High-energy physicists and nuclear chemists are as liable to misuse or distort a word as any untutored groundling:
How Japan took the lead in the race to discover element 119
At the start of the new year, nuclear chemists Hiromitsu Haba and Kouji Morimoto slide precisely 119 Japanese yen into the collection box at their local shrine. They are seeking good fortune in their hunt for an elusive entity: element 119.
Element 119! That’s deep into the transuranics. Where will it be “discovered?” Well, in a cyclotron, of course:
Haba and Morimoto are part of a research team at Riken Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science, just outside Tokyo. The team has spent the past 5 years using a particle accelerator to smash atoms together at high speeds in a bid to synthesize the new element.
Once created, element 119 will contain 119 protons—the most of any element discovered. It will sit on a new, eighth row of the periodic table, and it could be the first element to be named since 2016.
Just a moment: didn’t the article say Haba and Morimoto were hunting for element 119? It sounds to me much more like they were attempting to create it. Let’s read on a bit:
After around 4 trillion atomic collisions, just three atoms of element 113 were detected, and each existed for around 2 ms before breaking apart. But that was enough. Element 113 was the first element to have been discovered in Asia. It was given the name nihonium after Nihon—a name for Japan that translates to “land of the rising sun.”
Hideto En’yo, Riken’s then director, wrote that the discovery of a new element had been “an impossible dream for Japanese people” and that “thereafter, Japanese became fanatics of the Periodic Table” (Pure Appl. Chem. 2019, DOI: 10.1515/pac-2019-0810).
Is it linguistically legitimate to claim that one has discovered something that he actually created by technological artifice? Doesn’t seem kosher to me, but then, everyone knows what a fussbudget I am about using words according to their proper meanings.
2 comments
This is an interesting point, and one that sort of comes up professionally for me from time to time.
I’m a patent attorney, and one of the requirements for getting a patent on one’s invention is that it is supposed to be original to you (as opposed to someone else), not previously known, and something that you created.
The issue of “create” (or “invent”) versus “discover” was long an issue for folks that produced novel algorithms for performing particular types of useful results, especially predating computers. While they would claim they “invented” or “created” the algorithm, the patent office (for a long time) held that algorithms were merely a type of math, and that math was not the creation of humans, but rather a fact of the universe, and that one merely “discovered” such heretofore unknown truths. Therefore, such material was unpatentable.
It wasn’t until the late 20th century that the overwhelming impact of software on the business world finally got the US patent office to move off of this stance and move to a different analysis which was about whether the algorithm being claimed was “purely mental steps” or “abstract”, versus having a more tangible result.
So these days, whether or not something is an “invention” or a “discovery” in patent law effectively turns on whether you can make a novel use of it or not. Too abstract and no patent for you.
Whether or not math – as embodied in software, especially – should be considered to be created by technologic means is a good question for fussbudgets of all strains, in my opinion.
Consider that even Fermat said that he had “discovered” a marvelous demonstration of his proposed theorem, not “created”. (Modulo any translation errors from Latin.) Maybe it’s just a matter of humility to claim discovery instead of creation when something feels like an eternal truth or something fundamental?
Creation of organic substances deserves a patent on the process, as the resulting macromolecule is, generally, quite stable, and often has novel uses, whether in materials science, medicine, or other uses.
Elements in the “not found in nature part of the periodic table” are highly unstable, with lifespans in fractions of seconds, and – so far – of little practical use.
Now, there may be a need/purpose for such an element – for example, to provide a catalyst/activation energy/some other contribution to a reaction, should the element be able to be a part of some industrial process. But, for now, these are just opportunities for scientists to claim success in their lab creation.
Moderately interesting, but not much more.