The Infinite Monkey Cage - Anniversary of the Periodic Table

Episode Date: October 7, 2019

The Periodic Table How well do you know your Fe from your Cu, and what the heck is Np?? Brian Cox and Robin Ince are joined by comedian Katy Brand, Prof Polly Arnold and Prof Andrea Sella to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Dmitri Mendeleev's great achievement. They find out how scientists first realised that the elements that form the ingredients that make up our planet , are able to be organised in such a logical and ordered way, and whether its still a useful tool today. They also discover why one of the guests has been called the Free Solo equivalent of chemists because of the skill and danger involved in their work. Producer: Alexandra Feachem

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Hello, welcome to the Infinite. I did a very special hello, by the way. That was what we call the podcast hello, which means that because slightly younger people often listen to BBC Sounds for their podcasts, I go, hello! Can I just explain who that is? That's Robin Ince, I'm Brian Cox, and you are listening to the BBC Infinite Monkey Cage podcast on BBC Sounds, which you know because presumably you've downloaded it. Hello, I'm Brian Cox. And I'm Robin Ince. Inside the Infinite Monkey Cage, we are usually looking forwards towards the future of science.

Although in the block universe of general relativity, it's not possible to arrive at a global definition of simultaneity, and therefore the difference between the past and the future is not well defined. This means in turn that this introduction is not well defined, and I shouldn't really have said it. This, by the way, is one of the reasons that Brian is very rarely on any BBC Two or Channel Five nostalgia shows, right? If you try and put him on something like I Love the 70s,

he'll go, so tell us a little bit about the Noland. Well, I don't know. Did that happen in the past or the future? Were they in the mood for dancing then or will they be in the mood for dancing in a different nature of the space structure? Can you just tell us about the first time you saw Linda Noland? Were they in the mood for dancing then, or will they be in the mood for dancing in a different nature of the space structure? Can you just tell us about the first time you saw Linda Nolan?

Well, I can't really, because when we had Jim Al-Khalili on, he talked about Brotherhood of Man, and he was brilliant. He even did the dance moves, right? Anyway. As I said, we are usually looking to the future, but today we will be looking into the past to celebrate one of the great scientific achievements of the 19th century, the 150th anniversary of the periodic table of the elements. How was the periodic table discovered? How did it revolutionise our understanding of chemistry? And what does

it tell us about the building blocks of the universe? Joining us to discuss the periodic table, we have three people who are made of antimony, arsenic, aluminium, selenium, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, rhenium, nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium, iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium, europium, zirconium, lutenium, vanadium, lanthanum, osmanium, bismuth, bromine, lithium, beryllium. In fact, they're not, because if you were made of those things, you may well have exploded already. And they are. So I'm Andreas Seyla, I'm Professor of Chemistry at UCL. And for me, I should mention my most underrated element is mercury. And that's, if you remember,

Bruce Lee said, I am, you know, be water. Well, I think if you really want to protest things, then be mercury, because then you've got power. I'm Professor Polly Arnold and I'm from the University of Edinburgh and I think that neptunium is the most underrated element. It's not naturally occurring and it's an important part of nuclear waste but it sits between uranium and plutonium and you can't make a bomb out of it and therefore a scary film. I'm Katie Brand and I'm a comedian and writer, and I think the most underrated element for me is neon, because it always gave me a frisson of excitement

in chemistry lessons, which I largely didn't understand at all, because whenever neon was mentioned, I could get all excited and think about Las Vegas and my showbiz dreams. And this is our panel. Thank you all. showbiz dreams and this is our panel right polly i feel under no pressure whatsoever because uh when we had a little kind of run through beforehand check the mics and i accidentally said neodymium and you said

please don't do that again you did that four years ago but no pressure now that is a memory of a chemist um so neodymium first of all uh but secondly the periodic table what is it what is the periodic table um it's it's the thing that means i don't have to memorize stuff it's what makes my job easy and it's what made me choose chemistry as the subject as i grew up it's the one that um allows you to uh look at any particular formula or any particular element and go yeah I think I know how that's going to behave that's going to fit and I how many bonds I'm going to be able to make to it and what I can make from it and what it might be useful for whether it's magnetic maybe whether it's shiny whether whether it will not explode. Can you describe it, because this is clearly a radio programme,

