Elemental Humor

Have you ever wondered where all of those funny names on the periodic table come from? I'm a big fan of the periodic table—it adorns my shower curtain, in fact—and one morning the thought came to me to that there are many mysterious names on the periodic table whose origins are obscure to the average layman. Thus, I took it upon myself to create the following list, detailing the origins of many of those inscrutable names:

• 3 Lithium, named after the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
• 18 Argon, named after the Argonauts.
• 24 Chromium, named after the Internet browser (the open-source one that the more famous Google Chrome gets its code from).
• 36 Krypton, named after Superman's home planet.
• 44 Ruthenium, named after the Biblical Ruth.
• 45 Rhodium, named after the island of Rhodes, home to the eponymous Colossus in ancient times and famed as the site of the Siege of Rhodes in 1522.
• 52 Tellurium, named after William Tell, Swiss folk hero.
• 62 Samarium, named after the region of Samaria in the north of Israel.
• 64 Gadolinium, named after the Hebrew word gadól (גָּדֹל), meaning “big, large.”
• 67 Holmium, named after fictional detective Sherlock Holmes.
• 71 Lutetium, named for the lute.
• 84 Polonium, named after the sport of polo.
• 97 Berkelium, named after yours truly. 
• …

…alright, alright, I can't keep this up any more.

In case it's not obvious, none of the preceding is true; this is what happens when I get bored while looking at a periodic table and letting my mind wander.

Let's go over the actual, correct origins of the names of the aforementioned elements:

• 3 Lithium is actually named from the Greek word λιθος, lithos, meaning “stone.” This is a reference to it being discovered in a solid mineral, unlike its two fellow alkaline metals known at the time, sodium (known from high levels in animal blood) and potassium (discovered in plant ashes).
• 18 Argon is named from the Greek word αργος, argos, meaning “inactive,” in reference to its chemical inactivity. It's the least reactive element that actually stills forms compounds, though only a few are known and the first compound, argon fluorohyudride (HArF) was only synthesized in 2000.
• 24 Chromium, from the Greek word χρωμα, chrōma, meaning “color,” in reference to the intense colors of many of its salts.
• 36 Krypton, named from the Greek word κρυπτος, kryptos, meaning “hidden” or “secret.” It (like all the other noble gasses except helium) was discovered by successively evaporating components of liquid air, and the name is a reference to it being hidden among all the other gasses that make up air.
• 44 Ruthenium is named for the Latin name for the region that includes Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, Ruthenia in Latin.
• 45 Rhodium is named from the Greek word ροδον, rhodon, meaning “rose,” in reference to the rose-red color of one of its chlorine compounds.
• 52 Tellurium is actually named from the Latin tellus, meaning “earth.”
• 62 Samarium is named after the mineral it was discovered in, samarskite, which in turn was named after Vasili Samarsky-Bykhovets, Chief of Staff of the Russian Corps of Mining Engineers, who helped procure access to the samples of the (at the time) rare mineral samarskite from the Urals.
• 64 Gadolinium, similarly, is named for the mineral gadolinite, which in turn is named for the Finnish chemist Johan Gadolin, who discovered yttrium (and was knighted three times, apparently).
• 67 Holmium is actually named from the Latin name for Stockholm, Holmia.
• 71 Lutetium is similarly named from the Latin name for Paris, Lutetia.
• 84 Polonium was actually named by one of its discoverers, Marie Curie, after her homeland of Poland.
• 97 Berkelium is, of course, not named after any member of the Berke family, but after the city of Berkeley in California, where it was discovered in 1949 at the University of California Radiation Laboratory.

Hope you enjoyed my attempts at humor. A hui hou!

Burning questions of a Saturday morning.

So there I was lying in bed this morning, still half-asleep, when I got to pondering the fact that I, like the atoms that compose me, am made up of 99.99% empty space. I then idly contemplated the fact that most of this mass was in the nuclei of my atoms, at which point I was seized by a burning desire to find out how much all the electrons in all the atoms of my body put together weighed.

I know that last I checked, I had a mass of approximately 60 kg (my weight is left as an exercise for the reader), and a little searching on the 'net produced a table with the percent-by-mass composition of an average person. Starting with the first entry in the list, I have around \(61.35\text{%}\cdot 60\ \text{kg} = 36.81\ \text{kg}\) of oxygen in me. That's 36,810 grams of oxygen. A mole of oxygen being 16.00 grams, that's almost exactly 2,300 moles of oxygen in me.

(A mole, in chemistry, is simply a very large number \(-\ 6.022\times10^{23}\), to be exact. The conversion between grams and moles is pretty easy; if you have an amount of a substance equal in grams to the atomic weight of one atom (or molecule) of that substance, you have one mole of that substance, i.e., \(6.022\times10^{23}\) atoms (or molecules) of the substance. Since the atomic weight of oxygen is 16.00 atomic mass units, one mole of oxygen is 16.00 grams of oxygen. One more of oxygen at \(0^\circ\)C and normal atmospheric pressure would occupy about 22.4 liters, or just under 6 gallons.)

