Abstract
From Mendeleev’s time on, the Periodic Table has been an attempt to exhaust all the chemical possibilities of the elements and their interactions, whether these elements are known as actual or are not known yet as such. These latter elements are called “eka-elements” and there are still some of them in the current state of the Table. There is no guarantee that they will be eventually discovered, synthesized, or isolated as actual. As long as the actual existence of eka-elements is predicted, they cannot be considered as actual but only as purely possible. Given that eka-elements are chemical pure possibilities, a possibilist approach, entitled “panenmentalism,” can gain support as well as an important implication.
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Notes
Panenmentalism is my original metaphysics, which I suggested and have elaborated on since 1999. It treats some of the basic problems of philosophy, to begin with the psychophysical problem, and expands into the major fields of philosophy, especially ontology, epistemology, psychological philosophy, philosophy of science, theory of literature and fiction, and ethics. In each of these fields, panenmentalism studies individual pure possibilities and their relations (in general, relationality). For the panenmentalist publications and the applications of panenmentalism to some major issues in the philosophy of science, consult Gilead (1999, 2003, 2005, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013, 2014a, b, c, d).
As radically possibilist and, hence, as anti-actualist, panenmentalism treats pure possibilities as entirely independent of any actualization and actuality. In contrast, Le Poidevin’s treatment of the predicted elements as “mere possibilities,” which are simply combinations or re-combinations of physical actualities, is clearly actualist, physicalist, and ontologically reductionist (Le Poidevin 2005, suggesting “a form of reductionism about possibilia” [p. 129]). Thus, my panenmentalist view of the eka-elements as chemical individual pure possibilities, on which chemical actualities supervene, is radically different from his treatment of “mere possibilities.”
Moreover, “the claimed observation [Marinov’s] of extremely long-lived, high spin, super-or hyperdeformed isomeric states in neutron deficient heavy nuclei, … which was used as an argument to explain the observation of long-lived 292122, could not be observed in independent experiments” (ibid.). However, see also Dellinger 2010, p. 1290: “Summarizing, we could not confirm the findings of Marinov et al.… using AMS on thorianite samples, nor could we find a superheavy element with A = 292 in commercially available ThO2 powder. Considering the importance of Marinov’s findings for the stability of the heaviest nuclides, we plan to remeasure the material used by Marinov et al…. with the AMS method described in this paper.”
For a similar experiment, made by the GSI physicsts in 1990, “detected fission fragments that probably came from element 112” see Emsley 2011, p. 144. This team “considered the results not to be fully convincing, although this work is revealing because the tentative results seem to support Marinov’s 1971 claim” (ibid.; cf. p. 588, mentioning “a similar, but not exact, experiment” with regard to eka-element 122). According to Emsley, “the cold fusion method was developed in 1973–1974 by Yuri Ogannesian and Alexander Demin…, although the first person to use it was Amnon Marinov in 1971 (see copernicium)” (ibid., p. 75). Though mentioning the fact that Marinov was not officially declared as the first discoverer or producer of this element (eka-Hg, Z = 112), which hence Emsely names “element of doubt” (ibid., p. 144), in a concluding table of the elements discovered and synthesized in the 1900s, Emsley considers Marinov as the first discoverer (or producer) of copernicium in 1971, whereas Hofmann and his colleagues are mentioned in the same table as the producers of this element, twenty-five years later, in 1996 (ibid., p. 656).
“Elements 104 through 112 should be formed by filling the 6d subshell and should have chemical properties analogous to the elements hafnium (atomic number 72) through mercury (atomic number 80) although these elements formed by the filling of the 6d subshell may exhibit a greater variety of oxidation states than their lighter analogs” (Seaborg 1968, pp. 94–95).