so many people will know the periodic table, but could you talk us through roughly how the elements are arranged? Yeah, so basically it's almost a simple rectangle, and if you read it from left to right and then top to bottom, as you would read a book in in western world everything it reads in order of increasing nuclear mass by one so the reason it forms a table and a structure is because there are only so many orbitals we can put electrons every time you increase the nucleus by one you have to add an electron as well. So your nucleus has a bunch of protons

and neutrons, and then it has enough electrons to balance the protons. So as you start to fill from hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, et cetera, et cetera, I'm not going to sing it because it's in the wrong order. And that really bothers me, actually. It's quite embarrassing. Quite embarrassing. I really hate that song. And I used to really squirm and my mother used to try and sing it to me because she thought we were bonding right because a weird song that Tom Lehrer song is a lullaby it's not that and I love the fact you thought you were bonding anyway we've gone off topic already and I haven't done this before. So the thing that stops it from being a perfect rectangle is because as you get heavier, you don't just put your electrons in simple spheres, simple circular orbits around your nucleus. You start to put them into different orbitals, and those orbitals have shapes.

So they become more and more flower-like as you get heavier. So the first orbital, you can put a couple in, and then you put a couple more, and then you as you get heavier so the first orbital you can put a couple in and then you put a couple more and then you start to put the next set and you can put six in those and so that's why when you look at the periodic table you'll see that it's the particular one that we all that I know and love has those structures where it's narrow on the edges and it gets bigger in the middle and that's because as you get to the larger ones you can start to use really interesting orbitals, which are the d-orbitals and the f-orbitals.

And those have wonderful shapes. And you can put tons of electrons in those. And then the electrons can do what they like in a way. They can start to move between orbitals without really affecting the molecule that you started with. And then you get really cool properties, like electrical properties and magnetic properties. And you make um flat screen tvs out of them you can make quantum magnets it's interesting pictures so really what we're seeing is that is the increasing complexity

and the shapes and the numbers of electrons around nuclei and so on yeah but which is remarkably interesting because we're talking about something that was first written down before we knew even of the existence of atoms. Yeah, so the guys who made, who put it together, and Mendeleev, who saw the structure of it, they did a ton of work not knowing what they were working with to put everything into this shape. And as a result, I don't have to do that ton of work because I can predict how things are going to react just by looking at where the thing is on the periodic table so they made my life much easier so is there anything Andrea on the periodic table which does not fit into I mean generally it is that an acceptable rule of thumb if it's in that line there if it's there then this means the reaction will be similar to

the one nearest to it uh or is there something where you go ah now that one I wasn't expecting and now I have to glue my eyebrows back on? Well, I mean, the marvel of the periodic table is that when you look down the columns of it, then you know that the chemistry is going to be pretty related. So lithium, sodium, potassium, rubidium, those, you know that they're going to react pretty violently with water. So that's the first column. So that's the first column on the left.

Or, for example, the last column on the right, the noble gases. And you mentioned neon earlier. Those elements are kind of famous in a way for the fact that originally they didn't seem to have any chemistry at all. And so what you find is that they're all kind of similar in each column. Now, the table was kind of put together based on these observations. And that's a really important point, is that when the periodic table was actually assembled, it was simply a descriptive scheme. It was something which took what seemed to be a jumble of elements. And the first person really to write down the list of all the elements was Lavoisier, who wrote a book with his wife, although she didn't get credit for it or authorship. But he and Madame Lavoisier-Marie,

they wrote this book, which is called the Traité Elementaire de Chimie, the Elementary Treatise of Chemistry. So a good pun thrown in there too. And they listed all the elements that existed at the time. But it was simply a list. What were the connections between them? How did they work? How many might there be? That was a complete mystery. And when the periodic table was put together, there was suddenly this scheme which caused everything to fit together, but without an explanation. And that's the thing that didn't come until the 20th century and so the periodic table is this triumph of organization of the elements they fit all together very neatly but why hey

that would come later well what are your memories of it katie because because everyone i think remembers the periodic table from school and everyone remembers sitting and almost learning that the top i think we had to memorize some of it not all of it fortunately but some of it yeah we well i mean my memories of chemistry are kind of hazy because i spent most of it outside of the classroom because i'd been sent out um mainly because i would join in with the boys uh who spent most of chemistry lessons having a competition to see who could hold their hand in a bunsen flame for the longest so there was that kind of atmosphere going on so as i think i've said before because i wasn't really taught maths till i was eight or nine because i went to this catholic

school we were taught by nuns and we just did art and jesus um they didn't really they suspected maths they treated maths with a high level of suspicion so um i was always behind so then by the time we got to chemistry i was just completely at sea with it and the periodic table i remember being given it. And the first thing that annoyed me about it was, why couldn't they just make it a neat rectangle? Just move those. They just slot in nicely and make a nice, neat rectangle. Would you explain that?

