"I knew it, I knew it! If you come to me with a smile like that, there must be nothing good going on!"
Old Bragg picked up a piece of paper that Chen Muwu put on his desk with a somewhat unkind expression, and read out word by word: "Yttrium, zirconium, niobium, molybdenum, ruthenium, rhodium... Dr. Chen, don't be kidding me. , what do you want these simple substances for? Is it possible that you really want to change your career from physics and go further and further down the road of chemistry? I even regret it now, tricking you into Davy Faraday Laboratory Here it comes!”
The names of these elements were written on the note, but Old Prague stumbled over his words.
This was not because he was shocked by the news in his mind that Chen Muwu was going to change careers, but because he really didn't have many opportunities to come into contact with these uncommon niche elements.
When they were in school, most people memorized the periodic table of elements, and they would only memorize the first twenty numbers according to the teacher's requirements, from "hydrogen helium lithium beryllium boron" to "sulfur chloride argon potassium calcium".
Academic masters may memorize more ten or twenty digits in the future, but basically they can only memorize "zinc" or "zirconium".
After all, except for professionals, who wouldn’t be able to think about carrying these things?
If you really have nothing to do and want to save yourself some bragging rights, then memorizing the periodic table of elements is not as good as memorizing a few more pi ratios.
A few days ago, Oppenheimer didn't go to Liverpool with everyone to attend Chadwick's wedding, so he didn't follow everyone back to Cambridge. Instead, he got stuck and stayed in the Royal Institution.
Chen Muwu only realized this after returning to London.
This is a bit embarrassing. He couldn't just say to Oppenheimer, "If you have nothing to do, just go back to Cambridge. We won't take you to do the next experiment"!
However, it seems that Oppenheimer's stay in London still has some effect.
When Chen Muwu wrote that note, he relied on a periodic table of elements that Oppenheimer pulled out of his notebook.
Of course, he couldn't remember the names and symbols of those elements, let alone the English names.
The current format of the periodic table is very different from those appended to the end of chemistry books.
For example, the rare gases of group zero are in the first column instead of the last column.
Of course, their current name is still called noble gases.
For example, under the third main group boron and aluminum, instead of gallium, indium, and thallium, the magpie's nest is occupied by the third subgroup doves of scandium, yttrium, lanthanide series, and actinium.
On the contrary, elements such as gallium, indium and thallium, which originally belonged to the main group, became the sub-group by mistake.
That's right, this periodic table of elements only has the lanthanide series and no actinium series, and the uranium element No. 92 is the last digit in the entire table.
Finding transuranic elements with an atomic number larger than uranium has always been a dream of chemists.
Moreover, there are many symbols of elements on this periodic table, which are different from what Chen Muwu knows.
For example, the symbol for argon is A, not Ar.
Chen Muwu knows this very well. It seems to be because after World War II, with the rise of the United States, English has become more and more important in the world.
The same is true in academic exchanges. The authority of German-language journals in the defeated Germany plummeted, and English became the mainstream academic language.
In order to prevent confusion between the symbol A of argon and the definite article a in English, chemists gathered together for a meeting and changed the symbol of argon from A to Ar.
Fortunately, Germany's academic status has plummeted. Otherwise, if the periodic table of elements had one version in German and one in English, the chemical world would be in chaos.
Take now, for example, the German periodic table of elements in 1925, the first one at the beginning is not hydrogen H, but an imaginary zero element Nn.
The relative atomic mass of element zero is set to 1.0090, which is almost the same as hydrogen's 1.0078.
Unlike hydrogen, element zero is believed to have no electrons outside the nucleus, so the charge in its nucleus should also be zero.
The Germans had already predicted the existence of neutrons before they were discovered in the real world.
In addition, in the German periodic table of elements, the symbol of argon is Ar, not A; the symbol of iodine is J, not I; and the symbol of xenon is X, not Xe;
As well as element 71 in the lanthanide series, this is a public case in the history of element discovery.