I am grateful to Yona Sidreder for drawing my attention to Marinov’s amazing discoveries. Rama Marinov-Cohen provided me with vital details about the achievements of her late father. Is this one more tragic scientific story? Some eminent scholars and experts strongly believe that Marinov should be acknowledged as the first discoverer of eka-elements number 112 and 122. Such an acknowledgment would naturally endow him with two Nobel prizes for discovering two new elements (as in the case of Madame Curie), had he lived to gain this acknowledgment, which he officially did not receive until his death in 2011. There is still some room to seriously doubt the official decision of the scientific establishment according to which the “priority of discovery of… element 112… was assigned to Hofmann et al. in… 2009” (Türler and Pershina 2014, p. 1238; this paper does not even mention Marinov’s report about the discovery of element 112 and his paper in Nature of 1971!). Nevertheless, of a special, even decisive, weight is the following: “There are two independent claims for the discovery of element 112: The claim by Hofmann et al. from 1996 and the older claim from 1971 by Marinov et al. This Comment will not challenge the experimental results of Hofmann et al., but it will discuss one aspect of the claimed discovery of element 112 by Marinov et al., as their experiment has never been reproduced in exactly the form in which the original experiment has been carried out. The reasons for this deficiency may not be found in the field of science, but possibly in radioprotection restrictions for researchers who want to carry out such an experiment. However, such is not a sufficient reason to exclude the original claim from all considerations of the responsible international authorities, who have to settle such priority questions. It may be in agreement with scientific traditions, that when the responsible international committees do not feel to be able to come to a positive decision on the ‘1971’ claim, they could keep the priority problem unsettled for the time being” (Brandt 2005, p. 170). Are we entitled to say that for Marinov and for unbiased science as well, scientific justice was not carried out in his case? Scientific dogmatism, narrow-mindedness, and politics gained the upper hand in some tragic cases, which, like the case of Shechtman until the death of Pauling, have been strongly linked with the dogmatic exclusion or denial of vital scientific pure possibilities and of the experiments and observations concerning their actualities.
See Gilead (2013) and the relevant references, especially Istvan Hargittai’s publications concerning the discovery of quasicrystals.
“The same and not the same” and the question of identity are perfectly applied to individual pure possibilities and to their actualities. The Nobel laureate of 1981 in chemistry, Roald Hoffmann, has interestingly referred to the question of identity, similarity, and difference in chemistry (Hoffmann 1995; see especially pp. 26–31, concerning the problem of identity in chemistry, the periodic table, complexity, diversification, and isomerism). From a panenmentalist perspective, there are relational similarities between individual pure possibilities on the basis that no two of them can be identical but each relates to all the others: because each pure possibility is necessarily different from any other pure possibility, each pure possibility necessarily relates to all the others. On the basis of this mutual universal relationality of differences, similarities necessarily appear. From a chemical perspective, there are surely two identical molecules of water, whereas the “number of different isotopomers of hemoglobin is astronomical” (Hoffmann 1995, p. 34); hence, “the chances of two tiny hemoglobin molecules… being exactly the same, in every isotopic detail, are very, very small!” (ibid., p. 35; in this context, Hoffmann mentions isotopomer abundance and Henning Hopf’s “individualization of compounds”). Hoffmann’s concluding answer to the question “Are there two identical molecules?” is thus: “No, for a really large molecule, probably there are no two identical molecules in that Burmese cat” (ibid.), though chemically or biologically such differences may or do not really matter. Nevertheless, from a metaphysical (at least panenmentalist) perspective, no two water molecules can be identical, despite their many physical and chemical similarities. Panenmentalistically speaking, the law of the identity of indiscernibles is valid for pure possibilities and, derivatively, for their actualities as well. From such a metaphysical viewpoint, the differences between any two entities really matter. I would like to thank Robin Hendry for drawing my attention to Hoffmann’s book.
See http://www.apollon.uio.no/english/articles/2011/element1.html by Yngave Vogt; last modified on 1 Feb 2012.
Note that this by no means renders chemical pure possibilities reducible to physical ones. Panenmentalism avoids reductions as much as possible, for it adheres to pluralism (which should not lead to relativism) and to the abundant nature of pure possibilities.
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Gilead, A. Eka-elements as chemical pure possibilities. Found Chem 18, 183–194 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10698-016-9250-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10698-016-9250-7