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"Helium is notoriously difficult to contain. Its atoms are some of the tiniest in the universe." It's a good article, and I learned a lot, but every so often i
by vertnerd 2y ago
"Helium is notoriously difficult to contain. Its atoms are some of the tiniest in the universe."
It's a good article, and I learned a lot, but every so often it reads like something an 8th grader would write the night before their paper is due.
- B1FF_PSUVM 2y agoAnd then it swings up and hits you with "a way that it doesn’t scathe the seal". Plenty of "unscathed" around, but I don't think I ever met the "un"-free word. Reminds me of the P.G.Wodehouse "far from gruntled" ( https://nydamprintsblackandwhite.blogspot.com/2011/05/words-of-month-far-from-gruntled.html https://nydamprintsblackandwhite.blogspot.com/2011/05/words-... )
- AndrewSwift 2y ago[scathing remark deleted]
- dmurray 2y agoYou need to read How I Met My Wife! https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1994/07/25/how-i-met-my-wife https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1994/07/25/how-i-met-my-w...
- amelius 2y agoSometimes facts are simple.
- yummypaint 2y agoYeah i don't get the unnecessary vagueness. They are the smallest atoms. It's like they are afraid of accidentally educating the reader.
- kragen 2y agothis terror of accidentally including a fact is one of the worst of many plagues afflicting journalism today
- fckgw 2y agoIt's a company blog, not a newspaper
- kragen 2y agothat makes it even worse, doesn't it?
- neuralRiot 2y agoBy treating people like idiots they turn them into idiots. It’s like “The lenght of 5 football fields” or “The weight of 10 elephants” are they writing for 3rd graders?
- kragen 2y agotechnically football fields do have a well-defined length at least. often this sort of thing is lampooned as 'americans will do anything to avoid using the metric system' but i've seen it in overseas journalism as well. i don't see anything of this in the article in question, though, except for 'atom-sized holes', which seems entirely appropriate
- bjoli 2y agoAnd here I was, thinking helium was the tiniest atom unless you start counting cations which has it beaten by Li+ and He+
- adrian_b 2y agoYes, at the same number of electrons, the heavier atoms have a smaller volume, i.e. they are tinier, because their greater nuclear charge attracts the electrons closer to the nucleus. Li+, Be++, B+++ are tinier than He, but they are ions, not neutral atoms. Neutral Li, Be, B are bigger than He, because they have an additional electron layer. Both neutral H and H- are bigger than He, because their one or two electrons are attracted less by a proton than by a He nucleus with double charge. H+ is just a bare proton, so it is orders of magnitude smaller than any other ion, but it is not a neutral atom. So He is indeed the smallest neutral atom.
- addaon 2y agoMuonic atoms are many, many times smaller, and neutral — so small that the reduction in atomic radius by substituting a muon for an electron can catalyze fusion. Purely muon helium would be the smallest such. (Tauons can’t form atoms as their decay time is shorter by orders of magnitude than would be needed.)
- adrian_b 2y agoYou are right, so in order to say that the helium atom is the tiniest, the statement should be additionally qualified, by saying that it is the tiniest among the stable neutral atoms, in order to exclude the muonic atoms.
- chasil 2y agoWould neon offer some degree of these benefits? Is neon more plentiful than helium? Edit: No. "...neon is comparatively scarce on Earth... It is primarily obtained through the fractional distillation of liquid air, making it significantly more expensive than helium due to air being its sole source." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neon
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]