I think the reason that this compound, this element, Nobelium
was named after Nobel, is because Nobel
is perhaps the single most famous name that is associated with science.
Most of the people that you talk to in the street, have probably heard of Nobel,
but they may not easily have heard of Seaborg, or some these other people.
So I think, as a name for an element, it is really quite a good one.
Alfred Nobel was a Swedish chemist, or industrial chemist, who worked
on explosives, and the problem with explosives, which are compounds
of Carbon and Nitrogen, is that until the time of Alfred Nobel,
they were very unstable. They could go off unexpectedly,
and kill people, in fact, I believe one of Nobel's relatives, might even have been his brother,
was killed by a serious explosion. And the reason is that these compounds,
when they starts reacting, and they're reacting violently, the reaction builts up,
the heat produced by the first bit going off, goes on, and so on. And what Nobel discovered,
his real scientific discovery, was that if he spread this compound on to inert
material, it's just essentially sand, that it would be completely stable,
you can even throw in a fire and it won't explode.
But if you use a detonator that produces a sharp, small explosion,
that is enough to set the whole lot off. And so, this allowed people
to handle explosives safely, and many of the developments
in the 19th century, the expansion of the railways,
and some of the unpleasant developments in warfare, were all brought about by Nobel's
discovery of these high explosives that could be be stabilized.
Now, the result of this was that Nobel's company became really,
very lucrative, selling these explosives, and when Nobel died,
a foundation was set up, which exists to this day, to award prizes
in the areas of science for outstanding science, in physics,
in medicine, and chemistry, and economics, and peace.
I think the economics may actually be given by a sister organization.
And each year the prizes announced for really one of the exciting pieces
of chemistry, that has been done in the preceding 2 years.
Occasionally it's for something that was done just a year or two before,
where everybody recognizes straight away it was revolutionary.
For example, the discovery of C60, the molecule with 60 carbon atoms,
that looks like a football, which rewarded really quite quickly.
Other prizes, you really have to wait to see how the field develops,
and to see whether this discovery really was important,
whether it really changes the field of chemistry.
- Is it every chemist's dream to win a Nobel prize?
- I suppose so, but only 3 people can win it each year,
and there are so many chemists, that it's really something
which is almost like a lottery. In fact, some national lotteries,
it's probably easier to win the prize, so I think most chemist really aspire
to becoming members of the national academy of sciences of their own country,
and most of them don't think of winning the Nobel prize.
-So Nobelium is perhaps best known for the fact,
that it is quite controversial in terms of its naming
So it was originally discovered and called Nobelium
and there is another research group disputeed these findings, they claimmed that they named it
and gave a different name, then eventually, because it has been named
as Nobelium for such a long time, people just settled on that.
- But he had nothing to do with Nobelium.
- No no , Nobelium was first discovered, first detected,
I'm not sure how many years, but probably nearly a century after his death.
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