It's because of the structure of the electrons around the... Well, now I know that. But at the time, I just remember saying and thinking, why does everything come back to 12, not 10? And I would ask that. And my chemistry teacher said teacher said oh you can't ask why in science um and then so i would just god one guy actually that i knew tried to help me and he gave me a book to try and explain chemistry and all about this sort of notion that it all comes down to the number 12 and all of this but the illustrations in the books explained everything via the medium of bags of rats. I know I sound like I'm making this up, but there were all these diagrams.

It was like, say Scientist 1 has a bag of 12 rats. I'm just like, hang on, now we're into rats. I don't even understand. So it seemed like a weird... They weren't rats. Oh, OK, what were they? They were moles. Oh, no.

They were moles. So that was a pun. Oh, OK. What were they? They were moles. Oh, no. They were moles. So that was a pun. Oh, you like that. OK. Yeah. I'm so glad that I do this show. It's like my whole life just comes into focus here. The mole, which comes from the Italian word mole, meaning quantity.

And molecola is a little mole, a little quantity of matter. This is a beautiful moment for me. It's not rash at all. That's magnificent. You've gone on through all these years thinking that it was about little animals in the bank. What I like was the initial reaction from this audience, because they're younger than the average Radio 4 audience,

was a kind of anti-pun moment, and then they've gone, oh, it's real, he really was. We just presumed it was going to be a pun. Last week we did a show about the science of dreaming, and we were actually hearing about Mendeleev that it was in a dream. He spent days and nights trying to get the sense of the periodic table that he ultimately achieved, and it was actually within his kind of dream work

that he then found the pattern he was looking for. Is that true? I mean, that's always the legend. And actually, in chemistry, there are quite a few legends about people having dreams and daydreaming and so on. And sometimes I think those are after-the-fact rationalizations. I mean, Mendeleev wasn't working completely in a vacuum. And there were others who had started to see patterns well before that. I mean, the first was a man called Doeberreiner, who's really important because he's the first guy to invent the cigarette lighter. And so he really sort of set us up for the future.

But Doeberreiner is quite interesting because he was an early chemist. And, you know, as many German intellectuals at the time, he was a Freemason, and therefore interested in numbers. And he became fixated on the number three and the fact that he could find three elements, and he could link three elements at a time. So he could link chlorine, bromine, and iodine. He could link lithium, sodium, and potassium. He could connect, you know, nitrogen, phosphorus, and arsenic. And what here, again, numerology, yes, they came in

threes like Mozart's Magic Flute, which is his great Masonic opera. But the interesting thing is that he took the atomic weights, and that was the only thing that people knew about elements, apart from the properties, was the atomic weight. And if you weight and if you took the the define what atomic weight is okay so the atomic weight is is really a reflection of what the the mass of the atom is and so if you have a a collection of a standard amount the standard amount we call the mole, not the rat, then the atomic weight, you express the atomic weight in grams. Now, all they had were weights. Nowadays, of course, we talk about mass, but they only had balances at the time. So they were weighing things. And so they had these weights. And so if you took lithium and potassium and took the average of them,

you got a number which was very close to sodium. If you took chlorine and iodine, you took the average, you got something that was very close to bromine. And he suggested that there was a law of triads. And these kinds of numerological games are something that go on all the way through the 19th century. There's then a man called Newlands, a Londoner, in fact, and I'm leaving out lots of important people. But Newlands proposed a law of octaves. By then, he had more elements to work with. And he imagined that maybe the thing that related the elements was actually, it was like music, it was like harmony, that there was every eight elements,

ah, you came back to something similar to what you had before. When he proposed this to the Royal Institute of Chemistry, he was laughed out of the place. They shouted him down, they told him he was a half-wit. What was he talking about? And of course, the point is that this was just a description. And when two people, because although we always talk about Mendeleev, there's another man who comes up with exactly the same scheme at almost exactly the same time. They were unaware

of each other. His name was Lothar Meyer. And he came to it in a slightly different way, but he essentially came up with the same diagram. When they put everything together, what they had was a description, but without explanation. Polly, could you, if we choose a column of the periodic table and whichever one, let's say the lithium, sodium, potassium, there's three elements in the first column underneath hydrogen in one line. Could you describe, sort of characterize those elements? I mean, what kind of experiments do you do? What do you look at? How do you do what do you what do you

look at how do you say that what in what sense are they the same yeah the moment you you see them all in that row and you see where they are on the periodic table you know that they're going to lose one electron really easily and then they will become the cation and so for sodium example that will give you sodium chloride which is salt which is the one we think about and you know that if anyone tries to tell you that you can take a second one away, that's almost impossibly ridiculous because you're back at that full, complete shells underneath. But they knew nothing about that. I'm thinking in the 1860s when they knew, or before, they knew nothing about that.