Now, each oxygen atom comes with 8 electrons in tow, \(8\) electrons \(\times\) \(2,300\) moles \(\times\) \(6.022\times10^{23}=1.11\times10^{28}\) electrons.

That...is a very large number. (11.1 billion billion billion).

And that's just the first element on the list! (Although, by virtue of its nature, it is likely to provide the largest number of electrons.) Next up is carbon, which, at 22.83%, comprises 13.70 kg of me. Dividing by 12.00 grams per mole, and multiplying by 6 electrons to each carbon atom, we arrive at \(3.09\times10^{27}\) electrons from carbon, a factor of 10 less than from oxygen (not surprisingly).

Since the procedure is relatively boring, and quite simple, I will spare you further talk and simply list the amounts in the table below:

---

oxygen        36.81 kg  \(1.11\times10^{28}\) electrons

carbon        13.70 kg  \(3.09\times10^{27}\) electrons

hydrogen      6.00 kg   \(3.57\times10^{27}\) electrons

nitrogen      1.54 kg   \(4.64\times10^{26}\) electrons

calcium       0.86 kg   \(2.58\times10^{26}\) electrons

phosphorus    670 g     \(1.94\times10^{26}\) electrons

potassium     120 g     \(3.51\times10^{25}\) electrons

sulfur        120 g     \(3.61\times10^{25}\) electrons

sodium        84 g      \(2.42\times10^{25}\) electrons

chlorine      84 g      \(2.43\times10^{25}\) electrons

magnesium     18 g      \(5.35\times10^{24}\) electrons

iron          6.0 g     \(1.68\times10^{24}\) electrons

fluorine      2.4 g     \(6.85\times10^{23}\) electrons

zinc          1.8 g     \(5.00\times10^{23}\) electrons

silicon       0.60 g    \(1.80\times10^{23}\) electrons

rubidium      0.60 g    \(1.56\times10^{23}\) electrons

strontium     0.30 g    \(7.84\times10^{22}\) electrons

bromine       0.24 g    \(6.33\times10^{22}\) electrons

lead          0.12 g    \(2.86\times10^{22}\) electrons

copper        0.06 g    \(1.65\times10^{22}\) electrons

aluminum      60 mg     \(1.74\times10^{22}\) electrons

cadmium       60 mg     \(1.54\times10^{22}\) electrons

cerium        60 mg     \(1.50\times10^{22}\) electrons

barium        18 mg     \(4.42\times10^{21}\) electrons

iodine        18 mg     \(4.53\times10^{21}\) electrons

tin           18 mg     \(4.57\times10^{21}\) electrons

titanium      18 mg     \(4.98\times10^{21}\) electrons

boron         18 mg     \(5.01\times10^{21}\) electrons

nickel        12 mg     \(3.45\times10^{21}\) electrons

selenium      12 mg     \(3.11\times10^{21}\) electrons

chromium      12 mg     \(3.34\times10^{21}\) electrons

manganese     12 mg     \(3.29\times10^{21}\) electrons

arsenic       6.0 mg    \(1.59\times10^{21}\) electrons

lithium       6.0 mg    \(1.56\times10^{21}\) electrons

cesium        5.4 mg    \(1.35\times10^{21}\) electrons

mercury       5.4 mg    \(1.30\times10^{21}\) electrons

germanium     4.2 mg    \(1.11\times10^{21}\) electrons

molybdenum    4.2 mg    \(1.10\times10^{21}\) electrons

cobalt        2.4 mg    \(6.62\times10^{20}\) electrons

antimony      1.8 mg    \(4.54\times10^{20}\) electrons

silver        1.8 mg    \(4.72\times10^{20}\) electrons

niobium       1.2 mg    \(3.19\times10^{20}\) electrons

zirconium     0.60 mg   \(1.58\times10^{20}\) electrons

lanthanum     0.60 mg   \(1.48\times10^{20}\) electrons

gallium       0.60 mg   \(1.61\times10^{20}\) electrons

tellurium     0.60 mg   \(1.47\times10^{20}\) electrons

yttrium       0.54 mg   \(1.42\times10^{20}\) electrons

bismuth       0.42 mg   \(1.00\times10^{20}\) electrons

thallium      0.42 mg   \(1.00\times10^{20}\) electrons

indium        0.36 mg   \(9.25\times10^{19}\) electrons

gold          0.18 mg   \(4.35\times10^{19}\) electrons

scandium      0.18 mg   \(5.06\times10^{19}\) electrons

tantalum      0.18 mg   \(4.37\times10^{19}\) electrons

vanadium      0.12 mg   \(3.26\times10^{19}\) electrons

thorium       0.060 mg  \(1.40\times10^{19}\) electrons

uranium       60 μg     \(1.40\times10^{19}\) electrons

samarium      42 μg     \(1.04\times10^{19}\) electrons

beryllium     30 μg     \(8.02\times10^{18}\) electrons

tungsten      18 μg     \(4.36\times10^{18}\) electrons

---

(if you're wondering about the units, conveniently, 0.06 g = 60 mg and 0.06 mg = 60 μg)

