I read with great excitement on Yahoo News about the official naming of the heaviest element known to humankind. The Yahoo article, dated February 24, 2010, proclaimed that Copernicium was named after the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus and is 277 times as heavy as the lightest known element, hydrogen.

I called my Polish friends from my college’s mathematics department and asked them to meet for breakfast at MiMi’s, a nice local Polish Cafe near the school, to discuss this wonderful event.

I made a short video to capture our joy. In the video,

1. Jim Vilchuck appears on the left. Jim is real smart guy who likes to talk in detail about both the coefficient of determination and the coefficient of variation. Start any discussion with him and within 5 minutes he’ll have you asking about . You can’t help yourself. Soon you will find yourself asking Jim about other coefficients. He has a remarkable talent.

2. Sven Svenkoski appears in the center of the picture. Sven, at the age of 10, while practicing some topological probability homework problems, discovered a submarine lost for 30 years some 80,000 ft down on the Atlantic Ocean floor. Sven’s discovery came just in time as the crew of 150 sailors was just about out of oxygen. When we started discussing Copernicium, Sven suggested the heaviest element was being named after Copernicus because it was Copernicus who wrote the 1969 hit song, He Ain’t Heavy, He’s my Brother. Sven has an Erdos Number of 1!

3. Craig Allenski appears on the right in the picture. Craig is one of the smartest people in the department. I remember going to him when I had questions about how to derive and when presenting the topic Center of Mass in calculus. For some reason I still don’t understand, one morning Craig beat me up in the school parking lot.

See the guys discussing Copernicium in this video clip. The guys discussing Copernicium.

We had a nice breakfast, spent about 2 hours talking about mathematics, then went our own ways.

It was raining pretty hard the morning of our breakfast and as I hurried to my car from the restaurant, I got pretty wet. I was still pretty wet when I got home some 10 minutes later. In the bathroom while blow drying my hair, I saw something that just astonished me. See Figure 1.

Do you see this? Nutrium. An element I had never heard of. Not only had I not heard of it, but the Dove company was using it in soap! Now I am pretty good at keeping up with the Periodic Table, but somehow I had completely missed the discovery of Nutrium. But there it was with its electron configuration right there on the bottle of Dove soap. See the Periodic Table picture.

I had to know more about this element, Nutrium. So just like anybody would, I put a squirt of the soap on a glass slide and took it to my microscope lab.

My house is pretty much like most people’s house, I have the standard living room, kitchen, bedrooms, bathrooms, and hallways leading to other rooms likes laboratories and engine rooms. See Figure 2.

I put the slide containing the Nutrium under the microscope to get a visual of this element. See Figure 3.

An Astonishing Discovery

Among all the other particles in the sample, I was able to detect the Nutrium atom. Figure 4 shows an individual Nutrium atom.

I zoomed into one of outer electrons. Figure 5 shows the zoom magnification at 10 kabillion times the atom’s original size. Look at the astounding electron at the top of the image! Do you see it? That electron looks like a guy in a 60’s surf music rock band! What the heck, I shouted!

I connected the microscope to speakers so as to get an audio of the Nutrium atom.

The Nutrium Atom – See it and Hear it Here

What a surprise! You have got to see and hear this element. Be ready to adjust the volume on your computer’s speakers.

Here it is, The sight and sound of Nutrium