Apparently, there are people who actually do collect elements. These collectors try to gather physical samples of as many of the elements as possible into periodic-table-shaped display cases. Of the 118 elements, 30 of them (like helium, carbon, aluminum, and iron) can be bought in pure form at retail stores. Another few dozen can be scavenged by taking things apart. Others can be ordered over the internet. All in all, it is possible to get samples of about 80 of the elements (90, if you’re willing to take risks with health, safety, and arrest record). The rest are too radioactive or short-lived to get more than a few atoms at once. BUT! What if we did? The periodic table has 7 rows. Let’s go over them briefly: You could stack the top 2 rows without much trouble The third row would burn you with fire The fourth row would kill you with toxic smoke The 5th row would do all of that plus give you a mild dose of radiation The 6th row would explode violently, destroying the building in a cloud of radioactive, poisonous fire a dust Do not build the 7th row Let’s start from the top: The first row is simple, if boring. The cube of hydrogen would rise upward and disperse, like a balloon without a balloon. The same goes for helium. The second row is trickier: The lithium would immediately tarnish, the beryllium is pretty toxic, so you should handle it carefully and avoid getting any dust in the air. The oxygen and nitrogen drift around, slowly dispersing. The neon floats away (assuming it’s in the diatomic [you remember what that means, right? O2 and N2]. If it was pure Neon, it would heat up to thousands of degrees, which defeats the purpose). The pale yellow fluorine gas would spread around the ground. Apparently, fluorine is the most reactive, corrosive element on the table. Almost any substance exposed to it would spontaneously catch fire. Neon is the only element fluorine won’t kill me with. But if it comes into contact with any moisture, if would form corrosive hydrofluoric acid, YAY!. If you breathed even a trace amount of this acid, if would seriously damage or destroy your lungs, eyes, nose, mouth, and eventually the rest of you. You would definitely need a gas mask, but conventional ones often aren’t enough, you’d need a heavy duty one. Make sure to test it first, have fun! On to the third row! The big problem with this row is phosphorous. Pure phosphorous comes in several forms: red phosphorous is somewhat safe to handle, but white phosphorous spontaneously ignites on contact with air. It burns with hot, hard to extinguish flames and is in addition quite poisonous. Sulfur usually isn’t a problem, it would just smell bad, however, our sulfur is sandwiched between burning phosphorous on the left, and fluorine and chlorine on the right. When exposed to pure fluorine gas, sulfur (like many other substances) catches fire. The inert argon is heavier than air, so it would just spread and cover the ground. Don’t worry about this though, you got bigger problems. The fire would produce all kinds of chemicals with names like “sulfur-hexafluoride”. If you’re doing this inside, you’d be choked by toxic smoke and your house would likely burn down. And that’s only row 3, on to row 4! “Arsenic” sounds scary, that’s because it’s toxic to all forms of complex life. However, in small amounts like the kind we eat, drink, touch every day, it’s safe for us. This is not the case here. The burning phosphorous (now joined by burning potassium, which is similarly prone to spontaneous combustion) could ignite the arsenic, releasing large amounts of arsenic trioxide. That stuff is pretty toxic, don’t inhale. This row would also produce a ton of hideous odors. The selenium and bromine would react vigorously, and apparently this stuff reacting makes sulfur smell like Febreeze. Assuming the aluminum survived the inferno, the melting gallium under it would soak into the aluminum, affecting it’s structure and making it as soft and weak as wet paper (this is cool to watch, look up “gallium infiltration” to see how strange it is). The burning sulfur would spill into the bromine. Bromine is a liquid at room temperature. It’s also pretty nasty stuff. The range of toxic compounds of this blaze is huge. However, if you did this experiment from a distance, you might survive. The fifth row is interesting. Here, we see our first radioactive element: Technetium-99. The dose of our cube shouldn’t kill us, but if we spent all day wearing the cube as a hat, it will definitely kill you. Technetium aside, the fifth row would be a lot like the fourth. On to the sixth row! No matter how safe you are, this row will kill you. The sixth row of the table contains several radioactive elements including promethium, polonium, astatine, and radon. Astatine is the bad one (Radon is the cute one). We don’t know what astatine looks like, but that stuff does not want to exist. It’s so radioactive that any large piece of it