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0:00
Enrico Fermi may just be the luckiest man to ever win a Nobel prize. Fermi is Italy’s top physicist. At the age of just 24 he had been made a professor at the University of Rome, and thanks to his commanding presence his researchers had nicknamed him the Pope. Unlike the Pope though, he was broke. Italy’s dominance in science had long fallen off since the days of Galileo. If they needed a piece of equipment, they built it from homemade scraps.
0:26
If they needed protection from radiation, they would sprint back and forth down the hall to avoid getting a lethal dose of whatever chemical concoction they had just made. You see, they were trying to do the unthinkable. They were trying to make a new element. The periodic table back in Fermi’s time, looked like this. Similar to what you’re familiar with, but with lots of pieces missing. You’ll notice a few gaps in the middle regions.
0:49
Specifically, elements like Technetium, Francium, Astatine, and Promethium. But the biggest missing pieces are at the bottom. We’re missing like, a full row and a half. What you see here right now, are all the chemical elements that humans had found in nature, just sitting around, in the atmosphere as gasses, in the ground in rocks, even a couple liquids. Many of them are stable. A good number of them are safe, so long as you don’t eat, inhale or drink them.
1:16
A decent portion however are not, and are in fact, quite dangerous. Radioactive samples that are firing off millions of invisible electrons that can penetrate into your bloodstream. Radium, discovered by Marie Curie, almost certainly killed her. Her daughter, Irene, very likely died from exposure to Polonium, the other element discovered by her mother. So maybe you understand now why Fermi didn’t mind having to sprint up and down his lab if it meant extending his lifespan by a few years.
1:43
So how does one go about making a new element? Well, on paper it’s simple. You add or remove protons. Hydrogen has 1 proton. Helium 2. Lithium 3. And if you keep doing this, count all the way up the periodic table, you’d eventually get to the heaviest element in the known world up to that point. Element 92. You know it as Uranium. Here’s the other part of the picture. An element is determined entirely by its proton number, but the number of neutrons can vary.
2:14
That neutron number makes certain elements more stable than others. Carbon-12 with 6 protons and 6 neutrons is extremely stable. It will stay in that form, untouched, for billions of years. Carbon-14 with 6 protons and 8 neutrons, is radioactive. It’s got an energy imbalance that it wants to rectify. And at random it will convert one of its extra neutrons into a proton, and fire off a dangerous electron [and a neutrino] to account for the energy imbalance. We call this beta-minus decay.
2:46
What you’re left with is an element with one extra proton. That’s 7 protons, AKA Nitrogen. Look at that! Purely by having one too many neutrons, the Carbon destabilized, and transformed into a entirely different element. Fermi’s idea was to go to the furthest edge of the periodic table, Uranium, element 92, and fire neutrons at it to try and artificially induce beta decay. If it worked, you’d be upgrading element 92 into 93. And if he could do it twice in a row, possibly even 94!
3:18
But here’s a fun problem, how do you even know if you’ve made a new element? After all you don’t know what it looks like, or what its chemical properties are. In this case Fermi and his team had to rule things out, by verifying which elements they hadn’t created. They compared their result with the chemistry of all the known elements down to lead, element 82, and couldn’t find a single match. Unstable elements often lead to something called an alpha decay chain.
3:45
That’s when a nucleus spits out two protons and two neutrons. It leads to a leapfrog effect, where element 94 turns into element 92, then to 90, 88, and so on, until they reach a stable element, which is often lead. The other possibility was that they had actually succeeded! They had made elements 93 and 94 for the very first time! The discovery catapulted Fermi into overnight fame. He was Italy’s pride and joy, and obviously he got first dibs on naming those two elements.
4:16
Although he was under a lot of pressure to name the element after a symbol of ancient Rome. Fascium, from the word Fasces. Recently however, the symbol had taken on an entirely new and terrifying meaning. It was the symbol of Fascism, and the man pushing for the name was none other than Benito Mussolini. Yeah. Fermi did not follow the suggestion. Four years go by. It is November 10th 1938. Two things happen that day. In Germany it’s the Night of Broken Glass.
4:46
In Italy, a wave of anti-Semitic laws are introduced. Fermi’s wife Laura was Jewish and her passport was on the edge of being revoked. So when the phone call came that day at 6pm, that Enrico Fermi had won the Nobel prize in physics, their family didn’t think twice. Fermi, his wife and his children packed their bags, and immediately travelled to Sweden. They did not return to Italy, and instead settled in the United States. And almost immediately after they arrived there, Fermi got the news.
5:16
He had been wrong. He hadn’t created elements 93 and 94. He had done something much crazier. He had made an atom explode. When Fermi declared that he had made new elements, he did so because the chemical properties didn’t match up with anything as light as lead. Turns out, he should have looked even lighter. A group in Berlin had repeated his experiment, and they saw something really unexpected. They were seeing Krypton and Barium.
5:42
Two elements that were far too light to be the result of an alpha decay chain. But, if you add up their proton numbers, 36, and 56, you get 92. Uranium. Fermi had split an atom in 2, a process that releases an absurd amount of energy. In reality Fermi had discovered nuclear fission. A discovery that would go on to fundamentally reshape the upcoming war that he had just fled from. A discovery that would go on to dictate a global power struggle that would last for half a century.
6:14
Entirely by accident, Fermi had falsely claimed the discovery of two new elements. And a half century later, one man would make a similar false claim, but entirely on purpose. This is a story about Victor Ninov, and the race for the periodic table. I gotta show you something. This is the periodic table. I’m betting you recognize it. But it doesn’t show the whole picture. Each element has a unique number of protons. But each element can have any number of neutrons. We call these nucleides.
6:46
Some are more stable than others. There are dozens of elements. But there are thousands of nuclides. Here’s what you’re looking at. The X axis is the number of neutrons. The Y axis is the number of protons. Each square is a possible nucleus. This is Hydrogen. Exactly 1 proton. This is Helium. 2 protons, 2 neutrons. Every possible proton-neutron combination that has ever been observed is present on this chart. Every time we go up a row, that’s a new element.
8:41
I don’t think my audience has a ton of overlap with football fans, but if it does for some weird reason, think of this as scorigami, but for the chemistry. A checklist where we mark off things that didn’t exist before, and maybe never will again. See, inside a nucleus is a pair of competing forces. On the one hand you have the strong nuclear force. At extremely short ranges it is able to glue together protons and neutrons into bundles.
9:08
But on the other hand you have the repulsive electromagnetic force. Protons all have a positive charge, and thus want to push each other apart. Only when the strong nuclear force can overcome the electromagnetic force can you have a stable nuclei. The neutrons, which are electrically neutral, serve as a kind of packing material. Because they don’t repel each other, they can act as a buffer for the protons, making a nuclei more stable.
9:32
Notably, the same element can have different numbers of neutrons, with some being very stable, and some decaying immediately. We can actually see those stable nuclei quite clearly. They are the tall pillars in brown. The height on this chart represents the half-life of a given nuclei. A single half-life is the time it takes for a sample to be reduced by 50%. The taller it is, the more stable it is. One thing you can see is that for the lightest element, the most stable combinations are
10:00
those where the proton number equals the neutron number. See this line? Perfectly balanced. You can trace this line from Hydrogen up until about Calcium, and then the trend starts to diverge. For most elements it's actually more stable if you have more neutrons than protons. If we followed this path all the way we’d end up at lead. This is the path of stability, the safe path along the mountain. As soon as you stray even a little bit from that path you plunge into the realm of radioactivity.
10:28
The red pillars here is essentially stable, with half lives in the billions of years. But by the time you make it to the oranges you have a half-life in the minutes. A couple hours go by and a sample could be reduced to nothing. And if you touch the water, in blue, those are half-lives in the seconds. And the deep blue? Well, that’s milliseconds, or in the worst cases, the half-life is so short we can’t even measure it.
