Wednesday, April 19, 2017

19 April 17

Some of the entries from the periodic table on this tie are now obsolete, but I will continue wearing it! Element number 106 is called seaborgium, named for the American nuclear chemist Glenn Seaborg, who was born on this date in 1912. On my tie its box is labeled Unh, for the placeholder name "unnilhexium" (meaning one hundred six), which was used from the element's discovery in 1974 until its official naming in 1997. The periodic table hanging on my wall, dating from 1983, includes an empty box for #106 (just below tungsten, #74). Glenn Seaborg was a master pioneer of the nuclear chemistry programs in the mid-twentieth century, the principal or co-discoverer of ten elements: plutonium, americium, curium, berkelium, californium, einsteinium, fermium, mendelevium, nobelium and seaborgium.

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