questions on elements

treehugger

I was in school today, looking up at the periodic table and thought how perfect it is- almost too perfect. Does anyone actually ever question how it happened that it just went 1, 2, 3, etc each standing for its own unique element. Each element is singly characterised by the number of protons which is just stupid. Are you telling me that if somehow a helium and hydrogen atom fused together to get a nucleus consisting of 3 protons, would it be lithium. it is wrecking my head. the world simply cant be so perfect that every simple element follows the preceeding one by one extra proton. it is just too perfect to be plausable.

Son Goku

treehugger wrote:

I was in school today, looking up at the periodic table and thought how perfect it is- almost too perfect. Does anyone actually ever question how it happened that it just went 1, 2, 3, etc each standing for its own unique element. Each element is singly characterised by the number of protons which is just stupid. Are you telling me that if somehow a helium and hydrogen atom fused together to get a nucleus consisting of 3 protons, would it be lithium. it is wrecking my head. the world simply cant be so perfect that every simple element follows the preceeding one by one extra proton. it is just too perfect to be plausable.

If you add an extra proton you attract an extra electron. Electrons are the chemistry (in a sense) of the element.
So adding a proton gives something with different chemical properties.

You can add as many protons as you like with out risk of the thing falling apart, until you hit 92.
So it isn't too suprising that you can go 1,2,3,4................

Civilian_Target

The reason the periodic table works is because we made it to fit, we named the elements given on the number of protons they had, because this corresponded to their weight. At the end of the day, each element is just made of protons, neutrons and electrons.

The number of neutrons can vary in each element (eg. Hydrogen, H-Deuterium (1p, 1n), H-Tritium (1p, 2n) ), but the number of protons must remain fixed.

If you can find a way to fuse H and He together, you'll release vast amounts of binding energy through nuclear fusion. It's not as efficient as fusing 2 H's to a He, but it'd still work!

Panserborn

treehugger wrote:

Are you telling me that if somehow a helium and hydrogen atom fused together to get a nucleus consisting of 3 protons, would it be lithium. it is wrecking my head. the world simply cant be so perfect that every simple element follows the preceeding one by one extra proton.

Nuclear fusion fuses a hydrogen and a hydrogen together and ends up with helium (plus a gaggle of energy) so it does happen. Any element bigger than lithium (I think, could be beryllium) was made by such a fusion process in a star, so yup, thats what we (and nuclear physics) is telling ya.

There is a lot in science that makes one think "naaaaaaaa, that's gota be bullpoop", but the cool thing about science is that quite often the reality is just wierd!

Gurgle

treehugger wrote:

it is just too perfect to be plausable.

Only because you're looking at it from the wrong direction.

Atoms are made of protons, neutrons and electrons.
The number of each of these decides which element its an atom of.

As stated above, Neutrons can be a bit flaky because they have no charge and sort-of aren't involved in molecular bonding. Electron counts cant be used to determine the element because electrons are often shared among nucleii.

The only consistant definition of the element is the proton count.

Look at it this way: You can have one tree existing in nature, you can have two trees, you can have three trees, or any integer number at all.

You can't have two and a half trees.

When the periodic table was first defined, there were gaps. Many elements hadn't been discovered yet but their existance was predicted by the gaps in the table.

For example if chromium(24 protons) and iron (26 protons) were known but no element was known which had 25, it was left blank until someone identified Manganese as the element to go in there. Within a couple of decades of the table being defined, all the gaps in the lower numbers had been filled in.