10:51
For some of the nuclei, there’s a good chance there’s only ever been one of them in existence at a time, in the entire universe. A nuclei so unstable it could never occur on its own, and yet we forced it to. The beauty of this chart is that to me is that it’s almost like a topological map of our journey through the periodic table. Like a mountainous peninsula surrounded by a raging sea of radioactivity. The sea even has tides.
11:16
Way up here in the chasm, you’ll often get swept away in an alpha decay chain. That’s when an element spits out two protons and two neutrons. It moves two spaces diagonally downwards. Like this. A cascade that doesn’t stop until you reach a stable element. On the south side of the mountain pass there’s a different type of tide. Fermi’s beta-minus decay. You lose a neutron, but gain a proton. Like this. If you’re smart, you can use it to go up a step, potentially creating a new element.
11:49
But on the other hand, to the Northern side of the mountain pass, there’s beta-plus decay. You lose a proton, but gain a neutron. No matter where you are however, every part of this sea is fighting you. The tides of radiation always lead you back to the same place. No matter where you started you eventually get pushed back to shore, to the main path of stable nuclei. Some people refuse to accept this. They push back, trying to explore more of the sea and potentially uncover more land.
12:21
Enrico Fermi was one of the first. Fermi began his journey here, and he made it as far as the Uranium chasm. Over the course of the next 50 years several different labs would make the same pilgrimage up this mountain, and every new pilgrimage would fill more and more of this chart. The protagonist of our story, the intrepid explorer Victor Ninov, claimed he had made it up to here. That's pretty far huh? To meet him we’ve got a bit of journey ahead of us, and we’re going to need some help.
12:51
To cross this sea we’re going to need a captain. Fermi would go on to do important things. His most well known achievement is building the first nuclear reactor under the stands of a Chicago football field. But he stopped pursuing the hunt for new elements. That chase would be taken up by an entirely different team. The discovery of the real element 93 was weirdly un-ceremonial. On the West Coast of America at the University of California, Berkeley, American physics
13:22
was in full “go big or go home” mode. Berkeley at the time was home to the world’s biggest cyclotron, the best tool in the biz for element hunting. A cyclotron is a type a particle accelerator, it uses magnets to rapidly spin charged particles around in circles, and then smashes them into targets. Now this isn’t one of the multi-mile rings that you’re probably thinking of, those are actually too powerful for making new elements. For this you need something a bit more delicate.
13:49
Berkeley’s state of the art tool was 60 inches in diameter and it could pelt a Uranium target with neutrons, again, hoping for Fermi’s predicted beta decay. And one day, after finding a radioactive lump that matched no known samples, element 93 had been officially confirmed. We now know it as Neptunium. The credit for this discovery went to Edwin McMillan and Phil Abelson, but the celebration was short lived. Their publication was met with silence from the academic community.
14:17
No one dared acknowledge the breakthrough lest it give the Germans any inspiration. Although America hadn’t yet joined World War 2, they were preparing to, and so McMillan and the rest of the lab’s top scientists were soon drafted into the war effort, working on radar, or in some cases, the Manhattan project. That left a vacant seat to take over the element hunt. That’s where our captain comes in. Glen Seaborg.
14:40
As the descendant of Swedish immigrants, they had left their home country with the last name Sjoberg. Upon reaching Ellis island, an immigration official decided that their new name would be Seaborg, and it stayed that way. This customs officer had no idea that his half-assed spelling attempt would one day make it on to the periodic table. Glen from a young age went the tides of life took him. After his family decided to move from icy Michigan to sunny California, an 11 year old
15:06
Glen decided to add an extra ‘N’ to his first name because it looked cool. I can’t argue with that Glenn. And on another day, as a 24 year old chemistry student strolling through the Berkeley campus someone from the Radiation lab stopped him and asked he could help them separate out some chemical samples. He was just the first chemist they found on campus. Seaborg would eventually work his way up through the lab, and with Edwin McMillan gone, he
15:27
asked if he could take over the new captain of the element hunt. With bigger war related things on his mind McMillan gave the go ahead. Although McMillan never got to try it out, he had come up with a recipe for element 94, and good old Glenn would get the first crack at it. If you add one neutron to Uranium, it beta decays into element 93. But say you fired a proton *and* a neutron. The proton would immediately bump it up to element 93, and then the extra neutron would
15:56
have a chance at beta decaying, upping it one more time to element 94. It really is like an absurdly delicate game of jenga. So yeah. That’s how you make Plutonium. It’s safe to say that the discovery of Plutonium was kind of a big deal. It’s actually an even better fuel for a bomb than Uranium, which was the original plan for the Manhattan project, and thus Seaborg and his team were drafted to Chicago to work with…oh hey, it’s Fermi!
16:24
There they spent months artificially making enough Plutonium to flatten a city or two. It was difficult and hazardous work, and at one point a lead brick fell and broke a beaker, and 25% of the world’s entire Plutonium supply was soaked into a copy of the Chicago Times. But the Manhattan project is a story that’s been told many times by people better equipped to tell it than me. The story we care about involves Glenn Seaborg and Berkeley.
16:49
By this point they have enough Plutonium for their bomb, so Glenn and his team had free time to ponder some other questions. Why stop at 94? Surely the periodic table didn’t end at such a weird number! And they didn’t even have to re-invent the wheel. Instead of starting with Uranium, just start with Plutonium and fire neutrons at that. To go back to the jenga analogy, you’re trying to build a taller tower, but the bottom rows are radioactive, and they keep disappearing on you.
17:17
But as long as you’re building the tower faster than it’s disappearing, you can maybe find a new element. Now at this point we're going to pick up the pace a bit. There are still a lot of missing pieces here to get us up to our friend Victor Ninov, and not all the details are important. If you want to read more I highly recommend the book Superheavy by Kit Chapman. Essentially though, the timeline went like this. Element 93, discovered by Berkeley. Element 94, Berkeley.
17:42
Element 96, discovered by Berkeley members in Chicago. Element 95, discovered by Berkeley members in Chicago. Two atomic bombs are then dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing upwards of 250,000 in the immediate blast and poisoning the ground and air for decades after. Next up was element 97, once again found by Berkeley, and since they’d definitely earned it at this point, they named Berkelium. Element 98, hey guess what? It's Berkeley again, they named it Californium this time.
18:12
With 4 elements in a row the New York Times joked they should have just gone with Universitium ofium californium berkelium. It was at this point that Nobel academy finally acknowledged Berkeley’s achievements, and so Edwin McMillan and Glenn Seaborg shared the Nobel prize in chemistry. Next up was elements 99 and 100, and this is going to sound extremely stupid and I swear I’m not making it up. America dropped a nuclear bomb in the middle of the pacific ocean, sent fighter jets through
18:41
the very very top of the mushroom cloud to collect samples, raced like hell to get the rapidly decaying lumps back to Los Alamos in New Mexico, where they were then analyzed to see if they had made any new elements. Yes. And unbelievably, they did. Since Berkeley helped out with the analysis, they were co-credited with the discoveries of 99 and 100. These were named after two of the field’s greatest minds. Einstein, and Fermi. Both of them had passed away just months earlier.
19:12
And soon enough there was element 101, again, found at Berkeley. Named to honour the creator of the modern periodic table. It truly was one of the most dominant streaks in scientific history. Every other lab was left playing catchup and could do nothing but watch as Berkeley added nearly half a row to the periodic table. And there was nowhere else to go, except further and further up. As of 1945 the 4 earlier gaps in the table had been filled. Elements 43, 87, 85, and 61 had all been isolated.
19:45
If there were more elements out there, it was only going to get harder and harder to find them. They would be come to be known as the superheavies. As for Glenn Seaborg he was once again going where the tides of life took him. His career took a turn when he received an out of the blue phone call from John F Kennedy. He was about to be the next head of the Atomic Energy Commission. Later he would become a close confidant of Lyndon B. Johnson, and they were apparently
20:10
such good friends that Seaborg was regularly invited to the White house to just, hang out. After he had made the fuel for the first atomic bomb, Seaborg would push hard for treaties that would limit the spread of nukes. This is not an attempt to absolve him of his role in that, but to contextualize it. This is where Seaborg diverges from our story, but Berkeley does not. Every element in the streak from 93 to 101 had been discovered by a team with some sort of tie to Berkeley.
