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 art of leadership ... consists in consolidating the attention of the people against a single adversary and taking care that nothing will split up that attention.... The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged to one category.”
—Adolf Hitler (1889–1945)
“As soon as a religion comes to dominate, it has as its opponents all those who would have been its earliest disciples.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“If you do not regard feminism with an uplifting sense of the gloriousness of woman’s industrial destiny, or in the way, in short, that it is prescribed, by the rules of the political publicist, that you should, that will be interpreted by your opponents as an attack on woman.”
—Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957)