The Disappearing Spoon: Chapter 6: Completing the Table…with a Bang Summary & Analysis

Across the history of the universe, some elements have gone “extinct” because they are too unstable to survive. As scientists began to understand this process, they discovered something that was much more powerful than they expected—as well as more dangerous. Before World War I, scientists at the University of Manchester were at work analyzing “every discovered element up to gold.” One of them, Henry Moseley, discovered a mathematical relation between an element’s atomic number, how many protons it has in its nucleus, and the wavelength of X-rays created when a “beam” of electrons strikes the atom’s nucleus. At this point, the periodic table was different to the version Mendeleev published in 1869. It had been reorganized, yet uncertainty remained over whether this was the accurate version.

At only 25 years old, Moseley took up his lab director, Ernest Rutherford’s, idea that each atom had a compact, positively charged nucleus, something that at the time almost no one believed. Mosely suggested that an element’s location on the periodic table was not just determined by its atomic number, but also its (equivalent) nuclear charge—a theory that helped tidy up a lot of unresolved questions about the table. Still, many remained suspicious of his findings. Sadly, Moseley himself met a tragic end as he was killed like so many other young men in World War I. However, his ideas lived on. Scientists scrambled to find the elements that Moseley had identified as missing from the table. By 1940, only one natural element was left to be discovered: element 61.

One of the few teams of scientists trying to find element 61 was led by Emilio Segrè, though they were not successful. In 1949, however, an American team announced that they had found it and that they were going to call it promethium, after the Titan who stole fire and gave it to humanity. However, this didn’t rouse much excitement; few people even really paid attention. The reason for this was that everyone’s focus was on the atomic bomb.

In 1939, Luis Alvarez was a young physicist at UC Berkeley when he learned about the German scientist Otto Hahn’s experiments on nuclear fission (splitting a uranium atom). Within seconds, Alvarez attempted to spread this research to everyone he knew. Hahn’s research represented a major development in the understanding of how atomic nuclei function. Moseley had shown that isotopes could have the same overall charge yet different atomic weights. Many questions were still unanswered, although the nascent field of quantum mechanics was attempting to address them. At the time, scientists were also begin to understand radioactivity, which is how atoms decay or “fall apart.” A major breakthrough came in 1932, when a student of Rutherford’s named James Chadwick discovered neutral neurons (which have neither positive nor negative charge).

Unfortunately, all of this excitement regarding new understandings of atomic structure was set against the backdrop of the rise of fascism and fall of Europe. Nuclear fission wasn’t just a scientific fascination, but the means for creating an atomic bomb. Few people (including many of those working on it) believed that creating such a bomb was actually possible. It was so unlike anything that had been done before that the Manhattan Project, which was tasked with working on it, devised a totally new research strategy called the Monte Carlo method.

One of the big questions facing the scientists involved was how much plutonium and uranium would be needed to make the bomb. Many of the scientists’ wives were enlisted to make calculations to figure this out; they were given a new name, “computers.” This method was new because it borrowed from both the experimental and theoretical way of doing science without either being one or the other. It was based entirely on calculations, although, fortunately for the project, these calculations were very good. The end result was successful in the sense that two uranium bombs were produced and used in the war—the first dropped on Hiroshima, the second on Nagasaki.

Once the Manhattan Project was over, a Polish scientist named Stanislaw Ulam remained fascinated by the research method of the project. He realized that the Monte Carlo method of conducting “experiments” through trying out a huge number of calculations could prove transformative for science.  The Monte Carlo method grew quickly in popularity and it was no longer limited to the particular project of uranium fission. However, it did continue to be used for the development of even more powerful nuclear weapons called “supers.” Yet even these were not the worst weapons bomb scientists had come up with. The very worst was the cobalt-60 dirty bomb, which uses gamma radiation rather than simply heat for destruction. Gamma radiation not only kills living things but mangles cells, leading to cancers and deformities.

Cobalt is an especially brutal element in this sense because the radiation it emits is both destructive at the moment of impact and continues to have harmful effects for years. The scientist who invented the cobalt bomb, Leo Szilard, hoped that these weapons would never actually be built—and as far as anyone knows, they haven’t been. Meanwhile, once the Soviet Union also acquired nuclear bombs, it made an agreement with the U.S. called “Mutually Assured Destruction,” or “M.A.D.,” which was designed to deter use of nuclear weapons based on the idea that it is impossible to “win” a nuclear war.