Talk:Chemical element

Ununennium, the 119th element

Ununennium is an element with atomic number 119. Like Ununseptium, it has not yet been synthesized in a lab. Why is it not in this article, but Unuseptium is? Also, another question: why is Ununennium not on the periodic table, but Unuseptium is? ask123 (talk) 21:31, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

reference to Atomism and the writings of Leucippus and Democritus

I think I reference should be included in the history section to Atomism and the writing of Leucippus and Democritus, whose ideas about atoms are, in some ways, are much closer to the modern understanding of elements, than the ideas of Plato, Aristotle etc which they inspired. How can this be done though without breaking the flow of the current text? Yugyug (talk) 16:52, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

Definition

I've always thought that a chemical element is a... er... totality of atoms with the same number of protons/same atomic number, but not a chemical substance. It seemed to me that elementery substance is the right term for a substance consisiting of atoms of the same chemical element only. Anyway, the definition is a mess: "A chemical element is a pure chemical substance consisting of one type of atom distinguished by its atomic number, which is the number of protons in its nucleus. The term is also used to refer to a pure chemical substance composed of atoms with the same number of protons."--Adnyre (talk) 11:05, 9 January 2010 (UTC)

Consider this: chemical element

1. A species of atoms; all atoms with the same number of protons in the atomic nucleus.

2. A pure chemical substance composed of atoms with the same number of protons in the atomic nucleus. Sometimes this concept is called the elementary substance as distinct from the chemical element as defined under 1, but mostly the term chemical element is used for both concepts.

IUPAC Compendium of Chemical Terminology 2nd Edition (1997)

We should rewrite the definition.--Adnyre (talk) 11:31, 9 January 2010 (UTC)

Archiving

Does anyone object to me setting up automatic archiving for this page using MiszaBot? Unless otherwise agreed, I would set it to archive threads that have been inactive for 30 days and keep ten threads.--Oneiros (talk) 13:57, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

Y Done--Oneiros (talk) 00:50, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

Astronomical Californium

In Description

Cf-254 has been detected in supernova IC-4182 during 1956. ref. "Californium-254 and Supernovae" Burbidge et. al. in Phys. Rev. 103, 1145 (1956) URL:http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRev.103.1145 DOI:10.1103/PhysRev.103.1145

67.149.25.179 (talk) 19:10, 14 February 2010 (UTC) darianjenkins at googlemail

I am suspicious because the Cf-254 identification was done merely by the lifetime of 55 days - too weak an argument to me. Materialscientist (talk) 23:29, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Why not astronomical Curium?

If californium is detected in supernova, presumably there should be curium which is a lighter element. The alpha decay of Californium can also produce curium. It is interesting to note that the half lives of primordial Pu-244 (8.0 * 10⁷a) and Cm-247 (1.67 * 10⁷a) are comparable.Anoop.m (talk) 17:59, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

Element books

WP:ELEMENTS started creating books on each individual elements. Since there are a lot of them, any help would be very much appreciated. Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 02:40, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

Misusing of refs

Jagged 85 (talk · contribs) is one of the main contributors to Wikipedia (over 67,000 edits; he's ranked 198 in the number of edits), and practically all of his edits have to do with Islamic science, technology and philosophy. This editor has persistently misused sources here over several years. This editor's contributions are always well provided with citations, but examination of these sources often reveals either a blatant misrepresentation of those sources or a selective interpretation, going beyond any reasonable interpretation of the authors' intent. Please see: Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Jagged 85. The damage is so extensive that it is undermining Wikipedia's credibility as a source. I searched the page history, and found 7 edits by Jagged 85 (for example, see this edits). Tobby72 (talk) 21:26, 14 June 2010 (UTC)

I took this out because it deals with "the exhaltation theory of metals" not "elements"

Building on the theory, Arab/Persian chemist and alchemist, [[Jābir ibn Hayyān]] (Geber c. 790), postulated that [[metal]]s were formed out of two elements: [[sulfur]], ‘the stone that burns’, which characterized the principle of combustibility, and [[Mercury (element)|mercury]], which contained the idealized principle of metallic properties.<ref name="r8">Strathern, Paul. (2000). Mendeleyev’s Dream – the Quest for the Elements. New York: Berkley Books.</ref> Shortly thereafter, this evolved into the Arabic concept of the three principles: sulfur giving flammability or combustion, mercury giving volatility and stability, and in the 10th century, [[Islamic medicine|Persian physician]] and alchemist [[Muhammad ibn Zakarīya Rāzi]] (Rhazes) hints at [[Salt (chemistry)|salt]] giving solidity. In 1524, Swiss chemist [[Paracelsus]] adopted Aristotle’s four element theory, but reasoned that they appeared in bodies as three principles. Paracelsus saw these principles as fundamental, and justified them by recourse to the description of how wood burns in fire. Mercury included the cohesive principle, so that when it left in smoke the wood fell apart. Smoke represented the volatility (the mercury principle), the heat-giving flames represented flammability (sulfur), and the remnant ash represented solidity (salt).<ref name="r8"/> In 1669, German physician and chemist [[Johann Becher]] published his Physica Subterranea. In modification on the ideas of Paracelsus, he argued that the constituents of bodies are air, water, and three types of earth: ''terra fluida'', the mercurial element, which contributes fluidity and volatility; ''terra lapida'', the solidifying element, which produces fusibility or the binding quality; and ''terra pinguis'', the fatty element, which gives material substance its oily and combustible qualities.<ref name="r9">Partington, J.R. (1937). A Short History of Chemistry. New York: Dover Publications, Inc.</ref> These three earths correspond with Geber’s three principles. A piece of wood, for example, according to Becher, is composed of ash and terra pinguis; when the wood is burnt, the terra pinguis is released, leaving the ash. In other words, in combustion the fatty earth burns away.