So in what sense were they the same? Because when they would react them, if they made the chloride, they would see exactly the same mass of the product they would make. So they would make sodium chloride or they would make potassium chloride or lithium chloride and they'd have the same amount. And then if they react with oxygen, they'd see exactly the same thing and you would pick up two of each of those metals because oxygen can bind to two things.

Do they all behave in the same way? Like if you had sodium chloride, obviously salt. Yeah. If you had potassium chloride, can you just eat it? You can. It's in low salt. And then so in the same way... Yeah yeah it's quite similar oh so this is where we get to andrea telling us how everything tastes if you taste them and and remember you know in the 19th century they had very few ways to you know chemists use the word characterize in other words to define the properties unambiguously so to characterize something what could they do

well they could see if it dissolved in water they could see maybe if it melted but then you would define the properties unambiguously. So to characterize something, what could they do? Well, they could see if it dissolved in water. They could see maybe if it melted. But then you would taste things. And what you found was that salts, that we call them salts, because they all have a slightly salty taste and they vary a bit. When I was in school, I wrote an essay on the periodic trends in the salts in the lab. And I almost got kicked out of chemistry but it was quite interesting because there are definitely trends have you eaten rubidium chloride i have

tasted rubidium chloride it's quite interesting it's hard to get high risk to just do chemistry oh no no yeah oh yes yes yes can i just. For Radio 4 listeners, let's go with Polly's answer, yes, yes, not no, no. So what's the weirdest one? So is it francium chloride? Francium, sorry. What happens if you do that? There are too few atoms of that. Yeah, it's a wee bit radioactive.

You might not want to do that. Is it? Andrea, your approach to chemistry, I think, is a very kind of hands-on, tongue-out approach. Whereas, you know... Would you say yours is different? I of hands-on tongue-out approach. Would you say yours is different? I'm definitely tongue-in on this one.

No tongues. My group do a lot of work with the rare earths and with the actinides. With the what, sorry? The rare earths. Oh, the rare earths, sorry. Just to put that in context, these are the ones that I was always, because I did A-level chemistry and I was always very, we didn't do them very much.

This is the bit that's detached, if you remember the periodic table. There's some bit that's always stuck on the bottom with names that no one ever knows. I can't even pronounce them. Actually, you could maybe give us a few names. Yeah, well, I actually did memorize that part of the periodic table. So it's mnemonic. Yeah, I know. So I would say,

but Andrea would say, late night parties. Lately, college parties never produced sexy European girls that drink heavily even though you look or something. It was... It's much harder to say. It's mnemonic. I can trace it to a particular professor who I think was a Santa Barbara. I thought you were going to say a particular late night party.

Is it now? I never wanted those sorts of parties. It's all getting a bit hashtag me too, isn't it? So these names, I think most people won't have heard of any of these things. Yeah, and I love them all. All my children. So what's the point of them? What do they do?

Well, that's what I got excited about at the beginning. These are the F block elements, right? And there are two rows of them. We call them the 4F and the 5F because that's the main orbitals that you're filling the electrons in. But the 4Fs you would have heard talk about in the media as the rare earths or the lanthanides. And then the 5Fs, that's there be dragons

because that's thorium, uranium, and then all the reallythanides. And then the five, that's there be dragons because that's thorium, uranium, and then all the really radioactive ones. Okay, so most people have uranium, unfortunately. So the rare earths are interesting because they're the spices of technology. They're in absolutely everything that we have that is cool, but in very, very tiny amounts. They're the things that give us colours

in our mobile phone screens. They're in the magnets in our cars, in wind turbines. They're in the little tiny, tiny, very powerful magnets in your phones that make them vibrate. So very important, vibration, tiny things. Is that magnets? Of course, I've never even thought about it. So that's a magnet made of an element in the phone that's just going nuts to vibrate.

