Reborn and become a Great Scientist

Chapter 198 146
"I knew it, I knew it! If you come to me with such a smile on your face, there must be nothing good!"

Old Prague picked up a piece of paper that Chen Muwu put on his desk with a look of displeasure, and read it word by word: "Yttrium, zirconium, niobium, molybdenum, ruthenium, rhodium...Dr. Chen, don't be kidding." , Why do you want the simple substances of these things? Is it possible that you really want to change careers from physics and go further and further on the road of chemistry? I even regret now that I tricked you into David Faraday Laboratory Here we come!"

The names of these elements written on the note were stumbled by the old Prague.

This was not because he was shocked by the news that Chen Muwu was going to change careers that he imagined in his mind, but because he really didn't have any chance to get in touch with these uncommon niche elements.

When they were in school, most people memorized the periodic table of elements, and they would only memorize the top twenty according to the teacher's requirements, from "hydrogen helium lithium beryllium boron" to "sulfur chloride argon potassium calcium".

Scholars may recite ten or twenty more digits in the future, but basically they can only recite "zinc" or "zirconium".

After all, apart from professional people, who would not be able to think about memorizing these things?

I really have nothing to do when I'm idle, and I want to accumulate a bragging capital for myself, so memorizing the periodic table of elements is better than memorizing a few more digits of pi.

A few days ago, Oppenheimer didn't go to Liverpool with the crowd to attend Chadwick's wedding, so he didn't follow the crowd back to Cambridge. Instead, he got stuck in a bug and stayed in the Royal Research Institute.

Chen Muwu didn't realize this until he returned to London.

This is a bit embarrassing, he can't just say to Oppenheimer directly, "Go back to Cambridge if you have nothing to do, 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 dug out from 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 of elements is very different from those appended to the end of chemistry books.

For example, the noble gases of group zero are in the first column instead of the last.

Of course, their current name is also called noble gases.

For example, instead of gallium, indium, and thallium below boron and aluminum in the third main group, scandium, yttrium, lanthanides, and actiniums, the third subgroups, occupy the magpie's nest.

On the contrary, elements such as gallium, indium, and thallium, which originally belonged to the main group, also became the sub-group by mistake.

That's right, there are only lanthanides but no actinides on this periodic table of elements, and the uranium element No. 92 is the last one in the entire table.

Finding transuranic elements with a larger atomic number 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 knew.

For example, the symbol for argon is A, not Ar.

Chen Muwu is very clear about this. It seems that 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 periodicals in Germany, the defeated country, has plummeted, and English has become the mainstream academic language.

In order to prevent the ambiguity between the symbol A of argon and the definite article a in English, the chemists got together for a meeting and changed the symbol of argon from A to Ar.

Fortunately, the academic status of Germany has plummeted. Otherwise, if there is one version of the periodic table of elements in German and one in English, then the chemical community will definitely be confused.

Take the present as an example, the Germans' periodic table of elements in 1925 did not start with hydrogen H, but a hypothetical 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 considered to have no electrons outside the nucleus, so the charge in its nucleus should also be zero.

Before the neutron was discovered in the real world, the Germans had already predicted the existence of the neutron.

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;

And the No. 71 element in the lanthanide series, which 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, Lutetium, and the symbol Lu after the old name Lutetia in Paris where his workplace was located.

However, regarding the discovery of lutetium, the Germans believed that it was first discovered in 1907 by the Austrian mineralogist Karl von Weersbach.

Welsbach named this element Cassiopeium after Cassiopeia, 镏, so on the German periodic table, the symbol written at position 71 is Cp.

There is also element 43, an unknown element that people have always believed to exist 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 No. 31, Scandium No. 21 and Germanium No. 32.

However, element No. 43, manganese, did not appear until Mendeleev's death.

Since then, mineralogists and chemists are no less enthusiastic about searching for No. 43 manganese-like elements than looking for transuranic elements larger than 92.

First, in 1908, Masataka Ogawa said that he discovered element 43 in minerals and named it Nipponium. The etymology is Nippon, the country name of Japan.

It's just that people couldn't repeat Masataka Ogawa's experiment of discovering this element later, so he didn't recognize his result.

More than ten years later, the Germans also claimed that they were using X-ray diffraction on niobite and discovered element 43, and named it Masurium, masurium, after Masuren in the Masurian region of East Prussia.

However, the Germans claimed that the discovery of ammonium was exactly the same as that of Masataka Ogawa more than ten years ago.

Nobody but themselves can use the same experiment to get the same result.

But the Germans just refused to admit the failure of the experiment. On the periodic table of elements, Ma has always been used to represent the 43rd element.

In contrast, the American version of the periodic table given to Chen Muwu by Oppenheimer is more honest. They do not mark any element symbols directly below manganese, between molybdenum and ruthenium, but only a A question mark "?" means that the element has not been found yet.

Of course Chen Muwu knew what element 43 was. After he "discovered" deuterium, he thought about bombarding molybdenum with deuterium after the accelerator was built to "discover" this new element.

At that time, whether it is the Nipponium claimed by Masataka Ogawa or the magnolia claimed by the Germans, it will be self-defeating.

