Re: Why is it easy to prove that a material is not an element?

Date: Mon Nov 6 11:54:44 2000
Posted By: Dan Berger, Faculty Chemistry/Science, Bluffton College
Area of science: Science History
ID: 968307096.Sh

Message:

Their have been a number of false discoveries of new elements in the past 200 years. Why have their been so many mistaken reports? Why is is easy to prove that a material is not an element, but difficult to prove that a material is an element?

In order to prove that something is not an element, all you have to do is chemically decompose it into simpler pure substances. A chemical element is defined as a pure substance that is not made up of simpler pure substances.

In principle (and often in practice) the way to do this is to take a given mass of a pure substance, change it into two or more other pure substances, and show that the total mass has not changed.

The problem is that, using that definition, it is possible to

mistake a compound for an element because you haven't been able to separate the compound into its elements; or
mistake an element for a compound because you don't understand the new chemistry you have carried out with it.

Such misunderstandings were common in the late 18th and early 19th Century, because nobody had a clear global picture of just what was going on as chemists played with their subject.

Nowadays it is still possible to mistakenly discover a new element, but such mistakes typically involve mis-reading a nuclear reaction.

Dan Berger

Bluffton College

http://cs.bluffton.edu/~berger

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