Someone told me that there is a limit to the number of trans uranium elements that can be in the periodic table. His reasoning was that when the number of electrons for an element gets big enough, the electrons in the outer shell will be so far out that they will have to travel faster than the speed of light to orbit the nucleus. Could he be right?
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That’s a pretty terrible argument since elements are defined by the number of protons in the nucleus, and the number of orbital electrons doesn’t have anything to do with that. If we could make a “stable” nucleus (in quotes because we’d probably be talking about a lifetime of a fraction of a nanosecond) big enough to have that happen, we’d just note that it can only exist as an ion and not in the elemental state of neutral charge.
Since that would be the smallest element with that property, you wouldn’t have made the last element, but made the first of an entirely new group of permanent ions and be collecting your Nobel Prize in short order.
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