20:42
From this point on it would not be so clear cut, and the controversy would play out on a geopolitical scale. 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. “It would be like shooting birds at night, in a country with not that many birds". So true bestie. And he’s not wrong, element hunting is essentially like gambling.
21:11
The basic setup is easy enough to describe. You have a target, and a bullet. Except both the target and the bullet are so small that they’re invisible, and also the target is almost certainly radioactive. And even if you do make a direct hit, there’s a good chance you’ll break apart or even destroy parts of your target. So this is less like aiming a gun at a target, and more like a game of roulette with the absolute worst odds imaginable.
21:35
If you take just one spin, the odds of hitting the exact right pocket are not good. But, if you take 5 million cracks at the roulette wheel, suddenly your odds go from basically impossible, to just barely within the realm of possibility. Sure, the odds are terrible, but sooner or later you’re bound to get a hit. For element hunters, this means aiming a beam at a target, and leaving it firing for literal months, which you can imagine, gets very very expensive.
22:05
Depending on the lab, firing a beam continuously for an entire day can cost somewhere in the tens of thousands of dollars. A few months of beam time then is easily in the millions of dollars. We have a lot of Uranium on Earth, about 5.5 million metric tons, and even the shortest half life is still 25 thousands years, so getting a large enough Uranium target to fire neutrons at for months on end is no problem. So making Plutonium is easy enough.
22:34
But then for the next level, your target needs to be Plutonium. And then after that it’s Curium, Einsteinium, etc., and each time your target’s half life is getting shorter and shorter. A gram of Uranium costs about 13 cents. A gram of Einsteinium costs about $27 million dollars. Most casino go-ers can’t afford that kind of buy-in. But in theory, if you’ve got unlimited time, and unlimited money, element hunting gets a hell of a lot easier.
23:04
Berkeley, situated in the richest state in the richest country in the world, had the most money and the best equipment, so no wonder they had the leg-up. But that’s the beauty of the casino. It was just a matter of time until another lab got lucky. While the Americans were busy building a bomb, the Soviets were lagging behind, embarrassingly so. Admittedly they were very occupied holding off the Germans on the Eastern front, and had focused all their scientists on metallurgy.
23:30
The Soviet nuclear program owes its start to one random volunteer lieutenant on the Eastern front. Georgy Flerov. Prior to the war he had been following the topic of nuclear fission quite closely, only for all publications to abruptly stop mentioning it in 1939, of all years. Hmm. He found this bizarre as the ability harness the power of an atom was like the most exciting development in physics in decades. He soon connected the dots. “Oh my god they’re all making bombs”.
24:02
Flerov against all conventional wisdom, wrote directly to STALIN and basically demanded that the Soviets devote as many resources as they could to nuclear technology. Flerov was, surprisingly, not punished for this insubordination, but instead made a key player in the Soviet nuclear program. Following the war however, Flerov changed his focus. He wanted to hunt elements. He founded JINR in Dubna, a small Russian town. Soon it would be America vs the USSR in the hunt for elements.
24:36
Wow, science being used as a tool by rival superpowers to help fight a cold war? Never heard that one before. Couldn’t be me. It's safe to say nearly every new element discovery from this point on would be hotly contested, any and all evidence would denied by either side. These were the Transfermium wars, and here’s how it went down. First a small lab in Sweden claims they found element 102. Uh no you didn’t says Berkeley, your equipment is cheap and bad and your tests not thorough enough.
25:03
I agree says Dubna, and then they both bullied Sweden until basically nobody believed Sweden had actually found anything. Berkeley tried some experiments of their own, which accidentally caused a radioactive dust spill that resulted in their lab being evacuated, and 27 people had nearly 3 months shaved off their average lifespan. Dubna then swoops in with even better results, and claims 102 for their own. Then, Dubna claimed 104, 103, and then 105, so fast that all the Americans could do was
25:28
try and nitpick their data and make those same elements, but just, better. It didn’t help that each side had their own preferred types of evidence. To confirm a new element the Soviets preferred using spontaneous fission. Their detectors were cheaper, and nuclei that split in half were big enough that they were guaranteed to detect *something*. The Americans called this unreliable, as you had no idea what was being split in half.
25:50
They preferred to track alpha decay chains, the long line of elements feeding into each other. Because of this split in methodology the data from this period is a mess to make sense of. Some of it was good but was dismissed by the other side because of bias, some of is straight up wrong but was pushed out the door due to urgency. It’s almost as if this sort of cut throat, competitive structure leads to sloppy work. I sure hope that doesn’t come back to bite anyone.
26:14
For now the element hunt had stalled. By the time you get up to element 102 your half-life is less than hour. Before you could rely on other dedicated labs to manufacture you enough of an element, they could ship it to you, and then you could start firing your beams at it. With a half-life less than an hour, you couldn’t even get a sample across town, much less an intercontinental flight. The quantities they were working with were getting smaller and smaller.
26:38
When Berkeley claimed the discovery for Curium, element 98, they did so after generating around 5000 atoms of it. By the time they got to element 101 they had only created 17 atoms to claim the discovery. Soon enough it was likely that any new elements would only be created one atom at a time. Singular atoms that would decay before another could join it. This clearly wasn’t the end of the periodic table, but the element hunt was becoming too expensive and too impractical to continue.
27:13
At least, not without a breakthrough. Out the 218 winners only 4 women have ever won the Nobel prize in physics. The first was Marie Curie all the way back in the ceremony’s third year, for her studies of radiation. She would be the only woman to hold this title for nearly 60 years. It wouldn’t be until 1963 that Mario Goeppert-Mayer would break the trend. Like many of the pioneers of nuclear physics, Mayer was a alumni of the Manhattan project.
27:42
After the war she began studying elements and their half lives, and what at first glance appeared to be random, soon she began to see patterns. Certain nuclei were reliably more stable than others. It was almost as if there were “magic numbers” of protons and neutrons. Maria visualized protons and neutrons as a set of dancers engaging in a waltz. The dancers are circling around the room, and spinning around on their feet.
28:07
You can fit more dancers in the room if you pair them up, and by having have adjacent pairs spinning in opposite directions. Certain magic numbers of dancers fit more clearly than others. In technical terms, this results in nuclei with a higher binding energy, which in turn gives a more stable nucleus. To date the known magic numbers are: 2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82. In element terms, that’s helium, oxygen, calcium, nickel, tin, and lead. The critical way markers on the mountainous path of stability.
28:46
Notice that these magic numbers all even. This demonstrates that protons and neutrons like to pair up to become more stable. Like dancers, pairing up for a waltz. Additionally, elements with a magic number of either protons or neutrons tend to be extremely abundant. And finally, at the end of a naturally occurring alpha decay chain, you will always find a stable element with a magic number. For an extra special example of this, take lead, the heaviest stable element.
29:13
It’s considered double magic, with both a magic proton number and a magic neutron number. There’s a reason it’s the very last step on the mountain path before you get to the great chasm. And the magic numbers theory had one last crazy prediction that gave the element hunters some hope. There was a magic island out in the middle of the sea. This island, based on the predictions of magic numbers, should be situated at 114 protons, and 184 neutrons. Right here.
29:42
Make no mistake, this is not an island you could settle down on. You’re still up to your neck in water, but your toes can just barely brush against the sand at the bottom. For just a moment, you can catch your breath, before the tides of the sea will eventually come in and sweep you away again. And if this was true, maybe you didn’t need to work your way up from the bottom, element by element. Maybe you could do it in reverse.
30:05
Start at the edge of the cliff and launch yourself, all the way to the island. From there, whatever element you made would likely decay into an alpha chain. And you’d generate all the other elements on your way back down. They needed a catapult. Element 106 marked a turning point in the element hunt. The last 4 elements were contested by both major sides, but element 106 was found and announced by Berkeley and Dubna the same month. For once, both teams agreed that it was too close to call.
