Sunday 22 July 2012

What the...?

I have never really paid much attention to the idea of 3d printing, it all sounded a bit too star trek for me but once the nuts and bolts have been explained it all sounds quite plausible.
Strangely, for such a future technology, the story starts 13 billion years ago when the Earth was formed and all the elements were created. Everything, i am led to believe, is created from a mix of these 92 elements in the periodic table such as water which is what you get if you mix 2 parts of hydrogen and 1 part of oxygen. If you get distracted halfway through and only put in one part Hydrogen with your one part Oxygen you get a metal called Holmium, that's how exact the whole thing is but all we need to know is that everything, from the chair i am sat on to the apple sat in my fruit bowl is made up from the 92 elements in a different mix.
So far so good, so the 3d printer inventors say, why can't we not have a printer that instead of holding ink, why not have it hold elements such as Oxygen, Helium or Hydrogen which can build up whatever we want.Wiki answers show for example that my apple is made up of calcium, Copper, iron, Magnesium, Manganese, Phosphorus, Potassium, Selenium, Sodium and Zinc so put all them together in the right mix and you have yourself an apple.
Armed with this knowledge i looked up the periodic table that i had avoided so skillfully at school and found there was 118 elements. Had Prof Brian Cox lied to me?? He said there was 92 and everything was made from those 92 and here there are 118 and some of those towards the end have names like Americium, Berkelium, Californium and Einsteinium.
Scientists, deliberately confusing things and that's why we end up with planets called Uranus.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

the number of elements discovered has grown over time. when I took physics we thought atoms only had nuetrons, protons, and electrons and i think we had abour 16 elements...

the 3d printing is somewhat interesting. we built one in our lab at work. essentially it is a tool that replaces other tools...

q

Aaron said...

I'm just glad I never have to take chemistry again!

Lucy said...

The 3d printing idea does seem logical although i don't really understand it outside of all the building blocks being available to create anything. I did have to check i wasn't looking at a joke periodic table when i saw the names Californium and Einsteinium. My guess would be that after the initial 92 they were running out of decent names.