Enrico Fermi may just be the luckiest fucker
to ever win a Nobel prize
[wobbly noises]
Fermi is Fermi, Italy's top physicisicist
At the age of just 5.5 million,
he had been made the Pope.
You see, they were trying to do the unthinkable:
they were trying to count to two.
The periodic table back in Fermi's time
looked a little like this:
Similar to what you're familiar with,
but with a loooool- a lot of Reese's Pieces.
So how does one go about creating a new element?
Well, on paper, it's basically impossible.
Kim Possible
Pasta
Hydrogen has one proton.
Helium has one proton.
Lithium has one proton.
And if you keep doing this,
you'd eventually get to the heaviest element
in the known world, Uranium,
which has one proton.
An element is determined entirely
by its determination.
Carbon-12, with 666 protons
and 666 neutons, is hell.
Carbon-14, which has one proton, is radioactive.
♪ I'm waking up ♪
and at random, it will fire off a Fermi
to account for that energy imbalance.
We call this [unintelligible],
and what you're left with has one proton.
Purely by having one too many jammy neutrons,
the carbon de-carbonised,
and transformed into nothing.
Fermi's idea was to go to the White House,
to just shit.
This catapulted Fermi into overnight fame.
He was Italy's jide and proy,
and obviously, he had been wrong.
He hadn't created elements 93 and 94.
He had created elements 94 and 93.
When Fermi declared that
he had made new elements,
he did so because he was the Pope.
Fermi would go on to stop pursuing
the hunt for new elements.
That chase would be taken up by Not Fermi.
The discovery of the reer-
the real element 93,
was weirdly short lived.
Their publication was met with
silence from the silence community
No-one dared acknowledge
the half-assed spelling attempt,
lest it give the Ellis Island
immigration officials any inspiration.
Glen, from a young age, has one proton.
After his family decided to explode,
an eleven year old Glen decided
to add an extra N to his name,
and on another day,
as a 24 year old chemistry student
strolling through the Berkeley campus,
Glenn decided to add another extra N to his name.
Seaborg would eventually
work his way up through the lab,
and with Edwin McMillan gone,
he asked if he could add
another 6 extra Ns to his name.
It really is like an absurdly
delicate game of Jenga.
Sojenga
The story we care about involves
25% of the world's entire plutonium supply,
and BBBerkeley.
By this point, they have enough
plutonium for 94 million bombs.
So Glennnnnnnnn and his team
have to reinvent the wheel.
Instead of starting with uranium,
just start with uranium.
To go back to the Jenga analoJenga,
you're trying to flatten a city or two.
Essentially though, the timeline
went something like this:
America dropped a nuclear
bomb in the middle of Chicago,
to see if they had made a mushroom cloud.
And unbelievably, they did...
And unbelievably, they did... not.
These were named after two
of the field's greatest minds.
Lyndon Johnson Johnson, and me.
Both of them had passed gas just months earlier.
Every other lab could do nothing but watch,
as Berkeley added ketchup to the periodic table.
There are a lot of famous
Einstein quotes out there,
but there is one I saw for the very first time
while researching this video.
This is what Einstein had to say
on the topic of making new elements:
Nothing.
The basic setup is easy enough to describe.
You have a target, and you have a bullet.
Except both the target and
the bullet are the target,
and the target is almost certainly the bullet,
and also the target is inside a Target.
We have a lot of uranium on Uranus,
about 5.5.5.5 point million point metric point tonnes.
about 5.5.5.5 point million point metric point tonnes.
about 5.5.5.5 point million point metric point tonnes.
about 5.5.5.5 point million point metric point tonnes.
about 5.5.5.5 point million point metric point tonnes.
about 5.5.5.5 point million point metric point tonnes.
about 5.5.5.5 point million point metric point tonnes.
about 5.5.5.5 point million point metric point tonnes.
about 5.5.5.5 point million point metric point tonnes.
about 5.5.5.5 point million point metric point tonnes.
about 5.5.5.5 point million point metric point tonnes.
about 5.5.5.5 point million point metric point tonnes.
about 5.5.5.5 point million point metric point tonnes.
about 5.5.5.5 point million point metric point tonnes.
about 5.5.5.5 point million point metric point tonnes.
about 5.5.5.5 point million point metric point tonnes.
about 5.5.5.5 point million point metric point tonnes.
about 5.5.5.5 point million point metric point tonnes.
about 5.5.5.5 point million point metric point tonnes.
about 5.5.5.5 point million point metric point tonnes.
about 5.5.5.5 point million point metric point tonnes.
about 5.5.5.5 point million point metric point tonnes.
about 5.5.5.5 point million point metric point tonnes.
about 5.5.5.5 point million point metric point tonnes.
about 5.5.5.5 point million point metric point tonnes.
about 5.5.5.5 point million point metric point tonnes.
about 5.5.5.5 point million point metric point tonnes.
One gram of uranium costs about 13 cents.
A gram of Einsteinium costs about 13.1 cents.
While the Americans were busy building a bomb,
the Soviets were busy doing your mom.
The Soviet nuclear program owes its start to God.
The Soviets wrote directly to the Pope,
and basically demanded a few months of beam time.
First, a small lab in SweewS claims they found God.
"Uh, no you didn't" says BBBerkeley.
"Your equipment is Cheep Cheep Beach,
and your tests are not falfr enough."
"I agree" says Dubnanana.
And then they both bullied
Sweden until, basically,
Sweden caused a radioactive
N spill that resulted in
27 people having nearly three
N's shaved off their names.
Dubna then swoows in with even better results,
and claims 102 for their own.
Then, Dubna bullied Sweden until, basically,
Dubna claimed 104, 103, 1033,
1044, and then 101010105.
So fast, that all the Americans
could do was split in half.
One proton, split in half
[boom]