J8079s (talk) 19:54, 31 July 2010 (UTC)

Dubious

In the section on history it states that the term "element" was originally used to refer to states of matter. It goes on to list the relevant elements and their associated states of matter: solid/earth, liquid/water, gas/air, and plasma/fire. I don't believe that this statement is accurate. The original Classical elements were devised in ancient times (roughly Hellenistic era), but plasma wasn't discovered until the 19th century. The connection is tenuous. (And tt sounds like new-age hokum to me.) I think the first part of this section should be changed or removed completely. Danshil (talk) 15:58, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

I agree. It's quite plausible that the names originated from natural observations of phases of matter (clearly not plasma, except the sun and stars) however, the philosophical theories weren't equivalent to phases of matter. Once aether was no longer needed for celestial mechanics, the name was reused, sometimes in connection with odic force but most recently as the luminiferous aether. But that's TMI for this article.

I took out the global statement saying "they're all the same" because they're only similar due to everyone living on the same planet observing the same phenomena. There actually were theoretical differences. The classical elements article is able to compare and contrast the various theories but, again, that's TMI here and Greek philosophy is the proper basis for comparison for history of science. Thanks—Machine Elf 1735 (talk) 18:13, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Concur just to put down a note: the peripatetics with Plato, Aristotle and a couple of other guys imagined that every element was composed from thingies that looked like the platonic solids, of exactly five kinds. They imagined that the triangles were kind of abstract "atoms", rejecting the more modern-looking atomism of Democritus. The elements "water", "fire", "earth", "air" and "ether" was nothing like "states of matter", they were more like the essence of their respective practical manifestation if such a weird thing can be imagined these days. Rursus dixit. (^mbork³!) 12:04, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

Er, peripatetics (as opposed to "academics") were connected with Aristotle's school at the Lyceum (as opposed to Plato's Academy).

Aristotle rejected Plato's quasi-atom interpretation, which was no-doubt inspired by the Pythagoreans. Aristotle thought triangles were abstractions, and while they composed abstract "solids", they could not be said to compose real substance. Aristotle was ever-so-much more the materialist than Plato, although the atomists, in general, were strictly materialist (and Plato isn't counted among them, except to mention his solids in connection with the elements).

Aristotle gave an entirely different account of the transformation between the elements, (the change between "states of matter", coupled with cosmogonical considerations and a general explanation of what it means for something to change). Aristotle's hylomorphic reinterpretation of Plato's theory of forms implied the elements can't exist in pure form because they're intended to account for prime matter (and matter cannot exist without form). Form, for Aristotle, is an abstract description of something, entirely "before" or entirely "after" whatever change is being discussed.

The elemental forms were thus abstractions of "a potential to do work", that of heating or desiccating, which are always a "mixture" as found in nature (in various ratios). So abstractly, fire is what's hot (but dry), air is what's moist (but hot), water is what's cold (but moist), and earth is what's dry (but cold).

Aristotle was concerned to eliminate the possibility of an indeterminate form (some intermediate state) during an elemental transformation. His solution was similar to Gray code in modern communication and computing, multiple "contrarieties" don't undergo change simultaneously: for example, fire can't change directly to earth, the change must be analyzed as two stages: either fire→air→earth or fire→water→earth.

Anyway, selective accounts of Democritus (notably Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy) are tenuously "modern-looking", but a string of lucky guesses are impressive in a way even Aristotle would have characterized as non-scientific.—Machine Elf ¹⁷³⁵ 08:22, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

Elements found in nature

There are several different numbers of elements occuring naturally in nature that are thrown around on this page. Could we reach a consensus on the correct amount? --69.81.137.79 (talk) 03:29, 22 August 2010 (UTC)tytyytytytytyty

Did you read it carefully? Give an example of a discrepancy (making sure you're not giving example of what are different figures for what are actually two different things) SBHarris 17:26, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

He might have been right in 22 August 2010: there were mentionings of the speculative discoveries elements 122 and 126, at that time that a small minority of physicists believed could be factual. Those alleged discoveries were later retracted so now it is almost universally 118 elements (or less), where 117 is the latest plausible discovery. In other words: we've gotten the numbers right now. Rursus dixit. (^mbork³!) 12:16, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

Nothing like 118 elements are found in nature. 94 elements are found in nature-- the rest are made artificially, with increasingly small half-lives. Saying element 118 is found in nature is like saying automobiles are found in nature. That isn't what we mean by the phrase in English.SBHarris 16:35, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

Table summarizing origin of elements?

Would it be useful to augment the information in element table within this article with a new column showing the origin of the element (big-bang, stellar, supernova, etc)? Perhaps augment the primordial/transitory/synthesis column? Or an additional column? See Nucleosynthesis, Big Bang nucleosynthesis, Stellar nucleosynthesis, and Supernova nucleosynthesis. This article already has an "Origins" section which discusses these origins in general terms, but I was looking for a tabular summary, per-element. --Noleander (talk) 20:15, 7 July 2011 (UTC)

After studying the "List of the 118 known chemical elements" table, I propose to implement the above suggestion by changing the entries in the "Occurrence" column by replacing "primordial" entries with three more specific choices: Big Bang nucleosynthesis, Stellar nucleosynthesis, or Supernova nucleosynthesis. If unknown, I could just leave it as "primordial" or perhaps "nucleosynthesis". The "Transitory" and "Synthesized" entries would not be changed. Comments? --Noleander (talk) 03:39, 8 July 2011 (UTC)