30:34
The tactics at this point had changed. Element 93 was made by slamming a neutron into Uranium. The biggest possible target, and the smallest possible bullet. By the 1980s the thinking had changed. Why use an expensive radioactive target, when you could use a much cheaper and much stabler target like lead? And instead of firing something small like Helium, fire something medium sized, like Chromium, or iron. Think about it. Lead has 82 protons. Iron has 26. 82 plus 26 is 108.
31:09
Counter-intuitively, this is actually more reliable than trying to get a single proton to join to a massive nucleus, nuclei closer in size balance each other out, and the resulting product doesn’t eject nearly as many neutrons during the fusion process. Now if this sounds too good to be true, yes there is a reason no one had tried this before, a source as heavy as iron would need an entirely new beam technology designed from the ground
31:32
up, and a detector that was more sensitive than anything thing that had been invented yet. The Soviets were out of money, and had no hope of going any further. And the Americans over in California had for the first time run out of ideas. The stage was set for player 3. This is GSI. Situated in Darmstadt in Western Germany, GSI had more than enough money to bankroll the new expensive equipment that the Soviet team couldn’t afford thanks to the post war West German economic miracle.
32:00
Their new beam could fire elements as heavy as chromium, iron or even bismuth, all of which would hit a lead target. Over the course of just 5 years this led to the discovery of 107, 109 and 108, in that order. For the first time it was a true three-way race in the element hunt. Berkeley, Dubna, and GSI. As the 1980s came to a close, there were 9 elements that needed official names. In comes IUPAC. Now I once got into an argument with a commenter who claimed that IUPAC isn’t actually the
32:33
body that decides the names for the chemical elements, it’s the scientists who come up with the names. But only in the same way that 6 year old me totally got to choose my own bed time, and my mom had no say in the matter. IUPAC laid out the basic rule for what can be considered an element discovery: Namely, that an element must be stable enough to exist for more than 10^-14 seconds. It’s the time necessary for electrons to form a cloud around a nucleus.
32:59
But IUPAC’s also had to choose who got to name which element, otherwise we’d have separate American and Soviet names for a dozen or so elements. And even in the rare case where they could agree on a name, they couldn’t agree on which element it should get that name. Three separate elements have at one point, been referred to as Rutherfordium. IUPAC would foolishly spend years trying to find a compromise that satisfied everyone,
33:23
but eventually settled on a compromise that made everyone just slightly unhappy. Among these names, for the first time, after a lot of heated debate, was that of a living scientist. Element 106 was called Seaborgium. The captain had left a permanent mark on the sea that he had travelled for most of his life. He passed away 2 years after the name was made official at the age of 86. It was a fitting end, because Seaborgium would be the last element discovered at Berkeley.
34:10
The collapse of the Soviet Union hit the Dubna lab hard. The Russian economy was a garbage fire and even its prestigious element hunting team wasn’t immune to the fallout. For a while it seemed doomed to close down. If you weren’t Russian, you left the lab for your home country, if you were Russian, you left the lab for a private sector job where you’d actually have a salary. In the end what saved it was renting out the accelerators to private companies, and a partnership
34:33
with the unlikeliest of allies. Livermore Labs in California also had an element hunting team, and the Russian team kept their lab alive by joining forces. For the world this was a good thing. But for Berkeley this was yet another hurdle. Their fiercest rival had just teamed up with a fellow Californian lab. It would be outright petty to dispute any element claims that came out of such a partnership. Dubna-Livermore first set their sights on element 110, the next in the sequence, but
35:02
their attention soon shifted. They were about to attempt something that had only been dreamed of before this point. They were finally making that catapult, and they were going to aim it at the island of stability. Their recipe was Calcium-48, fired at Plutonium-244. They were going to skip 3 whole rows and aim for 114. And it 1998, it worked! 114 protons, but only 176 neutrons. Remember, the theoretical center of this island of stability was supposed to be over to the east, with 184 neutrons.
35:34
But the half-life of this atom of 114 was in the realm of seconds. Not milliseconds, full seconds. The island of stability was real, and they had found the beginning of its shoreline. IUPAC wasn’t entirely convinced, they wanted some more data, so the Russians kept at it. They’d work on trying to reproduce 114 more reliably, maybe even aim for 116 as well. The German team at GSI had other ideas. Although the country had suffered its own depression due to reunification they got back
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on their feet much faster than Russia, and they had spent the last 5 years upgrading their equipment. But the lab at this point was being shared by several teams with competing projects. The main accelerator had a busy queue, and you’d often only get a few weeks with the accelerator before another team got priority. The element hunting team had already spent a few of their precious weeks calibrating the beam intensity, and now they only had 4 weeks before the next team would bump them
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off the schedule. It was an extremely short window for this sort of experiment, but they couldn’t waste their slot. The team decided to swap out the beam to fire Nickel at Lead, which should add up to 110. After just 1 day they saw the first sign of element 110. They were unbelievably lucky. Their luck continued when they found out the next experiment was delayed by 17 days. So they kept at it. They swapped out the lead target for Bismuth. Bam, one extra proton gave them element 111.
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Two elements in just as many months. A year goes by and they try firing Zinc at lead. At first they get a weird reading, but they keep going. In a little over a week they find 112. The German team had once again done the unthinkable. A hat-trick of three elements in a row. Move over Berkeley, the crown had officially been lost. Berkeley at this point was nearly 20 years out from their last element discovery.
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The Russians were probing the island of stability, and the Germans were doing victory laps. They needed a secret weapon. And so, they orchestrated a coup. Enter, finally, Victor Ninov. Physics doesn’t often lend itself especially well to the idea of a rising star in the same way music or film does. It’s a glacially paced field of study that happens behind closed doors, and where it’s hard to find a photo of someone that hasn’t been JPEG’d into oblivion.
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But if physics did have a rising star, Victor Ninov certainly fit the bill. Ninov was born in Bulgaria in 1959. As a young man his family emigrated to West Germany. Ninov would go on to study physics at the technical university of Darmstadt, the same city in which GSI is located. Eccentric does not do Ninov justice. He regularly signed his emails with “Your crazy Bulgarian”. He loved biking, and even played the violin.
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After he met his future wife, Caroline Cox, she turned him into an avid hiker. He would often venture into the mountains with colleagues and had even survived an avalanche accident that left him badly injured. His travels were not limited to the ground however, he once sailed the Pacific ocean on a 45-foot sailboat, and somehow he had time to be pilot, flying a single-engine, four-seat Aero Commander. However none of that holds a candle to my absolute favourite of his antics.
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He and a colleague were on a quest to visit every Italian restaurant in Darmstadt, where they would always order the spaghetti carbonara so they could rank them all. Let me be absolutely clear. This is a grade A bit. I would also do this. This is so funny to me. A Bulgarian man ordering an Italian pasta dish from every restaurant in a German city. Zero notes on this. Besides being well liked by the entire team he was also essential.
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In 1988 GSI upgraded their computers and Ninov took the lead on this. He was the go-to computer tech and even wrote a custom software package called Goosy. It was one of a kind, a start-of-the-art software for analyzing decay chains of radioactive samples. Whereas before you had to manually look for analog detection spikes, element hunting had gone digital. He had found himself a niche in a field that is already made up of niche experts.
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And over the last 10 years he was able to add pretty sweet bullet point to his resume. “co-discoverer of elements 110, 111 and 112”. So given all this it was an outright scandal when Berkeley headhunted him from GSI in 1996. The man who orchestrated this headhunt was a man well into his 80s. Al Ghiorso’s story is a wild one. One day during the mid 1940s he was installing an intercom system to the Berkeley lab, and ended up meeting two secretaries.
