Opponents
The two principal groups which were involved in the conflict over element naming were:
- An American group at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.
- A Russian group at Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna.
and, as a kind of arbiter,
- The IUPAC Commission on Nomenclature of Inorganic Chemistry, which introduced its own proposal to the IUPAC General Assembly.
The German group at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (GSI) in Darmstadt, who had (undisputedly) discovered elements 107 to 109, were dragged into the controversy when the Commission suggested that the name "hahnium", proposed for element 105 by the Americans, be used for GSI's element 108 instead.
| Group | Atomic number | Name | Eponym |
|---|---|---|---|
| American | 104 | rutherfordium | Ernest Rutherford |
| 105 | hahnium | Otto Hahn | |
| 106 | seaborgium | Glenn T. Seaborg | |
| Russian | 104 | kurchatovium | Igor Kurchatov |
| 105 | nielsbohrium | Niels Bohr |
Read more about this topic: Transfermium Wars
Famous quotes containing the word opponents:
“The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opponents than from his fervent supporters. For his supporters will push him to disaster unless his opponents show him where the dangers are. So if he is wise he will often pray to be delivered from his friends, because they will ruin him. But though it hurts, he ought also to pray never to be left without opponents; for they keep him on the path of reason and good sense.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“A black boxer’s career is the perfect metaphor for the career of a black male. Every day is like being in the gym, sparring with impersonal opponents as one faces the rudeness and hostility that a black male must confront in the United States, where he is the object of both fear and fascination.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“Practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in Massachusetts are not a hundred thousand politicians at the South, but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here, who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity, and are not prepared to do justice to the slave and to Mexico, cost what it may. I quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home, coöperate with, and do the bidding of, those far away, and without whom the latter would be harmless.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)