And these are quite complicated things, 50, 60 electrons or something like that. No, no, no. So you put 14 electrons in there. Oh, no, in the whole thing. Oh, we see, yeah, but those are all in the shells underneath, so you don't have to worry about those. You don't care about those. You do if you're a computational chemist, because they're going to change the size

and they're going to give you relativistic effects, which make the electrons go in funny places and means it's difficult to predict their properties so they worry about them and we like them because that means that no one's yet worked out how they're going to react which means we can do what we like and everything's exciting we always we always head off trying to make something we think is going to be cool and then we'll head off in a totally different tangent when it turns green in the middle of the reaction i I mean, if I could just say one thing, I mean, what Polly hasn't talked about is just how technically demanding the kinds of chemistry that she does is.

To give you a kind of climbing analogy, I would regard myself as being someone who is pretty good, you know, on a climbing wall in a gym or something. You know, she's up there in this sort of free solo, kind of Honnold type of level. They're incredibly difficult because they're unbelievably water sensitive, unbelievably oxygen sensitive. And then she has the insane idea of going for Neptunium of all unbelievably radioactive things and try and explore that chemistry. That's why we work on Neptunium, because we don't understand it.

And we really need to, because it's a really important part of nuclear waste. that chemistry that's that's why we work on neptunium because we don't understand it and we really need to because it's a really important part of nuclear waste so these are when you talk about the difficult to work with sensitive to water sensitive to oxygen you mean they're highly reactive basically so if you put this thing just in the on the table now some neptunium is radioactive but any many of these things it just reacts and doesn't think explodes there are isotopes of net union that will last on the table for a million years and that's why they're an important part of nuclear waste i said i was you when you were talking about nuclear waste and how you manage the waste and all that it just reminded me of a documentary i saw a few years ago that

just chilled me to the bone i'm sorry if this is a bit off topic but it was about dealing with waste that was going to be radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years. And what they were trying to do with it. And they built this kind of lead bunker, I think maybe in Norway. I can't many, many sort of meters under the ground or lined with lead. And they put this stuff in it and they were planning to use it to put more stuff that's just going to be radioactive forever. But what was amazing, just from someone who's a bit more comfortable in terms of the world of language rather than chemistry. So they were trying to figure out how to warn whoever or whatever exists on this planet in 100,000 years.

This is a really interesting discussion. That what was going to be inside this and that they mustn't open it. Because you can't just necessarily write it in Norwegian or English or Mandarin or mandarin who knows you might have to write it in binary code what they may we have maybe some kind of weird deer language that they the deer have evolved and that they're now the primary species like how do you warn a species a hundred thousand years in advance making tree blue trees that glowed in the dark and everyone everyone would go, oh, that's so horrific, I'm never going to go and dig up and see what's in there. Oh, really? Yeah, they have arguments about what language to write the signs in.

And has there been any decisions out of interest? No, so the current consensus is that we should separate out all the smorgasbord of our elements and isotopes that are in our nuclear waste, and then we can separate them out and take the really nasty ones and we can bombard those, pacify them with neutrons, and then we only have to store the waste for as long as Edinburgh Castle has been standing.

Well, it's gone, has it? You know how long, oh, it's been standing. In terms of what we know about the periodic table now, you're talking, of course, now there are additions to the periodic table which have been made, constructed, but in terms of naturally occurring elements, do we believe the periodic table is...

Because I know Mendeleev, when he first put it together, he went, there's a blank there, but we're going to find that. That will exist. Are there still blanks within the naturally occurring... Ah, Andrea. We actually have some of Mendeleev's blanks here. There is gallium and there is germanium. I've got them here in little blocks. Can we just

describe what those are? So you said there were blanks, missing elements in the table when it was first written. When Mendeleev put together his periodic table, when Mendeleev and Meyer put together their periodic table, the interesting thing was that there were certain, they appeared to be gaps. There were things that should be in that position and that weren't there. Meyer kind of slid over that, but Mendeleev said very explicitly, there must be something called, and he called them, Ica aluminium. He called them Ica silicon. Those were his kind of invented names and that was really something for chemists to go and look for and so very gradually up until about 1930 right the various gaps that were in the periodic table the last one really was the element technetium which sits right in the middle of the

