Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand by Marcus Chown

Author:Marcus Chown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Diversion Books
Published: 2019-02-13T05:00:00+00:00

30.

LOOPY LIQUID

There is a liquid that never freezes

(and can run uphill!)

“In some sense, what you might have suspected from the first day of high-school chemistry is true: the periodic table is a colossal waste of time. Nine out of every ten atoms in the universe are hydrogen, the first element and the major constituent of stars.

The other 10 percent of all atoms are helium.”

—SAM KEAN

ONE OF THE MOST peculiar substances known to man is undoubtedly helium, the stuff that makes your voice sound squeaky and fills Mickey Mouse balloons. When in a liquid form, it never freezes, and it is the only liquid that can actually run up hill.

Helium is the second most common element in creation. In fact, it accounts for one in every ten atoms in the universe. So, it is a surprise that it was unknown on Earth until a century and a quarter ago.

The reason helium was overlooked was because it is both chemically inert (or unreactive) and extremely light. Its inertness means it rarely gets trapped in compounds with other elements; and its lightness means that, as soon as it is released into the air, it floats off into space. And space, it turns out, is where the gas was found in the first place.

Helium is the only element to have been discovered on the sun before it was discovered on Earth. The man who spotted it there was Norman Lockyer, who, among other things, wrote the first book on the St Andrew’s rules of golf, founded London’s Science Museum and launched the international science journal Nature, which he edited for its first fifty years. On October 20, 1868, Lockyer pointed his six-inch telescope at the sun from his garden in the South London suburb of Wimbledon and examined the light with a spectroscope. Crossing the spectrum of a solar prominence—a loop of solar material catapulted from the surface of the sun—was a curious yellow line.

The line was observed the same year from India by the French astronomer Pierre-Jules César Janssen. Both Lockyer and Janssen heated various substances in their laboratories in an attempt to reproduce the spectral feature, but neither succeeded. This led Lockyer, in 1870, to make the bold suggestion that the curious line was the fingerprint of an unknown element. He was ridiculed for proposing the existence of helium and had to wait many years before his critics ate their words.

The man who proved Lockyer right and found helium on the earth was the Scottish chemist William Ramsay, the only person to discover an entire group of the periodic table of elements. In March 1895, while examining the spectrum of the gases given off by a uranium mineral called cleveite, Ramsay spotted a mysterious yellow line. Lacking a good spectroscope, he sent gas samples to both Lockyer and William Crookes, a physicist famous for experimenting with cathode ray tubes and believing in psychic phenomena such as telepathy. Within a week, Crookes had confirmed that the gas was the same as the one Lockyer had observed.

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