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One of the women, Wilma Belt, would later become his wife. The other woman, would later become the wife of Glenn Seaborg. Through this mutual friendship, Glenn recruited Al when he joined the Manhattan project because Ghiorso was gifted at making homemade Geiger counters. After the war when they returned home to Berkeley, Ghiorso was Seaborg’s right hand man, and they had been together for every element up until 101, when Seaborg left for his political appointment.
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That left Ghiorso as the defacto head of Berkeley’s element hunt. He was meant for this job. Let me paint you a picture of this man. In the 1940s Al Ghiorso supposedly held the world record for the longest range ham radio, he had extended his personal one so far he could pick up stations in Ohio all the way out in California. He never collected the prize because he was illegally operating without a radio license.
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Back when Berkeley had their accelerator on one end of the campus and the chemistry lab a mile up a hill, Ghiorso would jump in his Volkswagon beetle, and in the middle of the night, race at illegal speeds up the Berkeley hill so that they could get their sample tested before it decayed into nothing. Once he nearly ran over a security guard who pulled a gun on him, and he just kept driving. When Berkeley had their accidental radiation emergency when hunting element 102, it was
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Al who exited the building last, after he calmly shut down the accelerator. Nearly half a century later Al Ghiorso was the last remaining key figure from Berkeley’s glory days. His 2nd world record, a little more prestigious than his radio one, was for the most elements discovered. So when Al Ghiorso calls Victor Ninov a young version of himself, you hire that man. Ghiorso was so excited that this brought him out of semi-retirement.
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Berkeley had new rising star, and an opportunity to be on top once again. With Ninov put in charge of the data analysis half of the experiment, they needed someone to be in charge of the equipment end. That man was Ken Gregorich. He had overseen the construction of Berkeley’s newest piece of tech, the Berkeley Gas Filled Seperator, a device that looks like this. Now they just needed a recipe. Dubna and Livermore had just made the claim for element 114. IUPAC wanted more data.
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Already months behind, Berkeley would have to act fast to try and scoop the element with a more convincing experiment, but they would have to use a different recipe than Dubna. Dubna had used Plutonium-244 and Calcium-48, neither of which Berkeley had enough of to run the experiments. Also the other problem was that the amount of required Plutonium was actually illegal to use in the densely populated San Francisco Bay area, so there was that whole thing.
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Instead they had another recent addition to the team who had another wild idea. Robert Smolanczuk wasn’t a permanent team member, he was on a visiting scholarship from Poland. He was a theoretical physicist who had previously run some calculations that were mildly controversial. One colleague called his calculations “simply mind boggling”. Robert was saying skip everything from 113 to 117. Aim for 118. His plan was simple, fire Krypton-86 at a lead-208 target, both of which are easy to
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acquire, and better yet, not radioactive! Now conventional wisdom said that this recipe was…too good to be true. Yeah the protons add up to 118, but the probability of the reaction occurring was thought to be near impossible. Not Robert though, he had published a paper in which he showed calculations where this recipe was actually more likely to occur than others. See going back to the roulette analogy, element hunting is all about probability.
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You gotta consider what the odds getting a hit are against the cost to keep a beam running for weeks. And to quantify this probability physicists had come up with delightfully silly unit of measurement. A barn is a unit that something of a hybrid between cross-sectional area, and the probability of a collision between two particles. Essentially, how likely are you to hit a given target. It quite literally comes from the phrase “couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn”.
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Given its origin, 1 whole barn is considered a comically large target, as in, it would be very difficult to miss a target of 1 barn. When it came to element hunting, the size of this target had been shrinking exponentially for decades. These days reactions are measured in picobarns, trillionths of a barn. Take a look at this chart. On the horizontal axis you see the atomic number of the element you’re trying to create. And on the left hand side is the estimated measure in barns.
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You’ll notice that this is a logarithmic scale. As you go from element 102 to 110, the probability has gotten worse by a factor of nearly 10 million! Talk about diminishing returns. One thing you might notice however, is the probabilities go up very slightly around element 114. This is one of the indications that the magic island of stability isn’t just a mirage, and suggested that the Russian team were onto something. Now element 118 though, that’s a terrible barn measurement.
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Most recipes were predicting not even a single picobarn. When you get down to picobarn level, if you have your beam running constantly, you might be able to produce one single atom a week, which you might not even detect, and you’re out hundreds of thousands of dollars. Once you go below a picobarn, you’d be lucky to get an atom for an entire month worth of beam time. And that’s why Robert’s recipe was so controversial. His paper argued that his recipe could give you 670 picobarns.
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If he was right it would be a game changer. Not everyone was convinced, but the nice thing was that this recipe was low risk, with a potentially high reward. And they needed a calibration test run for their new machine anyway, so why not use Robert’s magical recipe? No one was expecting an immediate breakthrough. And yet that’s essentially what they got. The experiment began on April 8th 1999. Most of the lab had left for Easter break.
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The one exception was Ninov, who stayed behind to analyze the results. 11 days later, the lab director, Darleane Hoffman, would get a phone call. Her first instinct was it would be bad news. It had only been 11 days. Ken Gregorich assured her that it was quite the opposite. Darleane had every reason to assume the worst. Chemistry in the 40s was not a job intended for women. Darleane Hoffman had to wade through years of systemic discrimination to help change that.
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When her father passed away suddenly she asked a professor if she could miss tomorrow’s quantum chemistry test to plan the funeral. The professor made her do the test on the spot instead. This was, to use the industry term, horseshit. She wrote it with tears in her eyes. She still got a B. She persevered and got hired as a Nuclear chemist at Los Alamos. But when she got there she was told that women weren’t hired to work in that division.
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While HR sat on their ass pretending to do anything, Darleane found her soon-to-be supervisor at a party, who immediately fixed the situation. And then her security clearance magically went missing. Wow, that's weird. It took 3 more months before Darleane got access to the lab. But it had been 4 months of waiting, and she had just narrowly missed out on what would have been a career highlight. Remember that atomic bomb that the fighter jets flew through?
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They went to Los Alamos, the because of the bureaucratic nonsense, she missed out on being part of the team who discovered elements 99 and 100. A loss that filled her with rage that she funneled into her work. She was beloved by nearly every chemist she came into contact with. And now, as entered her 70s, she was in charge of Berkeley’s element hunting team. So yes. She wanted an element. She wanted it a lot.
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Just a few minutes after the phone call, Gregorich, a visiting professor named Walter Loveland, and Victor Ninov had come to her office. Ninov had found something incredible in the early results, although notably, Ninov didn’t want to show Darleane the result at first. But he was outvoted, because why wouldn’t you? To better illustrate what he had observed, Ninov drew his colleagues this diagram. Three picture perfect alpha decay chains that ended at element 106.
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If we overlaid it here, it would look like this. If this was legit, the team had found not just 118, but 116, and 114 as well. With the IUPAC decision still out on 114, this was two, potentially three new elements that belonged to Berkeley. Their first in 25 years. Darleane Hoffman was going to get her wish, three times over. Ninov, in as much disbelief as everyone else jokingly asked “Does Robert talk to God?” Now they didn’t immediately announce to the world their finding.
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They took a few weeks and ran another experiment, and one more alpha decay chain was found. Of the four they had now, the team reasoned that one may be fluke, but that the other three were legit. Not only that, they sent the results to GSI. They also gave the greenlight. In June 1999 Hoffman and Ghiorso, two titans of the element hunt, held a press conference and announced their two new elements. The eventual paper was submitted to Physical Review Letters on May 25th 1999.
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Everyone from the semi retired Ghiorso to the fresh-faced grad students got to be on it. Victor Ninov was first author. Given how successful Robert’s recipe had been, Ken Gregorich thought the next logical step was to simply swap out the lead target for bismuth, which has one more proton. With that extra proton, maybe they could also find element 119. Now make no mistake, if an element was going to be named after someone in the group, it wasn't going to be Ninov.