of the transition metals and that filled all those gaps but the point about Mendeleev was that he had no way of knowing how many columns there could be, how many elements might be possible. And the answer to that came around just before the First World War from a man called Moseley, who showed by shining x-rays that that number that we've called one, two, three, four, five, corresponded to the charge on the nucleus. And so now, because you know that there are protons and there are electrons, once you have one, two, three, four, five, you can't have five and a half. You can't have anything in the gaps. And therefore, the only place to look for new elements is down at the bottom, right? And now we've got to 118 and that's where

it gets kind of interesting i can't even read that name what's it called organism is that the last one yeah organism yes so it's named after yuri organism organism organism yes so element 118 so that means it's got 118 protons lots of neutrons who knows and then 118, so that means it's got 118 protons, lots of neutrons, who knows, and then 118 electrons around it. So that's its chemistry, which is actually the same as helium, right? Well, that's a really good question. I only said that because for the radio listeners, it's in the same column. Helium, argon, your favourite thing, neon, it's in the same column.

They haven't really made enough atoms of it yet to be able to do any of its chemistry. Who's they? They, the super heavies, the atom smashers. To make these ones, you have to smash atoms. That's the elements, not the chemists, OK? So they're people who just sit there and make heavy elements. Oh, like knitting, yeah, they get their little knitting.

No, gosh, that would be nice, wouldn't it? No, they take a ton of your taxes and they build giant cyclotrons and they smash atoms together. The problem is that they do a lot of maths before they waste your taxes on smashing them together, so they will calculate that they're going to need something like californium

and they're going to have to bombard it with molybdenum all the other way around so and to make them the maths will often show that they have to take one particularly radioactive isotope and smash it into another particularly radioactive isotope or of two different elements and so it's quite a lot of work to get to this point we've we've discovered the easiest ones basically. So the people who are getting to these now will be using a lot of protective gear to fire radioactive things at other radioactive

targets. So yeah, they're pretty hardcore. I did get the sense when you were explaining that that some of the money you feel should go into Neptunian research was going to me. I like the sound of Californium. I'd have been much more into it if I'd known that. And I've just noticed one called Livermorium,

which is going to be my new toast, I think, when I have a drink. Livermorium! What does that do? Tell us what Livermorium does. We used to play the game, what would you build your spaceship out of? But yeah, none of these are contenders for that game. There's a lot that have been named after California,'s a lot that have been um named after um named after um california

and a lot of them were discovered in or discovered or made or smashed yeah the products of smashing together um in berkeley in the labs there they had an 88 inch cyclotron which would is still called 88 inch because they haven't gone metric yet and um that's where Seaborg made so many of them. So Seaborg was the famous chemist who they wanted to name an element after him, but at the time he wasn't dead, so it was officially not allowed. And eventually they finished that argument.

They named the element after him, and his daughter got very distressed because she thought her father had died. So Organessian is in quite a nice position. So he's still alive and he has an element named after him. So that's cool. I want to know both your opinions on this. About three, three and a half years ago,

there was a campaign to get one of the recently discovered or recently created heavy metals named after Lemmy. Lemmy from Moted, and they wanted to call it Lemmium. And it was decided, do you feel it should have been called Lemmium? Because I feel, as a big fan of Motet, I think that would have been a wonderful way to remember the man. Why are scientists so sniffy about that particular area of rock and roll? I think it's, the issue is not rock and roll. It's really whether it is wise to have a referendum

to define the name of an element. Or anything, in fact. It's a slippery slope. So you think this was going to be another of those kind of, you know, potassium, potassium face kind of things? It could be hugely divisive. I met Lemmy about 20 years ago. Would you like to hear a brief story about Lemmy?

Yeah, why not? Well, hello. So when I met Lemmy, he was very, very nice, very friendly. He wanted three bottles of Jack Daniels in his dressing room, which were duly provided, which he steadily worked his way through. You honestly couldn't tell. That man could have flown a plane after three bottles of Jack Daniels. And he told us that he had heard, I think it was Keith Richards,

had had a full blood transfusion in the 60s to try to detoxify himself from all the drugs and drink he had. So Lemmy had gone to the doctor, he told us this directly, he'd gone to the doctor to ask whether he himself could have one of these to purify all of his blood and have all new blood. And his doctor told him he couldn't because the shock of clean blood to his organs would kill him instantly. What a remarkable one. If we look at this as the ingredients list, you know, terrestrial ingredients list,

is there any thought that as we hopefully explore further into the universe you would find in other places in other environments that that would mean there were occurring other elements that this is this is the ingredients list of this planet but as we go beyond it we would find there is the possibility we would find other naturally occurring elements i've always thought that if i was going to talk to an alien race, then I would take the periodic table because that would be the way I would make them... We would be able to communicate that. Maybe with Brian as well we could even talk.

