yesterday there was the ceremony for the
closing of the international year of
chemistry the ceremony was in Brussels I
really wanted to be there but
unfortunately I had to be in London and
I missed a really exciting piece of
news the new names for elements 114 and
116 they haven't actually officially
approved the names yet but they've said
this is the names that we
considering elements 114 116 were
discovered through a collaboration
between a lab in Russia and a lab in
America so one name is Russian and the
other name is American the name for
element
114 is
flerovium with the symbol F L big F
little L the other name 116 suggested is
livermorium with the symbol
LV so let me try and explain to you why
they've chosen those names and my
feelings about them first of all I'm
really delighted that the two names have
signaled collaboration between Russia
and United States this is a really good
symbol of peace between the two
countries now the first element that's
114 is named after the scientist who
founded the lab in dubna where the
elements were actually
synthesized and his name if you look at
it in English letters is furo his full
name is Gori nikolich furo the
difficulty that I see with this name is
that the English letter that looks like
e e is in Russian in his name pronounced
like yo like the beginning of yogurt the
difficulty therefore is that the way the
Russians would pronounce this name and
the name of the scientist that we're
honoring will not be properly reflected
by the way that people will pronounce it
because they'll pronounce it flerovium
or something like that where the E is
pronounced like an English e the obvious
way to pronounce it is
fium but the way you should say it's
fium
fium fium that's just a perhaps you can
argue some of the other names are not
pronounced in the correct way so perhaps
it doesn't matter and the other one
livermorium is named after the Lawrence
Livermore lab which creat Ed some of the
elements that were used as the targets
for the big experiment in the synthesis
that was named after Lawrence Ernest
Lawrence who um was the inventor of the
cyclotron you can hear about that on our
video about lenum the lab is called
Lawrence Livermore and it was founded in
1952 to make atomic bombs at the height
of the Cold War so if you like it was a
really pretty anti-communist
anti-russian
institution so the fact that it is now
being chosen as a name for an element
that was synthesized in Russia is a
wonderful indication of Peace Livermore
is I believe the name of the place not
far from San Francisco where the lab was
so it was the Lawrence Lab at in the
city of Livermore so it was the Lawrence
Livermore lab I think the name is okay
but livermorium
sounds to me I don't know why perhaps by
some sort of word association slightly
sad in the sense of mournful because it
sounds rather like the English word
inmemoriam which means um in memory of
somebody who's died but I from the point
of view of pronunciation and so on Liv
amorium is fine these elements are just
a few atoms that have been made not all
at once one atom at a time over a period
of months so nobody knows anything about
the properties of these elements but if
you look at the periodic table here you
can see the element 114 here is in the
same group group 14 as carbon silicon
and so on and Lead so you would expect
if you could get enough atoms all at
once that 114 would be very heavy dense
metal rather like lead element 116 is in
the same group as polonium I don't
really know what the properties of
polonium are tuum is a very smelly
element it's chemicals smell Dreadful so
it's possible that if you could make
compounds of element 116 they would be
the smelliest compounds in the periodic
table
hydrogen
lioran
hydrogen um liver moride would be really
something that would smell but I must
say that when we started periodic videos
3 and a half years ago I never dreamt
that there'd be all these new elements
that were being named and two being
named on one day is really quite
exciting it seems to be even numbered
elements that keep getting
named well for reasons that I don't
entirely understand even numbered
elements are more stable than those that
are odd numbers it's something to do
with the number of protons being more
stable when you have an even number of
protons and as they get heavier and
heavier you're always on the tip of them
decomposing so if you have an even
number even a tiny difference in
stability is going to make a difference
I suspect that certainly up to
118 the odd numbers will also be
confirmed but with the new row there's a
thought that 120 may be much more stable
than 119