He Named An Element Before It Existed. Then It Existed.

LIVERMORE, Calif. — In May 1989 a man told a Las Vegas television reporter that the craft he had been shown ran on element 115.

At that time element 115 did not exist. It had not been made. It was a gap on the chart with a number and no name.

In August 2003, a joint Russian–American team made four atoms of it. It is called moscovium. It exists.

That is the strongest fact in this story, and every account you have read stops there. Here is the next sentence: moscovium has a half-life of about ninety milliseconds. Four atoms decayed before anyone could do anything with them but count.

Six claims, not one

The mistake everybody makes with this account — believers and debunkers equally — is treating it as a single thing that is either true or false.

It is at least six separate claims. They have very different amounts of evidence behind them and they can be reported separately, which is what the table above does.

One is confirmed by a laboratory that had never heard of the man. Two are refuted by the same laboratory's own measurements. One is partial and contested. Two cannot be tested at all, because there is no object.

What the chemist said

Professor Ingeborg Mutombo-Halvorsen has spent her career making elements that last less than a second, and was patient about a question she has been asked many times.

The island of stability is real theory. Nuclear shell models predict that at certain proton and neutron numbers, superheavy nuclei should be far more stable than their neighbours — perhaps by many orders of magnitude. Element 115 sits near the predicted shore.

"So the prediction that something interesting happens around there is not exotic," she said. "It was in textbooks in the 1960s. A well-read person in 1989 could have said 115 and been making an educated guess."

The isotopes actually made are neutron-poor. They are, in her phrase, "on the beach, not on the island." A more neutron-rich isotope might be dramatically longer-lived. Nobody has made one, because nobody has a way to get that many neutrons onto a nucleus that heavy.

Asked directly whether a stable isotope of 115 could exist, she said: "The theory permits it. Nothing forbids it. And 'nothing forbids it' is the weakest sentence in physics and I would like it printed as the weakest sentence in physics."

The forty minutes

We asked the subject for an interview in January. We got forty minutes in July, by telephone, with no recording permitted. Our contemporaneous notes are published as PX-1938.

He was asked one thing above all: given that moscovium decays in ninety milliseconds, what does he say now about a reactor fuelled by it.

His answer, from the notes: that what he saw was not what has been synthesised; that the material he describes was a different isotope; and that he has said this consistently for two decades.

That is a coherent answer. It is also unfalsifiable, and he did not dispute that characterisation when it was put to him. He said, in the notes: "I know. I can't help that. I'm telling you what was on the shelf."

The payslip

One document exists. It has been reproduced for thirty-seven years and argued about for thirty-six.

We paid Dr. Fenwick Adeyemi-Stroud $2,600 to examine it and told him we would publish whatever he found. What he found is that he cannot tell.

The available copy is a photocopy of a photocopy. The features a documents examiner uses — ink, impression, paper, printer artefacts — are all gone. He can say the layout is consistent with the period and that this is worth almost nothing, because the layout was public.

"People want me to say fake or genuine," he wrote. "I am able to say that this copy cannot support either answer, and that anybody who has told you otherwise from this copy was not doing my job."

What we are left with

A man named an element before it was made, and was right about the number.

The element turned out to last less time than a hummingbird's wingbeat, which is fatal to the use he described for it.

He says it was a different isotope. Nobody can make that isotope. Nobody can rule it out.

And there is no craft, no photograph, no fragment, and no access — so four of the six claims are exactly where they were in 1989 and will stay there until somebody produces an object.

This newspaper's view, for whatever it is worth: the interesting thing here is not the element. It is that a single correct guess about a periodic table gap has been carrying thirty-seven years of otherwise untested claims, and that almost nobody who writes about it separates the two.