would quickly be vaporized by its own heat. Chemists suspect it has a black surface, but no one really knows. There’s no material safety data sheet for this thing. If there was, it would likely be “NO” written over and over again in charred blood. Our cube would briefly contain more astatine than has ever been synthesized. I say “briefly” because our cube would instantly turn into a column of superheated gas. The heat alone would give third degree burns to anyone nearby and the building would be demolished. The cloud of hot gas would rise rapidly into the sky, pouring out heat and radiation. The explosion would be just the right size to maximize the paperwork your lab would face. If it were smaller, you might be able to cover it up, if it were larger, there would be no one in the city to submit the paperwork to. Dust and debris coated in astatine, polonium, and other radioactive products would rain from the cloud, rendering the downwind neighborhood completely uninhabitable. The radiation levels would be incredibly high. You could literally get a lethal dose in the blink of an eye. You would die from “extremely acute radiation poisoning”; that is, you would be cooked. The seventh row would be much worse. There’s a ton of weird elements along the bottom of the table called transuranic elements. For a long time, many of them had placeholder names like “unununium” but they’re gradually getting assigned permanent names. There’s no rush though. Most of these elements are so unstable they can only be created in particle accelerators and don’t exist for more than a few minutes. If you had 100,000 atoms of Livermorium, you would have exactly one after one second passed. And that would be gone after a few hundred milliseconds too. Unfortunately, for our project, these elements don’t vanish quietly. They decay radioactively. And most of them decay into things that also decay. A cube of any of the highest numbered elements would decay within seconds releasing tremendous energy. The result wouldn’t be like a nuclear explosion, it would be a nuclear explosion. However, unlike a fission bomb, it wouldn’t be a chain reaction, just a reaction. It would happen all at once. The flood of energy would instantly turn you, and the rest of the table to plasma. The blast would be similar to a medium sized nuclear detonation, but the fallout would be much, much worse- a veritable salad of everything on the periodic table turning into everything else as fast as possible. You’d see a mushroom cloud rise over the city. The top of the plume would rush up over the stratosphere, buoyed by its own heat. If you were in a populated area, the immediate casualties would be staggering, but the long-term contamination from the fallout would be even worse. The fallout would not be like normal, everyday fallout, it would be like a nuclear bomb that kept exploding. The debris would spread around the world, releasing thousand times more radioactivity than the Chernobyl disaster. Entire regions would be devastated, and the cleanup would stretch on for centuries. Although you can buy uranium ore on Amazon (you actually can, look it up), I would advise against it
Actually tbh its written well...CBA to read the whole thing(need less words more gifs) but what I have read is interesting
Thank you! Sorry it's so long, I got bored and decided to do some research. Next time I get bored, I'll draw up a few gifs as well to explain in place of words
That was a long but exhilarating and fascinating read. I especially like the part with the explosions!
Explaining the periodic table by row is so bad. The properties of elements going across the row vary so much. Elements have nothing in common with the element before or after it. Instead classify them by families or Columns. There is significant similarities of the properties of the elements in the same column. Please research and rewrite
Now science can produce monotonic elements or metals which are in that class because the elements are laid out in order of single atoms. Monotonic gold example has been given the most possible status of bread of heaven "manna" which the jews ate for 40 years In the dessert with Moses same can be said about ancient Egyptian pharaoh .The pyramids of Giza are also through to be the factory where manna was made. Egyptian book of the dead speak of feeding of manna but I'm English translation as "what is it " what is it" Also The philosophers stone in days of early alchemy
Alchemy was never ment to turn bace metals like lead into gold but to turn gold into manna cannot be destroyed why class as a stone. When put onto a weighting scale the manna form of gold weights -1g if u started off with 1gram science can prove the light energy produced by the manna food for your light body. The created it by accident and lots of studies were done by himself and took him years to realise what he had name is check out David Hudson Monotonic gold on YouTube