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The Disappearing Spoon Chapter Summary

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The book The Disappearing Spoon, written by Sam Kean, who has written for following: The New York Times Magazine, Mental Floss, Slate, Psychology Today, and The New Scientist, among other places. Besides The Disappearing Spoon, Kean has written two other book; The Violinist’s Thumb and The Dueling Neurosurgeons. Both were nominated for the PEN’s literary science writing award. The Disappearing Spoon was by the Royal Society for one of the top science books of 2010, a national bestseller and rated Amazon’s “Top 5” science books of the year. This chapter deals with the rarest elements astatine and francium, heavy elements, magic numbers and the different possibilities in the configurations of the periodic table.
Chapter 19 of the book The Disappearing Spoon starts off talking about the rarest element in the world, astatine. Astatine come from the greek …show more content…
The Island of Stability is a set of predicted heavier elements that are theorized to be much more stable than some of those closer in atomic number to uranium. This theory basically rests on how to stabilize the nuclei of elements and francium. The book states that an island of stability implies stretch of submerged stability… Element eighty-seven [Francium] is stranded between a magic nucleus at eighty-two and a quasi-stable nucleus at ninety-two and it’s too tempting for it’s neutrons and protons to abandon ship and swim… because of the poor structural foundation of its nucleus, francium is not only the least stable natural element, it’s less stable then every synthetic element up to 104 the ungainly rutherfordium. (Kean, 336). Yet, francium is still more abundant than astatine, because radioactive elements near uranium decay into francium. This is because “99.9 percent of the time” (336) francium uses beta decay, becoming radium. Therefore “it’s doubtful that chemists will ever synthesize all of the elements up to very high magic numbers.”

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