《那些古怪又讓人憂心的問題》第10期:元素週期牆
PERIODIC WALL OF THE ELEMENTS
Q. What would happen if you made a periodic table out of cube-shaped bricks, where each brick was made of the corresponding element?
Q．如果你把元素週期表裏的元素製作成立方磚頭，並按照週期表的排列方式把這些方塊一個個排起來，會發生什麼？--安迪o康諾利A. THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO collect elements. These collectors try to gather physical samples of as many of the elements as possible into periodic-table-shaped display cases.1
A．確實有人收集各種元素。他們會試圖收集儘可能多的元素的物理樣本，並把它們放在類似於元素週期表的展示盒裏。
Of the 118 elements, 30 of them-like helium, carbon, aluminum, iron, and ammonia-can be bought in pure form in local retail stores. Another few dozen can be scavenged by taking things apart (you can find tiny americium samples in smoke detectors). Others can be ordered over the Internet.
在所有的118種元素中，有30種（如氦、碳、鋁和鐵）能在本地的零售超市裏買到純淨的樣品。另有幾十種元素可以通過拆解某些東西得到，比如你可以在煙霧探測器中找到微量的鎇。另一些元素你可以在網上買到。All in all, it's possible to get samples of about 80 of the elements-90, if you're willing to take some risks with your health, safety, and arrest record. The rest are too radioactive or short-lived to collect more than a few atoms of them at once.
總的來說，搞到其中近80種元素的樣品還是可行的。如果你願意犧牲一下你的健康、安全和逮捕記錄的話，你可以弄到90種。而剩下的那些元素，不是太具有放射性，就是半衰期太短，一次最多隻能獲得幾個分子。But what if you did?
但如果你真的蒐集到了所有元素的樣品呢？The periodic table of the elements has seven rows.2
元素週期表有7行。You could stack the top two rows without much trouble.
前兩行元素堆起來沒什麼大問題。The third row would burn you with fire.
第三行元素會讓你燒起來。The fourth row would kill you with toxic smoke.
第四行元素產生的有毒煙霧會讓你喪命。The fifth row would do all that stuff PLUS give you a mild dose of radiation.
第五行元素會造成以上所說的所有後果，還會使你受到一點輻射。The sixth row would explode violently, destroying the building in a cloud of radioactive, poisonous fire and dust.
第六行元素會劇烈爆炸，會毀掉整幢房子，伴隨着具有放射性並且有毒的大火以及滿地的塵土。Do not build the seventh row.
不要拼出第七行。We'll start from the top. The first row is simple, if boring:
我們一行一行來討論。首先是第一行，簡單得有些無聊。The cube of hydrogen would rise upward and disperse, like a balloon without a balloon. The same goes for helium.
氫立方體會慢慢上升並擴散，就像沒有氣的氣球一樣。氦立方體也是一樣。The second row is trickier.
第二行就有些複雜了。The lithium would immediately tarnish. The beryllium is pretty toxic, so you should handle it carefully and avoid getting any dust in the air.
鋰會立即失去光澤。鈹有很強的毒性，所以你處理起來要小心一些，不要讓任何碎屑飛到空氣中。The oxygen and nitrogen drift around, slowly dispersing. The neon floats away.
氧氣和氮氣會飄來飄去，慢慢擴散開來。氖則會向上飄走。The pale yellow fluorine gas would spread across the ground. Fluorine is the most reactive, corrosive element in the periodic table. Almost any substance exposed to pure fluorine will spontaneously catch fire.
淡黃色的氟氣會在地上鋪展開來。氟是元素週期表中反應活性最高、腐蝕性最強的元素。幾乎任何其他元素接觸到純氟時都會自發地燃燒起來。I spoke to organic chemist Derek Lowe about this scenario. He said that the fluorine wouldn't react with the neon, and "would observe a sort of armed truce with the chlorine, but everything else, sheesh." Even with the later rows, the fluorine would cause problems as it spread, and if it came in contact with any moisture, it would form corrosive hydrofluoric acid.
我諮詢了化學家德雷克o勞維。他表示氟不會與氖反應，而且"會和氯達成某種意義上的武裝停火協議，但別的東西嘛，嘖嘖"。氟遇到後幾排的元素也會引起麻煩，如果空氣中有一些水汽的話，氟還會結合水汽形成具有腐蝕性的氫氟酸。If you breathed even a trace amount, it would seriously damage or destroy your nose, lungs, mouth, eyes, and eventually the rest of you. You would definitely need a gas mask. Keep in mind that fluorine eats through a lot of potential mask materials, so you would want to test it first. Have fun!
