Ida Noddack and the Universal Function of Matter

Time: 12:00pm

Location: Chemical Heritage Foundation

Ida Noddack was a German chemist who, with her husband, Walter Noddack, discovered in 1925 element 75 (rhenium) and possibly also element 43 (technetium). She is also known to have anticipated the possibility of nuclear fission in 1934. Noddack faced many challenges because of her scientific nonconformity, her gender, the overall strangling of research under the Nazi regime, and resentment from physicists.

Dos Santos’s talk will focus on Ida’s hypothesis about the distribution of matter in the universe. Ida and her husband undertook the chemical analysis of meteorites, out of which Ida concluded that all elements are present in just any mineral. The minimal concentration at which a given element is present in any mineral was called by Ida the “universal mineral concentration.” Ida related the relative abundance of the elements in the universe to some property of the atomic nuclei. This allowed her to conjecture about new and unexpected properties of periodicity in the table of elements. She and her husband also imagined that the relative concentrations of the elements had considerably changed during the history of the universe and, more specifically, during Earth’s geological eras.