Chen Muwu has even chosen a name for this No. 43 element. He will definitely not use the Greek word Technetos, which means "artificial", to name it Technetium, technetium Tc as in history.

Masataka Ogawa gave him inspiration, why not name it Zhonium after the Chinese character, of course the Chinese character is Zhong, and the symbol is Z.

In the future, there may be a lot of new elements, such as Qinium (钅秦) Q, Hanium (钅) Ha, Tangium (鎕Tg), Songium (钅宋) So, Mingium (钅明) M The class's name appears on the periodic table, giving the world a little 5000-year shock.

It doesn't matter if you run out of dynasty names, you can still use place names!

For example, Beijine (Shibei) Bj, Beijing Halogen?
The more Chen Muwu thought about it, the more excited he became. Now he is full of fighting spirit.

But the prerequisite for specifying these elements is to discover them first.

The prerequisite for discovering these elements is to get the accelerator out first.

But before building the accelerator, Chen Muwu still had this superconductor.

This time, he no longer wants to synthesize methyl methacrylate bit by bit from raw materials like he used to make plexiglass.

These metal materials already have metal elements, just find someone to buy them directly.

And those chemists who have been studying elements all their lives, the purity of the elemental substances extracted will definitely be much higher than that of his half-baked guy.

The matter of buying materials still has to be handed over to Old Prague.

After staying in London for so many years, he must know which professor in which laboratory of which university can refine these technical materials.

Originally, Chen Muwu just wanted to get Old Prague to find some high-purity metal niobium, because this is the element substance 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 Oppenheimer gave him, and copied their names one by one. to the note.

However, just as Chen Muwu picked up the pen, he discovered a new problem.

Why is the symbol of element 41 on the table not Nb in his memory, but Cb!
At first, he thought it was a typo, so he took a closer look at the small print attached below, which was the full name of this element.

Columbium, literally translated, is the 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 (钶).

No way, the periodic table provided by Oppenheimer proved at the last moment that it didn't work.

Chen Muwu had to go to the library of the Royal Research Institute himself, where he found the name of niobium, Niobium, and also verified his conjecture that this element does have different names in Europe and the United States.

Finally, he copied the names of several elements on the note. Chen Muwu found Old Prague again with the note, and the scene where Old Prague questioned him happened just now.

"Sir Bragg, I don't want to study any chemistry. I just want to test whether these metals can produce superconductivity at low temperature, and if so, what is their superconducting critical temperature?

"But I am not familiar with the place in London, and 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 most respected and most trusted person in London. Sir Prague.

"I believe that whether it's University College London or Imperial College, with your reputation, sir, it won't be a problem to find acquaintances in those schools to help you solve these kinds of metal materials.

"For you, it's just a little thing easier than blinking an eye."

He clearly knew that Chen Muwu was wearing a tall hat and carrying the sedan chair for himself, so that he could run errands for him.

But what Dr. Chen said really made people feel very comfortable, and Old Bragg believed that Dr. Chen would definitely succeed in the experiment, which would also be of great help to enhance the reputation of David Faraday Laboratory.

The director of the laboratory felt that he had no reason to reject this sincere young man, so he could only go to Imperial College for him.

A few days later, Old Prague finally found all the metal materials written on the note, and Chen Muwu was finally able to start his last experiment in the Royal Research Institute in the near future.

Chen Muwu used the machine 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, or even lower.

But Chen Muwu felt that this was completely unnecessary, because even if he found the superconducting critical temperature of those other elements, it would be of no use to him.

It was enough for him to discover that niobium, with a critical temperature close to ten Kelvin, was superconducting.

The old Prague worked so hard to find the other elemental elements, which were just Chen Muwu's tricks.

He even started with element 45 rhodium, then ruthenium, then molybdenum.

These three materials always have resistance at an ambient temperature of three Kelvin, and do not reflect the existence of the superconducting effect.

Chen Muwu was calm about this, but his two students showed completely different attitudes after the third experiment still ended in failure.

Oppenheimer has basically lost interest in experiments completely, and he believes that superconductivity is nothing more than a hoax.

In order to deceive that person, Mr. Chen even involved himself.

But Shi Ruwei still worked hard. Although the experiment kept failing, he was able to master the operation method of the refrigeration machine during so many days of experimentation.

From evaporating liquid hydrogen to find deuterium, to measuring the superconducting effect of molybdenum, Chen Muwu was the one who operated the instrument from beginning to end.

Although Oppenheimer also wanted to learn how to operate the instrument when it first arrived in David Faraday's laboratory, but the boring cooling process made him quickly give up this idea.

It was time for Shi Ruwei to master the use of the instrument, and now Chen Muwu could justifiably "lazy".

"Brother Shunruo, I'm really too tired after doing the experiment for so long. Otherwise, I'll ask you to do it for the next element niobium, how about it?"

It is not a problem if the credit is assigned to oneself every time. For such an insignificant discovery as the superconductivity of niobium, it is better to let it go.

What's more, what he gave up was not an outsider.

How do you say that?

A flower blooming alone is not spring, but a hundred flowers blooming together makes the garden full of spring.

(End of this chapter)