he thought GOOSY could have corrupted the data. His answer was no. Instead he offered multiple versions of a
bizarre conspiracy. At first Ninov argued that someone else at
the Berkeley lab must be jealous that the element hunting team was getting so much time
with the beam, and thus resorted to sabotage. Later Ninov changed his story, and argued
that after the initial reports of other labs failing to reproduce their results, someone
on the team must have gotten cold feet, and retroactively removed the decay chain from
the original data. Finally, putting aside sabotage, and putting
aside someone getting cold feet, Victor Ninov argued that everyone in the lab technically
had access to the account VNinov. His account password was apparently an open
secret. Someone else could easily have used his account,
and any blame would fall on him. The committee found that this was possible,
other lab members did have access to some of his files. The problem with this argument then, is how
did a GOOSY expert like Ninov not notice any alterations when they eventually reviewed
the data? Similarly, in October 2001 Berkeley submitted
a retraction of their paper to Physical Review Letters. PRL declines to retract the paper. Their cited reason, is that Victor Ninov refused
to sign off on the retraction. This is standard policy with journals, all
authors must agree for anything new to be published, including a retraction. So again, if he believes heâs been duped
or framed, why would he refuse to sign off on the retraction? Instead Ninov only attended one face-to-face
interview on December 14th of 2001, and declined two later invitations. His later statements were written answers
to provided questions, presumably after he consulted with his legal team. Despite this, some of Ninovâs responses
verge on outright petty. He claims that several figures in the report
by I-Yang Lee are âoff by orders of magnitudeâ as a way to discredit them. Thereâs nothing wrong with the figures,
they just happen to be based off of Robertâs magic recipe, which was well known to disagree
with most of the existing scientific literature. And he spends a whole paragraph saying that
the committeeâs focus on the failings of GOOSY is comparable to âdebates about the
superiority of Windows vs UNIX or Word vs WordPerfectâ. Sure man. If anyone had believed him beforehand, no
one was now. Whatever friendships they had with Ninov beforehand
were destroyed. Walter Loveland says he used to speak to Ninov
on a daily basis, and things just werenât making sense. âAt one time he alluded to other people
interfering instead of him, but that was nonsenseâ. With his back against the wall Ninov turned
on his friends. They wanted nothing to do with him now. The hammer came down quick. Ninov was placed on administrative leave on
November 21st 2001, a week before the misconduct investigation began. He was officially fired in May of 2002. After being fired he filed a grievance with
the University of California Berkeley, but nothing ever came of this. The paper was finally retracted after nearly
an entire year. None of his coauthors were implicated in the
fraud, although that didnât stop the committee from having a few harsh words for them. They homed in on what they saw as a shocking
weak-link in the scientific review process, relying on only a single person, Ninov, for
the analysis that underpinned the entire claim of element 118. Yes, Ninov was the sole expert at GOOSY, but
that didnât prevent anyone from looking at the raw data files. Part of the issue here may stem from the management
hierarchy. The experiment was essentially co-led, with
Ken Gregorich leading the machining side and Ninov leading the analysis side. As such he was able to avoid scrutiny. And finally the lab as a whole was criticized
for a stunning lack of documentation, especially for the breakthroughs in 1999, which as we
now know, were recorded entirely on just two pieces of paper. Heinz Gaggeler was a friend of Ninovâs when
they both worked at GSI. Ninov would often crash at his house when
they went on hiking trips. âVictor was so well received when he came
to Berkeley. He had full support. And because of that, one didnât look too
carefully into the analysis he was doing. It was a total disaster. Did it destroy Berkeley? Of course it did. Berkeley was Berkeley. The outside world doesnât want fake news. The show was over.â Ken Gregorich prefers not to talk about the
scandal at all. âIt was a dark period, and itâs gone,
and Iâd rather leave it at that.â Itâs a similar case for Darleane Hoffman. She never got her element. For those at the top itâs mortifying to
have such a blatant case of fraud occur under your watch, and on the other hand you have
a handful 20-something grad students whose names made it onto that paper. Even if you had just a single shift running
the cyclotron during the experiments, your name got on the paper. You had nowhere near enough knowledge or responsibility
to even consider fraud as a possibility, and now at the very start of your professional
career your name will permanently be part of a retracted paper. Suddenly your resume goes from being a golden
ticket into any lab you want, to a radioactive warning sign. To some it would be better to just erase 2
years from your career history. And the damage wasnât entirely contained
to Berkeley. Sigurd Hofmann had been Ninovâs boss at
GSI. Elements 110 to 112 had been verified by other
labs at this point, and the data used in GSIâs initial publication held up under scrutiny. Their elements were legit. And yetâŚthey also used GOOSY at their lab. And Ninov had been their GOOSY expert. Sigurd recalls one day back when they were
searching for 112. Ninov still worked there, and early on, only
