Chemical & Chemical Engineering News (80th Anniversary Issue), Vol. 81, No. 36, 2003, Sept. Edited by X. Lu Introduction

What Bohr had done was to rationalize the electronic configuration of hafnium, while implying that he was calculating it deductively from the theory. I'm not implying any scientific misconduct here, but perhaps an understandably exaggerated account of the power of the newly developed theory by its principal architect.

The revised version of the story is of interest to philosophers of science, who are frequently concerned with the extent to which any given theory rigorously predicts phenomena or merely accounts for the facts that are already known. It appears that in many respects Bohr's theory of the periodic system was of the latter kind. When I pointed this out to Popper, he was quick to accept my arguments before going on to share his recollections of people like Erwin Schrödinger and Ludwig Wittgenstein, with whom he had personally interacted. Throughout our meeting, Popper would frequently leap to his feet to go in search of some articles on the origin of life, a question that very much inspired him in the final years of his long and productive career.

But I will always be grateful to element 72, since it was due to the story of its discovery that I had the opportunity of meeting perhaps the greatest philosopher of science of the modern era.

Eric R. Scerri is a lecturer in the chemistry and biochemistry department at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also a leading researcher in the history and philosophy of chemistry and the editor of the journal Foundations of Chemistry, http://www.kluweronline.com/issn/1386-4238.

HAFNIUM AT A GLANCE

Name: From the Latin Hafnia, meaning Copenhagen.

Atomic mass: 178.49.

History: Discovered in 1923 by Danish chemist Dirk Coster and Hungarian chemist Georg Karl von Hevesey in Copenhagen.

Occurrence: Rare. It occurs as a 1­5% impurity in all zirconium ores and is generally obtained as a by-product of zirconium refining. Found in Australia, Brazil, Sri Lanka, and the U.S.

Appearance: Lustrous, silvery, solid metal.

Behavior: Resists corrosion as a solid due to an oxide film on its surface. Burns in air as a powder. Poorly absorbed by the body, so is of low toxicity.

Uses: Hafnium is used in nuclear control rods, high-temperature alloys, and ceramics.

RUTHERFORDIUM

MICHAEL FREEMANTLE, C&EN LONDON

Rutherfordium is an element more famed for its names than its properties or uses. It was also my baptism of fire into the international politics and sensitivities of naming new elements.
In 1985, I innocently wrote a piece on the element titled “What’s in a Name?” for Chemistry International, the newsmagazine of the International Union of Pure & Applied Chemistry (IUPAC).
At that time, I had only just joined the IUPAC secretariat staff in Oxford as information officer. My duties included editing the magazine.
The piece was short and, in my view, innocuous and factual. It alluded to the fact that the element, which has the atomic number 104, was first reported by Georgii Flerov and colleagues at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, in 1964. The Russian scientists named the element “kurchatovium” in honor of nuclear physicist Igor Kurchatov (1903–60), who was a driving force behind the Soviet Union’s race to develop the atomic bomb. For the next 10 years or so, the Dubna group published numerous papers on the element, including papers in 1969 and 1970 that provided evidence of the production of the isotope rutherfordium-259.
Glenn T. Seaborg, Albert Ghiorso, and coworkers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory considered the Dubna discovery in 1964 to be invalid, saying it was based on the misinterpretation of experimental data. In 1969, the Berkeley group produced two isotopes of the element, Rf-258 and Rf-260, and laid claim to its discovery. They named the element “rutherfordium” after New Zealand-born physicist Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937), who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908 “for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements and the chemistry of radioactive substances.”

Rutherford