即使你不慎呼吸到了痕量5的氫氟酸，你的鼻子、肺、嘴巴、眼睛都會受到嚴重傷害，時間長了整個人體都會被腐蝕掉。爲此你絕對需要一個防毒面具，不過你要知道氟能夠腐蝕絕大多數的面具材料，所以記得在選擇一款面具前先進行一下測試。玩得愉快！On to the third row!
下面是第三行。Half of the data here is from the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics and the other half is from Look Around You.
這裏的數據一半來源於《物理和化學手冊》，一半來自英國電視喜劇"看看你周圍"。The big troublemaker here is phosphorus. Pure phosphorus comes in several forms. Red phosphorus is reasonably safe to handle. White phosphorus spontaneously ignites on contact with air. It burns with hot, hard-to-extinguish flames and is, in addition, quite poisonous.
這一行裏最惹事的是磷。純磷有好幾種存在形式，紅磷可以相對安全儲存，而白磷一遇到空氣就會自發燃燒，併產生難以熄滅的紅色火焰，而且有很強的毒性。The sulfur wouldn't be a problem under normal circumstances; at worst, it would smell bad. However, our sulfur is sandwiched between burning phosphorus on the left . . . and the fluorine and chlorine on the right. When exposed to pure fluorine gas, sulfur-like many substances-catches fire.
硫在普通情況下不會引發什麼問題，再不濟也就是聞起來味道不太好。不過別忘了硫的左邊是熊熊燃燒的磷……右邊是氟和氯。和許多其他物質一樣，硫遇到純氟氣體也會着火。The inert argon is heavier than air, so it would just spread out and cover the ground. Don't worry about the argon. You have bigger problems.
惰性的氬氣密度比空氣大，所以它只會沉在地面上鋪展開來。先別管氬氣，你的大麻煩還在後頭呢。The fire would produce all kinds of terrifying chemicals with names like sulfur hexafluoride. If you're doing this inside, you'd be choked by toxic smoke and your building might burn down.
之前說到的大火會產生各種名字聳人聽聞的化合物，比如六氟化硫。如果你在室內進行這個實驗，那麼你會被有毒煙霧嗆到死，整幢房子也有可能被大火吞噬。And that's only row three. On to row four!
不過現在還只是第三行。讓我們來看第四行！"Arsenic" sounds scary. The reason it sounds scary is a good one: It's toxic to virtually all forms of complex life.
砷聽上去就很嚇人，而它的嚇人理由也相當充分--它對幾乎一切形式的複雜生命都是有毒的。Sometimes this kind of panic over scary chemicals is disproportionate; there are trace amounts of natural arsenic in all our food and water, and we handle those fine. This is not one of those times.
有些時候，這些嚇人的化學品引發的恐慌是有點誇大其詞。比如在我們所有的食物和水中都有痕量的砷存在，但我們的身體能夠很好地處理掉這些微量砷。但現在可不是這樣。The burning phosphorus (now joined by burning potassium, which is similarly prone to spontaneous combustion) could ignite the arsenic, releasing large amounts of arsenic trioxide. That stuff is pretty toxic. Don't inhale.
燃燒的磷（現在又加上燃燒的鉀，鉀和磷都很容易自燃）能夠引燃砷，同時釋放出大量有毒的三氧化二砷，這東西相當毒，不要吸入。This row would also produce hideous odors. The selenium and bromine would react vigorously, and Lowe says that burning selenium "can make sulfur smell like Chanel."
這一行的元素還會散發出可怕的氣味。硒和溴會劇烈反應，勞維表示相比於燃燒的硒，"硫聞起來就像香奈兒香水"。If the aluminum survived the fire, a strange thing would happen to it. The melting gallium under it would soak into the aluminum, disrupting its structure and causing it to become as soft and weak as wet paper.6
如果鋁塊能夠經受住大火，那麼你就會看到一個詭異的現象。在鋁塊下面熔化的鎵會被鋁吸收進去，破壞鋁的內部結構，使其變得像浸水的紙一樣又軟又爛。The burning sulfur would spill into the bromine. Bromine is liquid at room temperature, a property it shares with only one other element-mercury. It's also pretty nasty stuff. The range of toxic compounds that would be produced by this blaze is, at this point, incalculably large. However, if you did this experiment from a safe distance, you might survive.
燃燒的硫會濺到溴塊中去。溴在室溫下是液體，除它以外，室溫下是液體的單質就只剩下汞了。而且溴也是個很棘手的東西。到現在這份兒上，各種火焰形成的有毒化合物已經數不清了。不過如果你是在安全距離以外做這個實驗的話，你還是有可能活下來的。The fifth row contains something interesting: technetium-99, our first radioactive brick.
第五行有一個元素很有意思：鍀-99，它是目前爲止我們遇到的第一個帶放射性的磚塊。Technetium is the lowest-numbered element that has no stable isotopes. The dose from a 1-liter cube of the metal wouldn't be enough to be lethal in our experiment, but it's still substantial. If you spent all day wearing it as a hat-or breathed it in as dust-it could definitely kill you.
