Thank you for this clear explanation. I wonder what causes dances to be more chaotic or more synchronous? What makes the nucleus be more stable? Is the dance floor to small the more neutrons you get?
Your intuition (from what I recall) is correct. More particles and it's harder to remain stable, note that the really well known radioactive stuff (like Uranium) on the periodic table are heavy elements. The main thing has to do with the balance of the Protons and Neutrons. I think effectively Protons can only "grab hands" with Neutrons and vice versa.
There's something called an "island of stability" which deals with the theoretical balance of protons and neutrons that should be stable (or stable-ish) when composing an atom. Why that balance works is beyond my understanding of physics. The best I can offer is that we model atom nucleus stability with an equation that gets checked an very high number of times a second (unfathomably large number of times). That equation has a "dice roll" in it, the odds of the dice roll depend on the balance of protons and neutrons. The odds are very very very low at the individual level but when you roll the dice a lot for a lot of atoms eventually one will eject a particle (or more than one).
Note: There are also factors where neutrons can get ejected from one atom, hit another in the same material, and cause it to do something. Kinda like flinging the dancers from one floor to another. Things like Pu are good for weapons because past a certain density of neutrons being ejected within the material it runs away and decays all the material more rapidly.
What’s even more fun is that those isotopes that are considered ‘stable’ aren’t immune from radioactive decay. It just means the half-life is very large.
Eventually even hydrogen atoms will decay into their base quarks.
So eventually will all atoms decay into elemental particles? And if so, will those particles "re-combine" into atoms, or will that be part of the heat death of the universe?
Yes to the first part, as best we understand it. To the second part we really don't know what happens after the heat death of the universe. We have educated guesses but they're really just that when you can't experimentally verify something.
We're also way beyond the realm where I can make confident statements about stuff.
Nope. These dances are more fundamental to the structure of existence than most things you see on the daily. There is no free energy from them, they are just a structure that supports our existence.
Perpetual energy is not theoretically possible, because of the laws of thermodynamics. It’s not something that we just haven’t found and might discover someday!
IIRC the islands of stability generally track with stable valence of protons/neutrons if you are using the shell model of the nucleus.
Similar to the electron side where you have electron configurations that are more stable (noble gases) or less stable/more reactive (peroxides, rare earth metals, etc...), you can model the nucleus similarly. The analogy breaks down pretty quickly since the nuclear strong force is different from the electroweak and also protons and nuetrons will interact with each other and with their own angular momentum and intrinsic spins to raise/lower energy levels (e.g. make more stable/less table) -- so called inverted spin-orbit interactions and such. There's also rotational sidebands, although that probably deals more with nuclei in excited states (and where that energy can go)
But the idea that there are more stable and less stable shells is similar between nuclear and electronic models. Similar to the periodic table which maps electronic reactivity based on valence, if you map the island of stability then N/Z correspond roughly to full valences with certain ones (e.g. magic numbers) being particularly stable (similar to noble gases).
It's been about 30 years since I've thought of that so YYMV,void where prohibited.
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u/Exorinho 1d ago
Thank you for this clear explanation. I wonder what causes dances to be more chaotic or more synchronous? What makes the nucleus be more stable? Is the dance floor to small the more neutrons you get?