What Happens If you Mix Every Single Element Together without delay? [Madscience]

The complete periodic table mixed together is a kind of awesome what if scenarios so available that not even scientists know needless to say. Their guess? Anything from ” a quark-gluon plasma” (!) to ” flaming plutonium.” Do not try at home!

Luckily, that you would be able to never do this at home, as NYU theoretical chemist Mark Tuckerman says attempting to fuse each of the known elements would require ” 118 [Large Hadron Colliders]-one to accelerate each element.” Sounds slightly pricy! And even then, the implications can be fleeting. Quark-gluon plasma, the cosmic stuff theorized to have existed immediately after the massive Bang, ” would last for a fraction of a second before degrading.” Bummer.

Part of the explanation it’s so hard to predict what would go down is as a result of unpredictably reactive nature of the elements. Random stuff happens reckoning on which elements happen to be toward which. ” You may run this experiment 100 times and get 100 different combinations,” says Tuckerman. One hundred experiments! One hundred and eighteen Large Hadron Colliders! And to what end, besides some split second primordial plasma?

If you tried combining powdered varieties of all 118 elements in a sealed container, it wouldn’t be pretty-” All hell would break loose,” says John Stanton, director of the Institute for Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Texas. ” Flaming plutonium is a completely bad thing. Inhaling airborne radioactive material could cause rapid death.” But after some temporary terror and waves of flaming radioactive chaos, it’d get pretty boring-just a gaggle of lame old carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. most of the elements wouldn’t even react. ” Thermodynamics wins again,” Stanton smirks. Damn you, laws of the physical world! [ PopSci ]

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This post is tagged: carbon monoxide, complete periodic table, quark gluon plasma, radioactive material, theoretical chemist, theoretical chemistry, university of texas