鍀是不具有穩定同位素的所有元素中原子序數最低的一個。雖然1立方分米的鍀塊釋放出的輻射劑量不會使你喪命，但劑量還是非常大的。要是你整天戴着一頂鍀做的帽子，或者呼吸它的微粒，那麼你是肯定會死的。Techneteium aside, the fifth row would be a lot like the fourth.
除了鍀，第五行基本和第四行差不多。On to the sixth row! No matter how careful you are, the sixth row would definitely kill you.
現在到第六行了！現在無論你多麼小心，這一行元素還是肯定會置你於死地。This version of the periodic table is a little wider than you might be used to, since we're inserting the lanthanide and actinide elements into rows 6 and 7. (These elements are normally shown separately from the main table to avoid making it too wide.)
這個版本的元素週期表比你平常看到的要寬一些，因爲我們把鑭系元素和錒系元素插進了第六和第七行。（這些元素一般不放在主表中而是單獨列出來，避免主表太寬。）The sixth row of the periodic table contains several radioactive elements, including promethium, polonium,7 astatine, and radon. Astatine is the bad one.8
元素週期表的第六行有許多放射性元素，包括鉕、釙8、砹和氡9a。砹是裏面的大壞蛋。We don't know what astatine looks like, because, as Lowe put it, "that stuff just doesn't want to exist." It's so radioactive (with a half-life measured in hours) that any large piece of it would be quickly vaporized by its own heat. Chemists suspect that it has a black surface, but no one really knows.
我們不知道砹看上去是什麼樣子的，正如勞維所說："這玩意兒根本就是不想存在。"砹具有極強的放射性（半衰期以小時計算），任何一塊稍微大一點兒的砹塊都會被自身衰變釋放出來的熱量氣化掉。化學家猜測它的表面是黑色的，但沒有人能夠確切知道。There's no material safety data sheet for astatine. If there were, it would just be the word "NO" scrawled over and over in charred blood.
材料安全數據中沒有砹這一項。假如有的話，裏面大概會是一連串血跡斑斑的"不"字。Our cube would, briefly, contain more astatine than has ever been synthesized. I say "briefly" because it would immediately turn into a column of superheated gas. The heat alone would give third-degree burns to anyone nearby, and the building would be demolished. The cloud of hot gas would rise rapidly into the sky, pouring out heat and radiation.
而我們這個立方體中的砹含量將在短時間內超過有史以來所有提純出來的砹的總量，這裏我強調"短時間內"，是因爲這個砹塊將會迅速變成一大團熾熱的氣體。這股熱氣本身就會讓任何靠近的人三度燒傷，整幢建築也會被夷爲平地。之後這團熱氣會迅速升入空中，同時放出更多的熱和輻射。The explosion would be just the right size to maximize the amount of paperwork your lab would face. If the explosion were smaller, you could potentially cover it up. If it were larger, there would be no one left in the city to submit paperwork to.
你剛剛引發的爆炸大小剛好能讓你的實驗室面臨最大量的文書工作。如果爆炸規模再小一些，你沒準還能夠私下襬平；如果規模再大一些，城市裏就剩不下什麼人來看你的事故調查報告了。Dust and debris coated in astatine, polonium, and other radioactive products would rain from the cloud, rendering the downwind neighborhood completely uninhabitable.
夾雜着砹、釙和其他放射性產物的灰塵和碎片會隨着降雨落回地面，使得下風處的整塊區域完全不適合人類居住。The radiation levels would be incredibly high. Given that it takes a few hundred milliseconds to blink, you would literally get a lethal dose of radiation in the blink of an eye.
而輻射水平也會出奇地高。鑑於每眨一次眼睛需要幾百毫秒，你真的會在"一眨眼的工夫"裏因輻射過量而喪命。You would die from what we might call "extremely acute radiation poisoning"-that is, you would be cooked.
你的死因將會是"急性嚴重輻射中毒"，也就是說你其實是被煮熟了。The seventh row would be much worse.
第七行就更糟了。There are a whole bunch of weird elements along the bottom of the periodic table called transuranic elements. For a long time, many of them had placeholder names like "unununium," but gradually they're being assigned permanent names.
元素週期表的最後一行有各種奇奇怪怪的元素，它們被稱爲超鈾元素。在很長一段時間內，這些超鈾元素的名字都是些類似於"Unununium"的臨時名字，但後來它們都漸漸地有了正式的永久名字。There's no rush, though, because most of these elements are so unstable that they can be created only in particle accelerators and don't exist for more than a few minutes. If you had 100,000 atoms of Livermorium (element 116), after a second you'd have one left-and a few hundred milliseconds later, that one would be gone, too.
