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Collecting chemical elements - what it looks like? (UPD. Collector of articles you can ask questions)
Sodium metal in a sealed tube i>
Collectors in the world - a great many. Someone collects rare butterflies, someone - caps from beer bottles, someone else - mark Soviet times. All this - fairly common types of collectibles, for philatelists and numismatists - a lot. But there are people who collect, for example, chemical elements, trying to collect at home the most complete collection of elements of the periodic table.
For obvious reasons (the decay of some elements occurs in thousandths of a second), a complete collection of items collected will not work. But there are people who come close to the ideal, to collect a maximum of what is possible. One of the such people - Theodore Gray . By the way, it is - one of the founders Wolfram Alpha .
Gray is the author of popular science bestseller The Elements em> a >, a book that sold a million copies worldwide. The book just shows you how to collect the right chemical elements, including tips on finding the missing elements. All photos of this work - actually, they were sealed elements from the office of Gray.
It should be noted that some aspects of the search for rare (and, moreover, prohibited) elements may be similar to detective work. For example, if you can not buy , should buy 30-year-old smoke detector, where it was used . This element decays to neptunium. Polonium can be taken from the brush, antistatic agent, which is used for cleaning vinyl records and films. But polonium here will disappear within 10 years due to the complete collapse.
Most items can get quite the usual way - to buy from the manufacturer or look on e-Bay. For example, sells rare items as a 12-year-old kids, and NASA (of course, sets of elements for children and scholars differ in composition) .
Company sells ready-made sets of 76 elements, sealed in small glass vials. This set is priced at 695 US dollars.
It is clear that such a path - not for real collectors. So it is possible to buy items in steps. The same tungsten can be purchased for $ 8 in the form of a metal wire, and a $ 250 purchase already bars of tungsten metal. Price pure sodium fluctuates from 111 to 1,000 dollars, depending on the amount and type of capsules where the element is stored.
Not all kollektsionery- "chemists" gather full collection of items. Some stopped after collecting the noble gases. Others are only interested in radioactive or any "dangerous" elements.
Many collectors are upset that he would never be able to get the same , half-life of only 87 ms (and this applies to quite stable Uup-288). The same applies to Hasse cause is the same.
Thus, in the world simply do not have the collector, which has all the currently known chemical elements, and probably a collector never will. But the ideal can be pursued, and some people, including Gray, very close to this ideal.
UPD. B> Theodore Gray agreed to answer questions Geektimes. Ask your questions in the comments, if they are, I will translate them and send Theodore.
Source:
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