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Berkeley Lab to lead US hunt for element 120 after breakdown of collaboration with Russia
(www.chemistryworld.com)
this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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Y Tho? Legitimate question, is there a perceived functional use or even theoretical stepping stone to some greater knowledge beyond the mere proof of it's existence?
You don't know what you don't know, sometimes science may not seem useful at first, or even 50-100 years in the future.
Take the fourier transform, some guy in the late 1700s said that you can break down any function* into sines and cosines as in simple waves.
At the time this wasn't very useful except for deriving one equation. Know every single form of signal processing relies on fourier transforms.
So in the case of heavy elements, we simply don't know if this may or may not be useful. However there is a chance it might be, maybe not now, maybe in a 100 years.
*Turns out it has to be a trig function
Fair enough, sometimes explanations don't need a purpose. I guess my mind is in a place of hoping they're not expending some immense amount of resources on something like this when we have significantly more pressing matters out there to contend with. The world is a wee bit unstable these past few years and I'd be a lot more interested in avoiding some Mad Max / Dune outcome than adding another box on the periodic table.