a week into the experiments, Ninov said he had found something. Sigurd immediately asked to see a printout
of his findings, all the raw data. But Ninov said he was busy. Heâd do it after lunch. A bizarre thing to say when you may have just
found a new element. The printout wouldnât have been time consuming,
it should have just been instant. And yet it took all day for Ninov to get around
to it, and show it to Sigurd. When Sigurd saw it he was confused. It was missing data, and it didnât quite
look like a decay chain. He told Ninov it wasnât good enough, and
theyâd have to wait for a better event to publish anything. He didnât think much of it, as just a week
later they had seen the real deal. Ninovâs odd decay chain was only briefly
mentioned in the paper, almost no focus was given to it. At the time it was easy to forget about. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, it was
clear Ninov had attempted to fake element 112 too. Sigurd went back and looked at the raw data
files. The raw files just showed radioactive background
noise. But on Ninovâs computer, these old files
had been manually altered. Individual numbers had been changed. It was sloppy. Following the advice of his boss, Sigurd went
back even further. Again, he found a single decay chain for element
110 that had been produced by Ninov. It was manipulated in the same way. Yeah again, I keep burying the lead here. Ninov had attempted to fake FIVE new elements. Of all the elements Ninovâs name is attached
to, the only one with zero evidence of any wrongdoing, is 111. The only reason Ninov got away with his first
two fakes was because his team had found the real thing. GSI had been more vigilant and thorough than
Berkeley, and that had saved them from total disaster. They ended up publishing a follow-up paper
on their work for elements 110-112, where they said âIn two casesâŚwe found inconsistency
in the data, which led to the conclusion, that for reasons not yet known to us, part
of the data used for establishing these two chains were spuriously createdâ. âReasons not yet known to usâ. Sigh...yeah. They did not mention Ninov, but the implication
was clear. They were not hit nearly as bad as Berkeley,
but it still did lasting damage. Exactly how much damage is hard to say. When Sigurd requested permission to begin
searching for elements as high as 126, higher-ups rejected the proposal. As Kit Chapman says in the book Superheavy:
âIâve seen the internal reportâŚHowever it would be misleading and disrespectful to
everyone involved to say [the Ninov fraud] was the only reason GSI fell behind in the
element race. The truth is far more complicatedâ. Letâs take stock of what we know at this
point. First we have the element race as whole. A highly competitive and volatile field of
study which is prone to labs doing sloppy work just to have first dibs on an element. Secondly, Berkeley. A once dominant, highly respected institution
who hasnât had a victory in over 25 years, and is thus even more desperate for a win. Third, theyâve just poached a young up and
comer in the field from a rival lab, with his name already tied to 3 elements. He is widely considered to be the fieldâs
next superstar, and heâs brought over a custom software program that only he knows
how to use. All of this is a recipe for disaster. Itâs impossible to talk about the Ninov
fraud without also touching on the other major physics fraud from this same year. Jan Hendrik Schon was similarly fired from
Bell Labs for faking years worth of data on organic semiconductors. It was these two high profile frauds together,
in such short succession that forced the American Physical Society to revise its guidelines
on research misconduct. No one had ever expected someone to be so
brazen as to fake data in such a public way until now. Moving forward, coauthors have a responsibility
to vouch for the work of their colleagues, not simply defer culpability because they
had no direct involvement. In both cases the fraud occurred because of
a single weak link. What I find interesting is how these two cases
diverge. Although his exact motive was unclear, there
is a reasonable argument you can make that Schon was pushed to fake data in order to
keep his job during an economic collapse, and those lies snowballed until he couldnât
cover his tracks anymore. Ninov does not have a similar plausible motive. Again, much like Schon, some suspect that
Ninov was trying to get ahead of Berkeleyâs rivals by planting his flag on a discovery
he thought was a safe bet. Someone was bound to come along and discover
it for real. If he really was taking a gamble, he severely
underestimated just how bad the odds were. Al Ghiorso said it best: âWhy he did it,
I don't know. It's a real mystery. There was nothing for him to gain, absolutely
nothing, and everything to loseâ. He was almost glad that his good friend Seaborg
had already passed away at this point. âHe would have been one of the co-authors. This would have just about killed him.â Victor Ninov no longer works in physics, although
he still retains his Ph.D. Since being dismissed from Berkeley he briefly worked as a professor
of physics at University of the Pacific, but since 2006 he has held a variety of engineering
positions at a few different California companies. He is now in his 60s. Ninovâs exact motives will almost certainly
remain a mystery. So with that in mind, I present to you this
admittedly far-fetched theory, provided by his old boss at GSI, is. Hofmann double checked the dates when Ninov
first made his false claims. Ninov claimed he saw element 110 on November
11th, and it had a half-life of 11.19 minutes. On its own itâs odd that 11 would appear
so much here. But consider the fact that German carnivals