In 1907, French chemist Georges Urban discovered this element. He named this new element Lutetium, with the symbol Lu, after the old name of Lutetia in Paris, where his workplace was located.
However, regarding the discovery of lutetium, the Germans believe that it was first discovered by Austrian mineralogist Carl von Welsbach in 1907.
Weersbach named this element Cassiopeium after Cassiopeia, so on the German periodic table of elements, the symbol written at position 71 is Cp.
There is also Element 43, an unknown element that people have always believed exists but cannot be found.
In 1871, Mendeleev predicted the existence of four unknown elements, namely aluminum-like, boron-like, silicon-like and manganese-like.
A few years later, the first three elements were discovered by scientists, namely gallium 31, scandium 21 and germanium 32.
However, element 43, which is similar to manganese, was not seen until Mendeleev’s death.
Since then, mineralogists and chemists have been no less enthusiastic about searching for manganese-like elements No. 43 than they are about searching for transuranic elements greater than 92.
First, in 1908, I, Ogawa Masataka, said that he had discovered element 43 in the mineral and named it Nipponium. The etymology is exactly the name of the country Nippon.
However, later people could not repeat Ogawa Masataka's experiment of discovering this element, so they did not recognize his results.
More than ten years later, the Germans also claimed that they had discovered element 43 through X-ray diffraction of columbite, and named it Masurium after Masuren in the Masurian region of East Prussia.
However, the Germans claimed that their discovery of 鎷 was exactly the same as that of Ogawa Masataka more than ten years ago.
No one other than themselves can use the same experiment to get the same results.
But the Germans refused to admit that the experiment failed, and they always used Ma to represent element No. 43 on the periodic table.
In comparison, the American version of the periodic table of elements given to Chen Muwu by Oppenheimer is more honest. They did not mark any element symbols directly below manganese, between molybdenum and ruthenium, but only marked one The question mark "?" means that the element has not been discovered yet.
Of course Chen Muwu knew what element No. 43 was. After he "discovered" deuterium, he thought about using deuterium to bombard molybdenum and "discover" this new element after the accelerator was built.
At that time, both the Nipponium claimed by Masataka Ogawa and the Nipponium claimed by the Germans will be self-defeating.
Chen Muwu has even given a name to element No. 43. He will definitely not name it Technetium or Technetium Tc using the Greek word Technetos, which means "artificial", as historically was done.
Ogawa Masataka gave him inspiration, so he might as well name it Zhonium after the Chinese middle name. The Chinese character is of course Zhong and the symbol is Zh.
In the future, there may be a lot of new elements, with various names such as Qinium Q, Hanium Ha, Tangium Tg, Songium So, Mingium M. The name of the class appears on the periodic table of elements, giving the world a small shock of five thousand years.
It doesn’t matter if you run out of dynasty names, you can still use place names!
For example, Beijing (Shibei) Bj, Beijing Halogen?
The more Chen Muwu thought about it, the more excited he became, and now he was full of fighting spirit.
But the prerequisite for elucidating these elements is to discover them first.
The prerequisite for discovering these elements is to first develop the accelerator.
But before building the accelerator, Chen Muwu also had this superconductor in front of him.
This time, he no longer wanted to synthesize methyl methacrylate from raw materials bit by bit like he did when he made plexiglass before.
These metal materials have long been made of metal, so just ask someone to buy them directly.
Moreover, those chemists who have spent their whole lives studying elements will definitely refine the purity of the elements much higher than his dabbler.
But things like buying materials still have to be left to Old Prague.
Having stayed in London for so many years, he must know which professor in which laboratory in which university can refine these technical materials.
Chen Muwu originally just wanted to ask Old Bragg to find some high-purity metal niobium, because this is the element with the highest superconducting critical temperature on the periodic table of elements under normal temperature and pressure.
But he was afraid that his behavior would be too obvious, so in the end he chose a few before and after element 41 from the periodic table of elements given to him by Oppenheimer, and copied their names one by one. On to the note.
