Naming new elements after political leaders opens up new possibilities

US President Barack Obama was rather modest when elaborating to a social media interviewer last week on the properties he would want a (so-far) hypothetical new chemical element called Obamium to possess. He said he did want it to be a catalyst that “didn’t get too hot or too cold”, would be “useful to humanity” and not “just some shiny object”. He can be forgiven for his rather sketchy notion of what elements are, but with those expected attributes, it is unlikely that any of the four new ones that have just joined the periodic table — now simply called 113, 115, 117 and 118 — will be named Obamium. Or Putinium, for that matter, in case there are any suspicions of incipient chemical warfare in that arena.

Smashed together in particle accelerators, those newbies are so ‘superheavy’ that they exist for mere fractions of seconds before breaking up under their sheer weight of protons, making their presence on the chart largely academic. Therefore, naming them after proactive — if not radioactive —and long-standing political leaders may not be very appropriate. Indeed, certain scholars have posited that putative Obamium and Putinium would probably be absolute opposites on the table anyway with the former a noble gas and the latter a craggy solid, neither of which will ultimately accept each other’s proffered electrons or protons.