| MadSci Network: Science History |
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I am curious about the naming of new elements. Like who is honored? When is
the discovery and name of a new element recognized as "official"
by
scientists?
Short answer: The discoverer gets to name the element, as long as the name is taken from:
Chemists around the world do not question this right, but sometimes the naming process is fuzzed up by two different labs claiming priority of discovery. And once it was fuzzed by the official nomenclature authority, IUPAC, which arbitrarily decided that scientists had to be dead before elements could be named for them. (This decision, about element 106, was later reversed.) For the long answer, particularly about elements 101-109, see this article from the Journal of Pure and Applied Chemistry. What elements have been discovered but not yet confirmed? Which have not been named? What is the last confirmed element we have? The following information is from WebElements, and is current as of July 2000. Elements 110, 111 and 112 were discovered by nuclear chemists in Darmstadt, Germany, but names have not yet been proposed by the discoverers. The latest confirmed elements are 116 and 118, both discovered in 1999 at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (USA), and confirmed by experiments at the University of Oregon (USA). Element 114 was discovered in December 1998 at the Nuclear Institute in Dubna, Russia, but has not yet been confirmed.
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