However, as soon as Chen Muwu picked up his pen, he discovered a new problem.
Why is the symbol for element 41 on this table not Nb as he remembers it, but Cb!
At first he thought it was a misprint, so he took a closer look at the small print attached below, which was the full name of the element.
Columbium, literally translated, means Columbus element.
Columbus, who discovered the New World, is one of the spiritual symbols of Americans.
It seems that it is not a printing error on the table. It may be that the Americans really call element 41 Cb (columnium).
No way, the periodic table of elements provided by Oppenheimer proved at the last moment that it did not work.
Chen Muwu had no choice but to personally go to the library of the Royal Institute, where he found the name Niobium, which also verified his conjecture that this element did have different names in Europe and the United States.
Finally, he copied the names of several elements on the piece of paper. Chen Muwu took the note and found Old Prague again, and the scene where Old Prague questioned him just now happened.
"Sir Bragg, I don't want to study chemistry. I just want to test whether these metals can produce superconducting effects at low temperatures. If so, what is their superconducting critical temperature?
"But I am not familiar with the place in London. I would never be able to buy such a wide variety of metal samples. After thinking about it, I can only entrust this matter to the person I respect and trust most in London. Prague sir you.
"I believe that whether it is at University College London or Imperial College, with your reputation, Sir, it will not be a problem to find acquaintances in those schools to help solve these metal materials.
"For you, it's just a little thing easier than the blink of an eye."
He knew clearly that Chen Muwu was wearing a high hat to carry the sedan chair for him so that he could help him run errands.
But what Dr. Chen said was indeed very comfortable, and Old Bragg believed that Dr. Chen would definitely succeed in the experiment, which would also be of great help in improving the reputation of the David Faraday Laboratory.
The director of the laboratory felt that he had no reason to reject this sincere young man, so he had no choice but to go to Imperial College for him.
A few days later, Old Bragg finally found all the metal materials written on the note, and Chen Muwu could finally start his last experiment at the Royal Research Institute in the near future.
Chen Muwu used the machine he bought at a high price from Leiden University to set the ambient temperature of the experiment to three Kelvin.
In fact, the cooling limit of this machine is one Kelvin, and it can even reach lower.
But Chen Muwu felt that this was completely unnecessary, because even if he found the superconducting critical temperatures of other elements, it would be of little use to him.
He only needed to discover that niobium, with a critical temperature close to ten Kelvin, was superconducting, and that was enough.
The other elements that Old Prague found with great difficulty were just Chen Muwu's trick.
He even went so far as to covertly start with element 45, rhodium, then ruthenium, then molybdenum.
These three materials always have resistance at an ambient temperature of three Kelvin and do not show the existence of the superconducting effect.
Chen Muwu was unfazed by this, but his two students showed completely different attitudes after the third experiment still failed.
Oppenheimer had basically lost interest in the experiment, and he believed that superconductivity was nothing more than a hoax.
In order to deceive that person, Teacher Chen even got involved himself.
But Shi Ruwei still worked hard and never complained. Although the experiments continued to fail, he was able to master the operation of the refrigeration machine during so many days of experiments.
From the beginning of evaporating liquid hydrogen to find deuterium, to the just-concluded measurement of the superconducting effect of molybdenum, Chen Muwu was operating the instrument from beginning to end.
Although Oppenheimer also wanted to learn how to operate the instrument when it first arrived at David Faraday's laboratory, but the boring cooling process made him quickly give up the idea.
It was just the right time for Shi Ruwei to master the use of the instrument, and now Chen Muwu could justifiably "be lazy".
"Brother Shun Ruo, I'm really exhausted after doing experiments for so long. Otherwise, I'll ask you to do the next element 41, niobium. How about that?"
It's not a problem to take credit for every achievement. Small and insignificant discoveries like the superconductivity of niobium can still be allowed to go out.
What's more, the person he gave up to was not an outsider.
How do you say that?
One flower blooming alone is not spring, but a hundred flowers blooming together fills the garden.
(End of chapter)