commonly start on November 11th at 11 am, coinciding with armistice day. Sigurd thinks Ninov meant it as a joke. A taunt. I admit, itâs weak on its own. But element 118, Ninovâs other fake, was
announced on April 19th, Glenn Seaborgâs birthday. Who knows. Maybe weâre looking for a pattern where
there is none. The only labs that had survived the Ninov
scandal completely untarnished were Dubna and Livermore. The same year Ninov was fired, Dubna and Livermore
had jointly announced sightings of elements 116 and 118, alongside their still unconfirmed
114. The next year they made a claim for 115 too. Alongside that 113 was thought to be a possible
alpha decay product. This was a partnership that seemed impossible
just 20 years earlier, but a Russian-American collaboration was bulldozing everyone else. Of course Berkeley and GSI werenât going
to just roll-over and accept this new state of affairs. Right? The Livermore group found themselves at a
conference in 2009, in Salt Lake City. Unexpectedly they were approached by a researcher
who told them âHereâs some data, hot off the press, no one has seen it. Weâve just confirmed your discovery of 114.â That researcher was Ken Gregorich. After the crushing embarrassment of the Ninov
fraud, Berkeley had put the scientific community first. IUPAC confirmed 114 and 116 in 2012. The names honoured the California city of
Livermore, and Georgy Flerov. The man who started Russiaâs element hunt
in the first place. The two sides of the Transfermium wars were
officially partners. But, as it goes, a new challenger eventually
emerged to fill the vacuum left by Berkeley and GSI. The RIKEN institute in Japan. RIKENâs accelerator was top of the line,
and they didnât have to compete for beam time like the other major labs. After a decade-long stalemate, Japan just
barely eked out the discovery for element 113. Although my understanding is a ver controversial
ruling. The cold war was over, but new rivalries will
constantly pop up. On the flipside however Dubna did get credit
for 118, 115, and 117 [and 116]. Al Ghiorso, who passed away in 2010 at the
age of 95, never got an element named after him. Ghiorsium had been the proposed name for Berkeleyâs
element 118. In the end element 118 was named after Yuri
Oganessian, who has been, and still is the director of the Dubna lab for almost as long
as the Berlin wall has been torn down. He is now only the 2nd living person to have
an element named after him, joining Glenn Seaborg in their elite little club. Element 118 marks the end of the 7th, and
to date, final row of the periodic table. There is almost certainly an 8th row to the
table. Right now the first claim to that row looks
like it belongs to either Dubna-Livermore or RIKEN. 119 and 120, when theyâre found,
hopefully within the next 5 years, will start that new row. There are a few different recipes being tried
out. RIKEN wants to try Vanadium and Curium. Dubna-Livermore wants to try Titanium fired
at Berkelium. None of these are particularly easy to make
a beam for. Calcium-48 is by and large the best material
to use for beama, but that would require a target of Einsteinium to make 119, and that's
expensive. Thereâs even an ambitious plan to swap the
concept of the beam and the target. Make medium sized iron the target, and ultra
heavy plutonium the beam. At this point, nothing is too crazy to rule
out completely. In all likelihood, when 119 and 120 are found,
theyâll belong here. After that though, who knows what will happen. Maybe weâll need a 3rd row completely detached
from the rest of the table. Going by the magic island theory element 126
is supposed to be extra stable. Past that, itâs supposed to be possible
to go up to element 172, maybe even 173. Possible, yes, practical, who knows? Do these mean anything for real-life chemistry? Probably not. As weâve learned more and more about the
element up to 118, weâve noticed that the traditional chemistry starts to break down,
become less and less relevant. Whereas before an elementâs behavior could
be reasonably predicted by the shape of its electron orbitals, by the time you have 118
protons, those electron orbitals just kinda look like a blob. You might ask why we spend so much time and
money on experiments that have been reaching the point of diminishing returns for decades. I could tell you that, well, some of these
elements are used in radiation therapy for cancer treatment, and have saved millions
of lives. I could tell you that some of these elements
may be used to improve the efficiency of future nuclear reactors. However the vast majority are not so useful. They will only ever exist for a fraction of
a fraction of a second. But you know by now that utility was never
the point. Itâs like when youâre a kid, and you try
and see how tall you can build a tower of LEGO blocks before it topples over. We do it because, why not?
Is it Terrence Howard
Wow. This was really well done.
Iâm at work, so I canât watch, but the idea alone fascinates me. Hoaxing the periodic table?
Commenting just so I can find it again later. :-)
EDIT: Yes, I know there's a save button -- I've had saved posts of my own for years. My second sentence is not phrased well; I mostly wanted to convey the sentiments in my first sentence. I also like having a comment trail on things I take interest in, save feature or not, as I do sometimes stroll through old comments on a whim, but rarely do the same for my saved posts.
I appreciate the altruistic desire to educate, however.
Very interesting documentary. And well done.
Bobby is the best đđť
I love that guys channel.
Smollet 115
Something like that ufo guy?
That was excellent, really interesting and well presented. Thanks for posting.