When I went to school, I believe that everyone has learned to understand the periodic table of chemical elements, and many people can still fluently recite the top twenty elements even after graduating many years later. There are currently as many as 118 known chemical elements in the world, so is it possible to collect all 118 known elemental entities in the name of an individual, and if the value of these element entities is converted into money?
In fact, this idea has been tried by many collectors, the most famous of which is the former world's richest man Bill Gates. And he may be the only one in the world who has collected most of the elemental entities except for radioactive elements, and some estimate that Gates' hobby cost him at least hundreds of millions of dollars.
Bill Gates once invited Hollywood actor Will Smith to visit his personal office. Unexpectedly, the former world's richest man's office is very simple, except for the huge floor-to-ceiling windows that are basically some common office facilities, and the most eye-catching thing in the room is his whole wall of elemental physical collection cabinets. In addition to the radioactive elements, the collection cabinet displays almost all the element entities that can be legally collected in the name of an individual, and all the elements are arranged in strict order in the periodic table.
A famous collector of elements, Theodore Gray, once said: "If you are a philatelic enthusiast, there is a high probability that you will not be able to collect all the stamps in your limited life." But element collection is very simple, all elements have corresponding grids, just put in the corresponding element entities."
It sounds simple, but in fact it is almost impossible for an individual to collect 118 elements in its entirety, and even Bill Gates has only collected more than 80 elemental entities. This is because some elements are so rare that the likelihood of buying a collection in your personal capacity is basically zero.
For us ordinary people, if we want to contact and collect some regular element entities, it is still relatively easy to complete. For example, nitrogen or oxygen, the earth's huge reserves of elements, to know that in the air we breathe, the proportion of nitrogen elements accounts for 78%. These elements are also relatively stable and do not decay too quickly under normal circumstances, so they cost less than 1 cent per gram. After that, the value of the elements will gradually become "rising", such as rubidium, platinum and other elements per gram the price will be roughly in the range of 100-200 yuan.
The price of gold elements per gram that is more common in our lives is in the range of 400-500, and the most expensive element before bismuth is the promethium element, the price per gram is as high as 3,000 yuan, but it is still within the range of our ordinary people. But the next element price, even if the buyer is the richest man Bill Gates has to think twice.
For example, the stable element rhenium element, which was discovered last, is worth about 1.18 million yuan per gram. Even more exaggerated are the elements of polonium and actinium, which often cost hundreds of billions of yuan per gram, and the high price can be said to have exceeded the scope of personal consumption.
In addition to the high price, some elements with strong radioactivity that are easy to cause harm to the human body are also difficult to collect. There are ten types of naturally occurring radioactive elements in the periodic table, including polonium, radon, scandium, radium, actinium, thorium, plutonium, uranium, haftium, and thulium. There are seventeen kinds of radioactive elements that need to be synthesized by artificial synthesis, namely technetium, promethium, cadmium, cadmium, curium, germanium, hafnium, gallium, vanadium, germanium, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108 and 109.
In addition to the radioactive materials that produce radioactive materials and cause irreversible harm to the human body, such elements as uranium, which are used in the manufacture of military weapons, are elements that can never be possessed in an individual's capacity. So even Bill Gates wouldn't easily collect such tricky elemental entities.
In addition to the dangerous radioactive elements that are difficult to collect, there are some elements that are valuable and market-free, and these elements are either rare in nature's own storage or require extremely complex artificial means to synthesize small amounts of entities. What is more troublesome is that such elements decay extremely quickly, such as the last og element in the periodic table. In 2006, researchers bombarded the osmium atoms through high-speed moving calcium ions, and found that 3 og elements were obtained, and the three og atoms decayed into other substances after only a millisecond, and most synthetic elements such as og had the problem of decaying very quickly. Today's science and technology can't even slow down the decay of such elements, let alone collect a gram.
In these respects, it is not difficult to see why even Bill Gates has not been able to collect the complete periodic table of elements, some of which have gone well beyond the scope of personal collections. The real value of these elements is not only lying in the display case, for people to compare the price in it, but more importantly, the value lies in the study of the elements, so that we can recognize what the essence of everything that makes up this world is.
For us ordinary people to burn money and laborious to collect these elements, it is better to learn the knowledge behind these elements, rather than moving the periodic table of elements into the home, it is better to be stored in the brain, the value of these scientific knowledge is not only money can be measured.