不過起名字這事兒倒不必着急，因爲絕大多數超鈾元素非常不穩定，它們只能在粒子加速器中製得，存在時間不超過幾分鐘。如果你有10萬個（Lv）原子，一秒鐘後就只剩一個了，再過幾百毫秒就一個都不剩了。Unfortunately for our project, the transuranic elements don't vanish quietly. They decay radioactively. And most of them decay into things that also decay. A cube of any of the highest-numbered elements would decay within seconds, releasing a tremendous amount of energy.
但是對於我們的項目而言，很不幸，超鈾元素可不會"輕輕地我走了"，它們會衰變。它們中大多數衰變出來的東西還會接着衰變。原子序數最高的那些元素的立方體會在幾秒內發生衰變，同時釋放出驚人的能量。The result wouldn't be like a nuclear explosion-it would be a nuclear explosion. However, unlike a fission bomb, it wouldn't be a chain reaction-just a reaction. It would all happen at once.
其結果不會"像核爆一樣"，其結果就是核爆。不過，和裂變彈不同，它們不會發生鏈式反應，而就只是一個反應而已，所有衰變都發生在一瞬間。The flood of energy would instantly turn you-and the rest of the periodic table-to plasma. The blast would be similar to that of a medium-sized nuclear detonation, but the radioactive fallout would be much, much worse-a veritable salad of everything on the periodic table turning into everything else as fast as possible.
反應產生的能量會瞬間把你（和剩下的週期牆）燒成等離子體。爆炸規模和一次中型核爆炸相當，但釋放的放射性塵埃則會比後者糟糕得多--元素週期表上那些大雜燴全都在飛速地盡力變成其他什麼玩意兒。A mushroom cloud would rise over the city. The top of the plume would reach up through the stratosphere, buoyed by its own heat. If you were in a populated area, the immediate casualties from the blast would be staggering, but the long-term contamination from the fallout would be even worse.
你所在的城市將會升起巨大的蘑菇雲，煙柱會藉着自身產生的熱量一直衝上同溫層。如果你所在的區域人口密集，那麼瞬間造成的人員傷亡將會難以計量，而且長期的放射性塵埃帶來的後果還會更糟。The fallout wouldn't be normal, everyday radioactive fallout9-it would be like a nuclear bomb that kept exploding. The debris would spread around the world, releasing thousands of times more radioactivity than the Chernobyl disaster. Entire regions would be devastated; the cleanup would stretch on for centuries.
這次的放射性塵埃和普通日常的核爆放射塵10可不一樣，這是一個還在不停爆炸的核彈。爆炸產生的碎屑會遍佈全球，放射性水平將會是切爾諾貝利災難的數千倍以上。你周圍的整個區域都會被徹底摧毀，在接下去的幾個世紀內都寸草不生。While collecting things is certainly fun, when it comes to chemical elements, you do not want to collect them all.
收集東西誠然很有意思，但當你收集的是化學元素時，你可能不會想要全部收集全。1 Think of the elements as dangerous, radioactive, short-lived Pokémon.
1 你可以把這些元素想象成危險的、具有放射性的、短命的口袋妖怪。2 An eighth row may be added by the time you read this. And if you're reading this in the year 2038, the periodic table has ten rows but all mention or discussion of it is banned by the robot overlords.
2 在你讀到這篇文章時，可能已經開始加入第8行了。如果你在2038年讀這篇文章，週期表就會有10行。但我們的機器人領主會禁止一切關於此的討論。3 That is, assuming that they're in diatomic form (e.g. O2 and N2). If the cube is in the form of single atoms, they'll instantly combine, heating to thousands of degrees as they do.
3 這是說，假設它們都處於雙原子結構（比如氧氣O2和氮氣N2）。如果元素立方體是單原子結構，它們會在一瞬間組合起來，同時產生數千攝氏度的高溫。4 Lowe is the author of the great drug research blog In the Pipeline.
4 勞維是很棒的藥物研究博客In the Pipeline的作者。5 A property that has led to its controversial use in incendiary artillery shells.
5 白磷的這個性質被用到了爭議很大的白磷燃燒彈中。6 Search YouTube for "gallium infiltration" to see how strange this is.
6 在YouTube上搜索"鎵滲透"你就會明白這種現象是有多詭異。7 In 2006, an umbrella tipped with polonium-210 was used to murder former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko.
7 2006年，前克格勃（KGB）特工亞歷山大o利特維年科被人用一把頂部塗有釙-210的雨傘謀殺。8 Radon is the cute one.
8 氡是裏面最無害的一個了。9 You know, the stuff we all shrug off.
9 你懂的啦，我們平常拍拍肩抖掉的那玩意兒。
