and I was so excited that element 114
has finally got its official name that
we felt that I should try and say a few
words in Russian because my father was
born in Russia we've already made two
videos about the discovery of this
element first of all how the discovery
was confirmed and people really
established that 114 had been made and
then the first time that the name was
mentioned at the end of the 2011
International year of chemistry so
what's new and what's new is that on the
30th of May this year
2012 the element's name was officially
adopted and therefore we can make a new
video to go in our Periodic Table of
videos so this is the official video of
the element depending whether you say it
with a Russian accent or not is called
flerovium or
fium element
114 there is no official periodic table
in the same way that there's a standard
kilogram but when a name is suggested Ed
such as the name fluvium was suggested
in December last year then people are
allowed a few months to point out if
there are any problems in the case of
element 112
cerium the symbol was changed from CP to
CN during this discussion period in the
case of flerovium nothing has changed
and the element symbol is f l
big F little L though in some fonts it
looks like F1 which is possibly a
problem now like the other super heavy
elements these elements are
synthesized by taking the nucleus of a
heavy element or an atom of a heavy
element and banging into it an element
that is
lighter and so in this case they take
plutonium which is element 94 and to
make 114 you need 20 so you take a
nucleus of calcium which has atomic
number 20 you accelerate calcium very
rapidly and eventually after bombarding
plutonium with millions and or hundreds
of mli billions of atoms one of them
will fuse together you can see it's
quite hard you now have an element with
a nucleus of atomic number 114 that's
with
114 protons that flies off to be
analyzed these experiments were done in
the Russian Research Center dubna North
of Moscow which was founded by
academician fuu the earlier elements
like element 105 there was huge
nationalistic competition between us
labs and Russian labs and arguing who
discovered it first these elements 114
and
116 which were named at the same time
are a beautiful example of international
collaboration this element like the ones
around it has only been seen in a number
really quite small number of atoms so
nobody has made any compound from it
though if you look at the periodic table
you will see it's in the same group as
lead this cup here was made before the
name was announced so it says has the
old symbol
uuq and you would expect the chemistry
of fium to be rather like that of lead
only rather more so so you might expect
it to be a very dense and rather soft
metal highly radioactive so you couldn't
use it as weights for your fishing
like people use lead but it would
probably be poisonous even if it were
not
radioactive and its chemistry might be
quite similar to lead though as you go
down the periodic table you can get
quite some surprises now the real
question that you might all be asking is
if you can only make a few atoms of this
element why on Earth does it need a
symol nobody is going to be writing
textbooks about the chemistry fluvium
with fluvium oxide or fium sulfate so
why do you need this symbol and the
answer is that the symbol probably isn't
use useful in chemistry but it's very
useful in physics because as you go to
heavier elements say element 116 118
they will Decay via some of these other
elements like
114 and so if you want to make charts
like this one that I've got on my
tie with
the different elements and how they
Decay away as they give out radioactive
particles gamma rays you need the
symbols and if you don't have the symbol
then it's quite difficult to construct
these so the symbol does have a use even
though it's not particularly useful for
day-to-day
chemistry I've been to Russia quite
frequently lots and lots of times to
Moscow but not yet to dumna though it's
one of the places that Brady and I
really want to
go I have heard of Florio of course and
his
Institute but I think that it is rather
sad that although he was alive at the
time that these elements were discovered
the experiments were done that he died
before the name was officially
announced and so this is why at the
beginning of the video I said that the
name of this element is really his
memorial and I think it's a very
positive Memorial because it symbolizes
how science has brought countries of the
world together in a way although I
didn't know him that I'm sure in his
heart he really wanted can I ask you a
question would you rather have an
element named after you or win a Nobel
Prize well I think that's that's a very
interesting
question