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The obvious choice, the one already being thrown around, was Ghiorsium. Al was the current world record holder and the only person who had a legacy comparable to his late friend Seaborg. But Ninov clearly had a bright future ahead of him. With potentially 5 elements under his belt he was clearly ready to carry the torch. He didn’t get to carry it for long. GSI, missing their star researcher but still on top of their game, were eager to get caught up with Berkeley.
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However when they took a crack at repeating Robert’s magical recipe, they didn’t see the alpha decay chain that Ninov had recorded. Similarly before the end of 1999 teams in France and Japan also came up blank. This was very odd, as all those labs had tried their best to replicate the Berkeley conditions as closely as possible. Robert’s recipe was thought to be a longshot, yes, but the benefit of it was it was low
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risk with a potentially high reward, as the two recipe ingredients were comparatively easy to acquire and set up. Something was off. Ninov was doing the conference circuit at this time and again, was bizarrely reluctant to talk about his breakthrough. He continually deflected questions about his potentially career defining discovery. The Berkeley team is perplexed at this point. They re-run their own experiment in Spring of 2000. They can’t reproduce the event either. This is a problem now.
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Assuming the same conditions, the 2nd run in 2000 should have produce around 3 more atoms of 118. By summer 2000 Berkeley established an independent team to re-run the same experiment, under the supervision of I-Yang Lee. Completely different team of people, but the same lab and conditions His studies wrap up by Fall 2000. They too saw no evidence of the 118 decay chain. Following this Berkeley overhauls their detector system and clamps down on their operation procedures.
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We’re talking, checking the purity of the Helium gas, the resistance of the coils, everything you can think of. They even considered whether their beam was actually made of Krypton, and not contaminated by some other element. It was in fact, almost entirely Krypton, but by this point you couldn’t take anything for granted. The year 2000 came and went with not a single hint of 118. By April 2001 they are ready to begin testing again with their new setup.
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By May, they finally got what they were hoping for, another detection of 118. There was only one single alpha decay chain detected. And the reporter, once again, was Victor Ninov. Now in 1999 Ninov had been the only person to analyze the data, as he was the only one familiar with the GOOSY analysis program he had brought over from Germany. But since then it had been nearly 2 years and several people had taught themselves GOOSY as well. A postdoc named Don Peterson, was among them.
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He and Ninov would run the program on the exact same data, and yet come up with completely different results. Don’s results said 118 wasn’t there. The dread had set in. Berkeley by this point knows it’s in hot water and meticulously documents every single step from here on out with multiple rounds of bureaucracy, which I have to imagine, is for legal reasons as much as it is for technical reasons. In June 2001 Darleane Hoffman assembles a working group to comb through every bit of
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data relating to the detection of element 118. They were going to sift through every raw data file as far back as 1999. This working group, based on their findings, leads to a new independent review committee, which then leads to a 3rd committee, and then a 4th, the last of which had the official name “The Committee for the Formal Investigation of Alleged Scientific Misconduct.” Over the course of three committees the investigation had gone from “why aren’t we able to repeat
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the experiment” to “okay someone is getting fired”. A big thank you to Kit Chapman for providing me with nearly 200 pages from Berkeley’s internal investigation, which he obtained thanks to California’s Public Records Act. As you can imagine the three committees cover a lot of the same ground, so I’ll be summarizing their main arguments into 3 categories. 1. Statistical – what is the likelihood that these measurements were genuine? 2.
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Technical – Is there evidence that the raw data was tampered with, either intentionally or by accident? 3. Identity – If anyone, who is to blame? We’ll start with statistics. When the other labs attempted to verify the Berkeley results they found nothing. This was odd because those labs actually had setups with better beam luminosities, they actually had a higher chance at producing element 118 than Berkeley. Berkeley was capped at 1.6 x 10^18 Krypton ions.
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GSI and RIKEN had a combined total of 4.9 x 10^18, nearly 3 times as many. If you interpret that statistic in the most generous way possible, that’s like being able to spin the roulette wheel 3 times as much. Together they should have seen around 3 times as many atoms of 118. Again, just like a roulette wheel, this doesn’t mean it can’t happen, just that’s it statistically unlikely. Another physicist, H.K Schmidt, ran an analysis on the decay chains from an earlier study
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of element 110 as well as element 118. It’s important to remember that an element’s half-life is a statistical quantity. If you measure a random atom a radioactive sample, it will decay after a completely random amount of time. It could be a microsecond, it could be minutes. You need to analyze several atoms and then plot those decay times on a probability distribution. An ideal distribution would see many very short decays, and fewer and fewer long decays.
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Data for element 110 agrees with this behaviour. When the same test is applied to the 3 atoms shown in the element 118 paper, they rise up sharply, with most decays clumping in the middle of the graph. This data was straight up goofy. Three more Berkeley team members privately performed statistical analyses of their own. Out of 1 million random trials, only 0.82% gave decay distributions that matched the element 118 data. There was almost no chance this data was real.
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Next the technical argument: The program used to detect the decay events was called Goosy. Goosy was known to be unreliable at times. It would occasionally glitch, and data could be corrupted in the shared memory database. This corruption could manifest as incorrect histograms, misaligned array indices, or truncated arrays. The problems were frequent enough that an aura of superstition had arisen around GOOSY.
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It took someone experienced with the program to even realize that GOOSY had glitched in the first place, much less decipher what had really been measured. But what they were seeing in the data was too perfect to be a glitch. To quote the New York Times: “It was as though Microsoft Word had crashed and, like the proverbial monkeys banging on typewriters, tossed off sentences from Shakespeare.” The idea that GOOSY had crashed, and dozens of lines of measurements had perfectly corrupted
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to give 5 pristine alpha decays chains was absurd. We’re talking time measurements, energy measurements, location measurements, all synching up to give not just one rogue decay chain, but 5? With file corruption ruled out, the only remaining explanation was that the raw data files were manipulated in some way. Whether intentional or accidental, something had happened to the data files that wasn’t random. The investigation became hyper focused on the events that originally showed 118.
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In 1999 there were two runs of interest. Run 013, from April 8-12th detected 3 alpha decay chains. 2 of those made it into the published paper. A couple weeks later run 015 from April 30th- May 5th also detected an alpha decay chain, which also made it into the paper. And finally in 2001 there was run 045 from April to May 2001 which showed just a single alpha decay chain. The committee determined by checking the relevant system log files that all the data from these runs was in fact original.
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The raw cassettes had not been altered. That being said, the original data tape that should contain run 045 was missing. There is no explanation for where this tape went. Could be intentional, or an accident. Fortunately, a disk file was found that was believed to contain an exact copy of run 45, and this disk copy was analyzed as well. The committee took these raw data files and used GOOSY to analyze them all. No hits for element 118 were found. Now that is really odd.
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Their next step was to look deeper into the log files. GOOSY outputs a massive running log where a bunch of data is grouped in columns like this. The left-most column is time. Each line is considered a separate “event” which is when the detector receives an energy reading somewhere. We’re working with extremely fast physical phenomena here so there’s a few dozen events in a single second. This block of events here were supposedly a string of three alpha particle decays.
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You can tell because the location where they hit the detector are all quite close together, and their energy readings match predictions for element 118. However, they checked much later in the log file after GOOSY had been run multiple times, and these perfect numbers were no longer there. Huh. The signs of tampering are completely invisible unless someone is extremely experienced with GOOSY. A printout from GOOSY will typically contain somewhere between 63-68 lines of text.
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During the investigation 5 exceptions were found. One of those exceptions was a detection of 118, which was 76 lines long. Almost as if extra lines had been added to the readout somehow. The event at 12:54 states that a 200 Mb file was read and analyzed in 5 seconds. However the computer GOOSY runs on would not be capable of processing a file at 40 Mb/s. The only explanation is that a file wasn’t actually being analyzed.
