I adore the periodic table. To me it’s a larder containing everything that makes up everything. I also feel that way about the dictionary, the full spectrum of light, the audible wavelength range of musical notes, and the giant menus at diners in the Northeast where you can get both waffles and lobster.
Einsteinium is the element you get when you combine 99 protons with 99 electrons, which is difficult to do because it requires a hydrogen bomb explosion, which we are absolutely blessed with a dearth of.
(I’m thinking about 99s because this is my 99th column, and yes of course I thought of the ”red balloons” song first, but I translated the lyrics and boy is that dark. Yeeesh. Trust me, we’re better off with the element angle.)
Discovered in 1952, Einsteinium is named after Albert Einstein, though key research on this element occurred in 2021 at the height of the COVID crisis; as the element is very radioactive and decays quickly there was no time to lose, and they only had 250 nanograms of the stuff.
(I’m not pretending to know what a nanogram is: the New York Times calculated it as less than 100 millionth of an ounce. I would drop it, definitely, or put it in the wrong pocket or sneeze or something. I am not a scientist, and even those who wish me well would not say I’m that brand of detail oriented.)
They were studying Einsteinium to discover a clinical or practical use, but it wasn’t easy: the weight of the element meant that the electrons traveled at speeds that reached “a sizable fraction of the speed of light” (a funny Einstein coincidence, if you’re into that sort of thing).
If you were to measure Einsteinium it would be 2.38 angstroms wide (an angstrom equals one hundred-millionth of a centimeter). Apparently the scientists were super surprised because they had expected it to measure 2.43 angstroms. Can you imagine? It was 5 angstroms shorter. Wow.
Our own elemental tables, charting that we each find essential to who-we-are, grow as we live our lives. For instance, I never knew that the album “Surfer Rosa” by the Pixies was going to be so important to me when I was seven years old, but it’s now on the same list as soap bubbles and yo-yos, which I’d added back then.
Then there are the phrases I always say and clothes I like to wear which are a direct result of interactions and bonds with specific people; those are my elements too. It’s social chemistry; we all live at least part of our lives in volatile combination with others, reacting and even dissolving a bit here and there.
Nothing on my periodic identity table is as dangerously complex as Einsteinium (probably), but I’d like to think that I’m made of somewhat elegant juxtapositions of simple pleasures and hard lessons. The paper towel dispenser in the bathroom at work was broken for three days; the fourth day I fixed it with my pocketknife, which people seemed to be surprised that I just had in my bag all the time.
That’s the thing, in science and in life, what we’re made of may be impossible to see with the naked eye, but that doesn’t make it any less essential. Deep inside, everyone really does contain Walt Whitman’s “multitudes”. Thus we move ever forward through experience, quietly mocking those myopic enough to underestimate us.
In NYC right now there is an advertising campaign celebrating Women’s History Month; it is on every digital subway display in the stations and on the trains - a 15 second film illustrating female inventors.
“Women invented mint chocolate ice cream, the trash can lids that open with a foot lever, and the tiny plastic “table” thing that keeps the lid of a pizza box from touching the actual pizza.”
I think we’re supposed to say “wow”, but that’s what one says when surprised, and I’m not surprised, exactly.
I don’t believe that’s the depth of information they were hoping to share. Two minutes of internet research revealed that they could have chosen the invention of windshield wipers, GPS, Kevlar, caller ID, Vitamin E, the life raft, chemotherapy, central heating, disposable diapers, the game “Monopoly”, computer programming, electron microscopy, the dishwasher, CRISPR gene editing, or the flat bottomed paper bag to display. Mint chocolate ice cream is delicious, but the bigger story is that a woman invented the ice cream maker.
Wow. Now there… that’s a little more appropriate. But still, it’s not surprising.
Not that the inventions listed on this advertisement weren’t cool, but I’ve been the recipient of a specific kind of “wow” that is usually placed after a short-sighted person learns a pretty pedestrian fact about me: where I work, or where I went to college, or how well I can speak the English language. It’s not a compliment, but it is an admission of surprise that my actual life has surpassed the size of the box this person has put me in due to their, y’know, short-sightedness.
To me, that ad says, “Look what women are capable of achieving!”, but if they’d listed pulsars, the fire escape, and carbon dioxide would that that be ok? Would anybody feel bad about that? I think we all know the answer to that question - YES : various dudes and broheims would burn their thumbs off looking up whether or not it was true in the spotty cell service between stations.
Today, when you face underestimation, remember that you are made of stars. You are whirling magnetism and walking electricity, elemental circumstance that can only happen one time, a singular time-space event, no matter how you felt this morning or looked like in the bathroom mirror today. You are a miracle, wearing shoes, combining what exists into what’s never been imagined, always capable of great things.
“Wow!”
Now that’s more like it.
Einsteinium.