If you add all those electrons up, you come up with a total of \(1.88\times10^{28}\) electrons. That's a lot of electrons -- 18.8 billion billion billion, to be exact. But how much mass do they have? And how much do they weigh?

Finding the mass is easy. The mass of an electron is \(9.11\times10^{-31}\) kg so \(1.88\times10^{28}\) of them together have a mass of 17.1 grams, which has a weight of approximately 1/25 of a pound.

Wow. All the electrons in my body make up a measly 0.0000029% of my mass. Everything else is concentrated in the nuclei of my atoms. Wild, huh?

Observing run debriefing

My apologies that I didn't get around to writing anything yesterday about my observing run on Friday night. This was partly because I was busy working on my take-home final for Partial Differential Equations and studying for my Electromagnetism final, and partly because staying up all night does some wacky stuff to your head. I knew it was Saturday, because I headed to the library for a previously-scheduled study group, and yet Saturday night I steadfastly maintained to Jonathan that it was Friday, until being informed by my watch otherwise. I have a slight break from busyness right now; as of this writing I have just completed both the take-home final and the final paper for PDE's . My final paper was on the Schrödinger Wave Equation and how it can be solved to give the electron orbitals in a hydrogen atom, and it came out looking beautiful, especially with the graphics I included showing the first ten orbitals (1s-4f, if you're interested). \(\LaTeX\) is such an amazing typesetting program

But back to my observing run Friday night with Dr. Takamiya. We started about 5:30 in the afternoon, heading into the Institute for Astronomy building just above campus to remotely control the UH 2.2 meter telescope atop Mauna Kea (no, we didn't actually go up the mountain this time). Our telescope operator (TO) got there about 6, and we proceeded to start the telescope computers and the instrument we were using (a camera called SNIFS) and put them through a battery of pre-observing tests, calibrations, and routines. The sun didn't set till almost 7, and twilight didn't end for another half-hour after that, so we were performing tests and getting things set up for almost an hour and a half.

Thankfully, we had perfect weather, no clouds or other obstacles. We had a rather humorous incident where the Gemini observatory called us to tell us that they were planning to shine their adaptive-optics laser into the area we were observing, and were we going to be observing there much longer? We only had another 20 minutes there anyway, and they very politely waited, even calling again to make sure we had left. We could see their laser on the all-sky camera mounted at the summit to watch for clouds, which was pretty nifty

As the night progessed, Dr. Takamiya showed me how to issue orders to the telescope, and I got to tell it to take several exposures. We were observing relatively nearby galaxies, taking pictures first of an ionized hydrogen region, followed by a picture of a blank patch of sky nearby which we'll subtract from the image later on (technically we were capturing the spectra of the regions, in order to measure the relative abundance of different elements, so no visual pictures. Sorry)

I also learned a new word Friday night (or maybe early Saturday morning, it gets hard to tell): telluric, which means "earthly", as in "starlight that comes to us is affected by clouds and other telluric factors". I already knew that 'tellus' is the Latin word for earth, (which is what the element tellurium is named for), so I was able to guess in context what telluric meant, I just never knew it existed in English before. Now I just need to find a conversation in which to use it..

The night went pretty uneventfully, except for a portion when we weren't able to get a guide star to work for about 10 minutes. The hardest part was staying awake during the 20-minute exposures when there wasn't much to do but watch the guide star and make sure the focus didn't wander (seems like the hardest time is from 2 to 3 in the morning, after that I woke up a bit). We started shutting down about 4:30, since twilight came around 5, which is when we finally left. Luckily, I got home and made it into bed before the sun rose at 5:30, or I probably wouldn't have gotten much sleep. As it was I got several hours of very good sleep in (I think it's funny that I was the person up the latest in our house, and I still got up before anyone else, around 10:00).

Well, with my PDE stuff done, I don't really have anything to do tonight, so it's time for a little relaxation, before hitting the books next week. My PDE final is tomorrow, but it's simply turning in things and watching a few classmates' presentations, nothing to worry about. After that I have two finals on Wednesday, and one on Thursday, so it's studying Monday and Tuesday.

Oh, I almost forgot to say, Happy Mother's Day, mom! And thank you very much for the chocolate in your latest package; I've been slowly chipping away at it. Aloha wau iā 'oe! (I love you!)