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If you look at the 2nd column for the event at 12:54 you see two dashes “- -“. The following event, 15:03 shows a “$ANL” instead. The committee noted that two dashes only appear in the 2nd column when a command is run to type the contents of another file into the log file. So, say someone takes the raw data, and runs it through GOOSY for analysis. GOOSY then outputs a bunch of analyzed data. That text is then copy pasted into a text editor, and the text is manually altered,
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line by line, until the numbers show what appear to be perfect alpha decay chains. This text is then saved to a file, a command is run in GOOSY, as indicated by the “--” line, which overwrote GOOSY’s logfile to show the amazing evidence of a new element. So the 2001 log file had clear evidence of tampering. But, what about 1999? Well it turns out they had just been looking in the wrong place. The log files showed all the correct outputs, but when you compared those tables to those
1:00:06
that made it into the published paper, there were some major differences. Energy values and time values were altered, some entirely new events were added. Values tweaked just enough to suggest alpha decay chains. The entire fundamental basis for the paper was made up. It didn't match the data from GOOSY. This blatant manipulation could occur if say, only one person had actually seen the original log files, and that person just so happened to be the first author on the paper.The committee
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later found that every suspicious log file belonged to the same user account. VNinov. Argument 3: Identity. You would think at this point it’s an open and shut case. That the user account name settles the argument as to who exactly tampered with the log files, but Berkeley had to cover their bases. Throughout the course of the investigation, as more and more signs pointed to Ninov as the culprit, he was placed on paid administrative leave. He also hired legal council.
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He wasn’t going down without a fight. Even without the smoking gun of the of the user account name, there were plenty of indications that Ninov’s involvement in the project wasn’t entirely above board. Notably, when Ninov had announced the detection for the 1999 event, there was not nearly as much scrutiny over the raw data files. Back they submitted the paper, the original data had only been analyzed three times, all by Ninov.
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When the committee went digging for the raw data, they discovered that basically no electronic copies of it existed, and that the only record of a detection of 118, was on two hand-drawn pieces of paper from Ninov. And yet, no one had double checked where any of these numbers came from. Later when one of the committees asked Ninov to reproduce figure 2 in the paper, Ninov was able to produce approximate version of A, B and C, but he was unable to reproduce
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figure D using any analysis program, instead saying that he had originally made it by hand. Interesting that of these 4 graphs, only one of these would be easy to generate by hand. Ninov maintained his innocence throughout the entire investigation. Ninov was specifically asked by the committee whether he thought GOOSY could have corrupted the data. His answer was no. Instead he offered multiple versions of a bizarre conspiracy.
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At first Ninov argued that someone else at the Berkeley lab must be jealous that the element hunting team was getting so much time with the beam, and thus resorted to sabotage. Later Ninov changed his story, and argued that after the initial reports of other labs failing to reproduce their results, someone on the team must have gotten cold feet, and retroactively removed the decay chain from the original data.
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Finally, putting aside sabotage, and putting aside someone getting cold feet, Victor Ninov argued that everyone in the lab technically had access to the account VNinov. His account password was apparently an open secret. Someone else could easily have used his account, and any blame would fall on him. The committee found that this was possible, other lab members did have access to some of his files. The problem with this argument then, is how did a GOOSY expert like Ninov not notice any
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alterations when they eventually reviewed the data? Similarly, in October 2001 Berkeley submitted a retraction of their paper to Physical Review Letters. PRL declines to retract the paper. Their cited reason, is that Victor Ninov refused to sign off on the retraction. This is standard policy with journals, all authors must agree for anything new to be published, including a retraction. So again, if he believes he’s been duped or framed, why would he refuse to sign off on the retraction?
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Instead Ninov only attended one face-to-face interview on December 14th of 2001, and declined two later invitations. His later statements were written answers to provided questions, presumably after he consulted with his legal team. Despite this, some of Ninov’s responses verge on outright petty. He claims that several figures in the report by I-Yang Lee are “off by orders of magnitude” as a way to discredit them.
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There’s nothing wrong with the figures, they just happen to be based off of Robert’s magic recipe, which was well known to disagree with most of the existing scientific literature. And he spends a whole paragraph saying that the committee’s focus on the failings of GOOSY is comparable to “debates about the superiority of Windows vs UNIX or Word vs WordPerfect”. Sure man. If anyone had believed him beforehand, no one was now. Whatever friendships they had with Ninov beforehand were destroyed.
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Walter Loveland says he used to speak to Ninov on a daily basis, and things just weren’t making sense. “At one time he alluded to other people interfering instead of him, but that was nonsense”. With his back against the wall Ninov turned on his friends. They wanted nothing to do with him now. The hammer came down quick. Ninov was placed on administrative leave on November 21st 2001, a week before the misconduct investigation began. He was officially fired in May of 2002.
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After being fired he filed a grievance with the University of California Berkeley, but nothing ever came of this. The paper was finally retracted after nearly an entire year. None of his coauthors were implicated in the fraud, although that didn’t stop the committee from having a few harsh words for them. They homed in on what they saw as a shocking weak-link in the scientific review process, relying on only a single person, Ninov, for the analysis that underpinned the entire claim
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of element 118. Yes, Ninov was the sole expert at GOOSY, but that didn’t prevent anyone from looking at the raw data files. Part of the issue here may stem from the management hierarchy. The experiment was essentially co-led, with Ken Gregorich leading the machining side and Ninov leading the analysis side. As such he was able to avoid scrutiny. And finally the lab as a whole was criticized for a stunning lack of documentation, especially
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for the breakthroughs in 1999, which as we now know, were recorded entirely on just two pieces of paper. Heinz Gaggeler was a friend of Ninov’s when they both worked at GSI. Ninov would often crash at his house when they went on hiking trips. “Victor was so well received when he came to Berkeley. He had full support. And because of that, one didn’t look too carefully into the analysis he was doing. It was a total disaster. Did it destroy Berkeley? Of course it did. Berkeley was Berkeley.
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The outside world doesn’t want fake news. The show was over.” Ken Gregorich prefers not to talk about the scandal at all. “It was a dark period, and it’s gone, and I’d rather leave it at that.” It’s a similar case for Darleane Hoffman. She never got her element. For those at the top it’s mortifying to have such a blatant case of fraud occur under your watch, and on the other hand you have a handful 20-something grad students whose names made it onto that paper.
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Even if you had just a single shift running the cyclotron during the experiments, your name got on the paper. You had nowhere near enough knowledge or responsibility to even consider fraud as a possibility, and now at the very start of your professional career your name will permanently be part of a retracted paper. Suddenly your resume goes from being a golden ticket into any lab you want, to a radioactive warning sign. To some it would be better to just erase 2 years from your career history.
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And the damage wasn’t entirely contained to Berkeley. Sigurd Hofmann had been Ninov’s boss at GSI. Elements 110 to 112 had been verified by other labs at this point, and the data used in GSI’s initial publication held up under scrutiny. Their elements were legit. And yet…they also used GOOSY at their lab. And Ninov had been their GOOSY expert. Sigurd recalls one day back when they were searching for 112. Ninov still worked there, and early on, only a week into the experiments, Ninov said he
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had found something. Sigurd immediately asked to see a printout of his findings, all the raw data. But Ninov said he was busy. He’d do it after lunch. A bizarre thing to say when you may have just found a new element. The printout wouldn’t have been time consuming, it should have just been instant. And yet it took all day for Ninov to get around to it, and show it to Sigurd. When Sigurd saw it he was confused. It was missing data, and it didn’t quite look like a decay chain.
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He told Ninov it wasn’t good enough, and they’d have to wait for a better event to publish anything. He didn’t think much of it, as just a week later they had seen the real deal. Ninov’s odd decay chain was only briefly mentioned in the paper, almost no focus was given to it. At the time it was easy to forget about. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, it was clear Ninov had attempted to fake element 112 too. Sigurd went back and looked at the raw data files.
1:08:07
The raw files just showed radioactive background noise. But on Ninov’s computer, these old files had been manually altered. Individual numbers had been changed. It was sloppy. Following the advice of his boss, Sigurd went back even further. Again, he found a single decay chain for element 110 that had been produced by Ninov. It was manipulated in the same way. Yeah again, I keep burying the lead here. Ninov had attempted to fake FIVE new elements.
