There’s multiple levels of “theory” here. We have reasonable confidence that an ab initio simulation of a O28 nucleus would match experiment, but such a simulat

There’s multiple levels of “theory” here. We have reasonable confidence that an ab initio simulation of a O28 nucleus would match experiment, but such a simulation is outrageously hard. We simplify things by creating an abstraction of the strong nuclear force, the residual force of the strong force at the scale of nucleons; there’s plenty of room for improvement here. Then, we have a further abstraction of “magic numbers,” a rule-of-thumb level theory that reduces the calculations of the strong nuclear force to a lookup table. While this last step is a pretty good approximation when applied to the EM force and electron orbitals, it’s no surprise that it’s a mediocre-at-best approximation for nuclear structure. Even so, finding cases where it doesn’t apply is useful for developing a refined version of this third-level rule-of-thumb — and a more accurate, more grounded rule of thumb here would be useful for refining speculations about the possible island of stability, where ab initial simulation is even less practical.