May 5- Science

Recently, I was looking at the periodic table of the elements (I have a poster of it) and was looking at the pattern. How the lightest elements elements are at the top and the heavy in the middle, and the strip of medium ones on the bottom. One thing I noticed was that on most standard periodic tables, the element Lawrencium (Lr) is ALWAYS on the bottom right. This got me interested... because frankly, Lawrencium is strangely named. It doesn't have a normal name, like Hydrogen or Carbon or Lithium, but at the same time, it isn't clearly named after anything, like Americium; you know what that element was named after. Anyway, this brings me to my question of the day: For whom or what is Lawrencium named after?





First off, it was named after Ernest Lawrence (1901-1958) who invented the machine (cyclotron) that created Lawrencium. Lawrencium itself is Californium bombarded with Boron.

For more info (and to get all the fancy stuff) visit: http://homepage.mac.com/dtrapp/people/Lawrencium.html