1:08:36
Of all the elements Ninov’s name is attached to, the only one with zero evidence of any wrongdoing, is 111. The only reason Ninov got away with his first two fakes was because his team had found the real thing. GSI had been more vigilant and thorough than Berkeley, and that had saved them from total disaster. They ended up publishing a follow-up paper on their work for elements 110-112, where they said “In two cases…we found inconsistency in the data, which led to the conclusion,
1:08:59
that for reasons not yet known to us, part of the data used for establishing these two chains were spuriously created”. “Reasons not yet known to us”. Sigh...yeah. They did not mention Ninov, but the implication was clear. They were not hit nearly as bad as Berkeley, but it still did lasting damage. Exactly how much damage is hard to say. When Sigurd requested permission to begin searching for elements as high as 126, higher-ups rejected the proposal.
1:09:28
As Kit Chapman says in the book Superheavy: “I’ve seen the internal report…However it would be misleading and disrespectful to everyone involved to say [the Ninov fraud] was the only reason GSI fell behind in the element race. The truth is far more complicated”. Let’s take stock of what we know at this point. First we have the element race as whole. A highly competitive and volatile field of study which is prone to labs doing sloppy work just to have first dibs on an element. Secondly Berkeley.
1:09:56
A once dominant, highly respected institution who hasn’t had a victory in over 25 years, and is thus even more desperate for a win. Third, they’ve just poached a young up and comer in the field from a rival lab, with his name already tied to 3 elements. He is widely considered to be the field’s next superstar, and he’s brought over a custom software program that only he knows how to use. All of this is a recipe for disaster.
1:10:20
It’s impossible to talk about the Ninov fraud without also touching on the other major physics fraud from this same year. Jan Hendrik Schon was similarly fired from Bell Labs for faking years worth of data on organic semiconductors. It was these two high profile frauds together, in such short succession that forced the American Physical Society to revise its guidelines on research misconduct. No one had ever expected someone to be so brazen as to fake data in such a public way until now.
1:10:47
Moving forward, coauthors have a responsibility to vouch for the work of their colleagues, not simply defer culpability because they had no direct involvement. In both cases the fraud occurred because of a single weak link. What I find interesting is how these two cases diverge. Although his exact motive was unclear, there is a reasonable argument you can make that Schon was pushed to fake data in order to keep his job during an economic collapse,
1:11:12
and those lies snowballed until he couldn’t cover his tracks anymore. Ninov does not have a similar plausible motive. Again, much like Schon, some suspect that Ninov was trying to get ahead of Berkeley’s rivals by planting his flag on a discovery he thought was a safe bet. Someone was bound to come along and discover it for real. If he really was taking a gamble, he severely underestimated just how bad the odds were. Al Ghiorso said it best: “Why he did it, I don't know. It's a real mystery.
1:11:42
There was nothing for him to gain, absolutely nothing, and everything to lose”. He was almost glad that his good friend Seaborg had already passed away at this point. “He would have been one of the co-authors. This would have just about killed him.” Victor Ninov no longer works in physics, although he still retains his Ph.D. Since being dismissed from Berkeley he briefly worked as a professor of physics at University of the Pacific, but
1:12:02
since 2006 he has held a variety of engineering positions at a few different California companies. He is now in his 60s. Ninov’s exact motives will almost certainly remain a mystery. So with that in mind, I present to you this admittedly far-fetched theory, provided by his old boss at GSI, is. Hofmann double checked the dates when Ninov first made his false claims. Ninov claimed he saw element 110 on November 11th, and it had a half-life of 11.19 minutes.
1:12:32
On its own it’s odd that 11 would appear so much here. But consider the fact that German carnivals commonly start on November 11th at 11 am, coinciding with armistice day. Sigurd thinks Ninov meant it as a joke. A taunt. I admit, it’s weak on its own. But element 118, Ninov’s other fake, was announced on April 19th, Glenn Seaborg’s birthday. Who knows. Maybe we’re looking for a pattern where there is none. The only labs that had survived the Ninov scandal completely untarnished were Dubna
1:13:30
and Livermore. The same year Ninov was fired, Dubna and Livermore had jointly announced sightings of elements 116 and 118, alongside their still unconfirmed 114. The next year they made a claim for 115 too. Alongside that 113 was thought to be a possible alpha decay product. This was a partnership that seemed impossible just 20 years earlier, but a Russian-American collaboration was bulldozing everyone else. Of course Berkeley and GSI weren’t going to just roll-over and accept this new state
1:14:00
of affairs. Right? The Livermore group found themselves at a conference in 2009, in Salt Lake City. Unexpectedly they were approached by a researcher who told them “Here’s some data, hot off the press, no one has seen it. We’ve just confirmed your discovery of 114.” That researcher was Ken Gregorich. After the crushing embarrassment of the Ninov fraud, Berkeley had put the scientific community first. IUPAC confirmed 114 and 116 in 2012.
1:14:27
The names honoured the California city of Livermore, and Georgy Flerov. The man who started Russia’s element hunt in the first place. The two sides of the Transfermium wars were officially partners. But, as it goes, a new challenger eventually emerged to fill the vacuum left by Berkeley and GSI. The RIKEN institute in Japan. RIKEN’s accelerator was top of the line, and they didn’t have to compete for beam time like the other major labs.
1:14:52
After a decade-long stalemate, Japan just barely eked out the discovery for element 113. Although my understanding is a ver controversial ruling. The cold war was over, but new rivalries will constantly pop up. On the flipside however Dubna did get credit for 118, 115, and 117 [and 116]. Al Ghiorso, who passed away in 2010 at the age of 95, never got an element named after him. Ghiorsium had been the proposed name for Berkeley’s element 118.
1:15:21
In the end element 118 was named after Yuri Oganessian, who has been, and still is the director of the Dubna lab for almost as long as the Berlin wall has been torn down. He is now only the 2nd living person to have an element named after him, joining Glenn Seaborg in their elite little club. Element 118 marks the end of the 7th, and to date, final row of the periodic table. There is almost certainly an 8th row to the table.
1:15:49
Right now the first claim to that row looks like it belongs to either Dubna-Livermore or RIKEN. 119 and 120, when they’re found, hopefully within the next 5 years, will start that new row. There are a few different recipes being tried out. RIKEN wants to try Vanadium and Curium. Dubna-Livermore wants to try Titanium fired at Berkelium. None of these are particularly easy to make a beam for. Calcium-48 is by and large the best material to use for beama, but that would require a
1:16:16
target of Einsteinium to make 119, and that's expensive. There’s even an ambitious plan to swap the concept of the beam and the target. Make medium sized iron the target, and ultra heavy plutonium the beam. At this point, nothing is too crazy to rule out completely. In all likelihood, when 119 and 120 are found, they’ll belong here. After that though, who knows what will happen. Maybe we’ll need a 3rd row completely detached from the rest of the table.
1:16:45
Going by the magic island theory element 126 is supposed to be extra stable. Past that, it’s supposed to be possible to go up to element 172, maybe even 173. Possible, yes, practical, who knows? Do these mean anything for real-life chemistry? Probably not. As we’ve learned more and more about the element up to 118, we’ve noticed that the traditional chemistry starts to break down, become less and less relevant.
1:17:05
Whereas before an element’s behavior could be reasonably predicted by the shape of its electron orbitals, by the time you have 118 protons, those electron orbitals just kinda look like a blob. You might ask why we spend so much time and money on experiments that have been reaching the point of diminishing returns for decades. I could tell you that, well, some of these elements are used in radiation therapy for cancer treatment, and have saved millions of lives.
1:17:30
I could tell you that some of these elements may be used to improve the efficiency of future nuclear reactors. However the vast majority are not so useful. They will only ever exist for a fraction of a fraction of a second. But you know by now that utility was never the point. It’s like when you’re a kid, and you try and see how tall you can build a tower of LEGO blocks before it topples over. We do it because, why not?
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