Yeah, this is the laws of nature written out here. So they're universal. But you're right, there is a possibility that there could be more out there beyond in the lower levels that are stable but this is only according to calculations that are being done by only according to really difficult calculations being done by frighteningly clever theorists who suggest that there is something called the island of stability which is one of the reasons that i'm actually very happy for my taxes to still pay for people to smash things.

So what's The Island of Stability? Yeah, it's got a great name, hasn't it? That's going to be my next novel, I think. Well, maybe we could become The Island of Stability again one day. Yeah, there are people who say that you might be able to get to a really, really large number of protons and neutrons in a land far away, in some shells, where you would reach a stable nuclear configuration again. So there might be elements that we can fuse together that will last long enough that we can actually do chemistry with. And so this means going beyond number 118 to 119, 120, 121.

People are going this already. They're already looking. People are desperately trying to do this, right? I mean, it's a fascinating quest. But one of the interesting questions is, will the periodic table actually still hold? In other words, will the chemical properties still fit the pattern? In other words, if you get something that is below francium, and that would be element 119, will that be something that very easily loses one electron that forms a nice one-to-one salt with chlorine?

And you could eat it. And you don't want it. That will taste salty if you eat it. Is it all about seasoning for you? I just want to put a disclaimer on the end of this programme because it's played out, I should say, the first time, during the school run on Monday. So we should just say,

don't taste the chemical elements in the lab without permission, written permission from somebody. Hopefully, though, they haven't got the keys to the lab. I mean, hopefully, if they go into the lab, hopefully there's someone else with them. We're going to give them that advice. OK, I'm being overly sensitive. So anyway, we asked the audience a question as well, as we always do,

and today we asked them, if you discovered an element, what would you name it after and why and unsurprisingly the first answer is brian because it would be absolutely amazing and i'm doing that with the number of a's that were placed in that by the way i love this one from david occurrence affairs Prime ministerium, the element of transience. Because, oh yeah, because each of its newly discovered isotopes has an ever-decreasing half-life. That's from David. Have you got any there? I've got some here, yes.

I've got chesteronium. This one was anonymous. A special ginger element named after my ginger cat. So that's nice. Yeah, Auditorium, but I would not want to make a song and dance about it. That's from what I've tried. There's a lovely one from Aidan. My mum, Isabel, an element on her own, stable enough but needs careful handling.

I'd name it Shelium, for gender equality with helium. Next week is the final episode in the series, and we end roughly as we began. We kind of began a while ago with a 50th anniversary Apollo special, and we end with another space exploration special with our two Britishish astronauts we have helen charman and tim peak on the show and uh it is going to be very exciting we are going to find out basically if anyone here any of us have what it takes to be an astronaut and i think we're all

hoping that we have got what it takes because never have people wanted to leave the planet earth as much as they do now so uh we'll see you next time. Bye-bye. In the infinite monkey cage. In the infinite monkey cage. Till now, nice again. Thanks very much for listening. We hope you enjoyed the podcast. We hope you understood it.

They will have enjoyed it. Well, they might not have done. There might have been a point where you said something that was confounding or one of our guests said something which made them go, this is much harder than I thought. But why would they have listened all the way to the end if they didn't enjoy it? Just to impress their friends. All right. Well, anyway, if you did enjoy it,

then there are lots of other Infinite Mooncage podcasts you can download on BBC Sounds. If you didn't enjoy it, you can download somebody else's podcast on BBC Sounds. We leave the choice to you. I say we leave the choice to you, but as I've told everyone before, free will's an illusion. You think you've got choice? Go on, choose something else you're on BBC Sounds. We leave the choice to you. I say we leave the choice to you, but as I've told everyone before, free will's an illusion. You think you've got choice?

Go on, choose something else you're not really choosing. Anyway, enjoy the podcast you believe you've chosen next. Hello, I just wanted to tell you about my new podcast. It's called Classical Fix, and it's basically me, Clemmie Burton-Hill, each week talking to a massive music fan.

I mix them a classical playlist. They have a listen, they come in and we just see where the conversation goes. If you like to give classical music a go but you haven't got a clue where to start, this is where you start. To subscribe, go to BBC Sounds and search for Classical Fix. Now then, as you were.