Chemistry and the Elements

Today we’ll discuss worldbuilding the elements and chemical compounds of the universe, discussing why you shouldn’t mess with chemistry and looking at ways that you can do it anyway.

Hey everyone, my name is Matthew, at least that’s what I’m called with this number of protons, and this post is part of a series where I will be going through a science-adjacent worldbuilding process step-by-step. Last time we looked at worldbuilding the rules of the physics of the universe, with some slight variations to how the conservation of energy works.

For today’s discussion, we’re going to be continuing our delving into the science of worldbuilding universes, looking at the rules of chemistry. We’ll look at why the periodic table is your friend for worldbuilding, as well as ways that we can bend the rules to create something unique and interesting.

Just like when we were discussing physics, you don’t need to be a real-life chemist to have a world-building appropriate understanding of chemistry. Chemistry concerns the properties, composition, and structure of elements and compounds, as well as the energy that is released or absorbed when they change.

An element refers to all atoms that have a certain number of protons in their nucleus, regardless of their other factors. An element may be pure, which refers to an element not bonded with any different elements, or a compound, which refers to a number of elements that have bonded together chemically to form a new substance. An example of both respectively are oxygen and water. Oxygen is a pure element that is unmixed with another, while water is a combination of an oxygen atom bonded with two hydrogen atoms. Elements may also exist as allotropes, which is where an element has multiple ‘pure’ states, such as carbon able to exist as diamond, graphite, graphene, fullerenes, and nanotubes.

Our real-life universe is made up of 118 known elements, organised into the periodic table, which is firmly set, based on the atomic weight of each element; that is to say, we couldn’t discover a new element that fits within our periodic table. Any new elements would have to be at the end of the table, and if you’re wanting your fictional universe to follow the same scientific rules, any new elements would also have to fit at the end of the table. Unless you completely rewrote the periodic table, which… isn’t advisable if you’re wanting to worldbuild anything even closely recognisable to something in the real-world.

The number of protons an element has determines its position within the periodic table, and so inserting an element between say, nitrogen and oxygen, numbers 7 and 8 on the periodic table respectively, would give that new element 8 protons and would make oxygen have 9, bumping it up to number 9 on the table, and everything above that up one as well. This however has drastic fundamental consequences for how the universe is composed on a chemical level, changing everything from how elements are formed, their mass, what stars are made of, what planets are made of, which elements will stick around within an atmosphere, and which elements are suitable for life. The short answer is that this is probably not advisable from a scientific point of view. If you want to add new elements and have them make sense scientifically, make them number 119 onwards.

This doesn’t mean your chemistry has to be EXACTLY the same as the real-world however, and in fact the introduction of our fictional processes of Synthesis and Severance can absolutely affect the chemistry of the universe we’re worldbuilding. Buckle in, it’s time for some science. As mentioned before, how many protons an atom has determines what element it is. You can find this really easily on the periodic table; with Hydrogen having 1 proton, Helium having 2 protons, all the way to Oganesson having 118 protons. How many neutrons an element has though can vary, and the different types are referred to as ‘isotopes’. An isotope is a member of a family of an element that has the same number of protons but possesses a different number of neutrons.

Let’s look at carbon as an example, which has 15 known isotopes, from Carbon-8 all the way through to Carbon-22. These numbers, 8 through 22, are the combined number of protons and neutrons, and determine the atom’s mass. Carbon is number 6 on the periodic table, meaning we know it has 6 protons. So, as long as the element is still carbon, we know it MUST have 6 protons, however the number of neutrons can vary, making up the remainder of the number present in the isotope. Isotopes want to become stable if they aren’t already, which usually (but not always) means having an equal or close to equal number of protons and neutrons. For Carbon, its two stable isotopes are Carbon-12 and Carbon-13, with 6 and 7 neutrons respectively. If Carbon were to gain an additional neutron, it would become Carbon-14, which is not stable and therefore radioactive. This radioactivity is called ‘decay’. Radioactive decay is the process that an unstable atom goes through to restabilise itself, emitting energy through radiation. Thankfully, all the information for isotopes and their respective decay processes can be found simply by googling, and Wikipedia has tables that show every element’s list of isotopes, what type of decay they undergo, how long that decay takes, and what they’ll turn into afterwards.  

So, this is great, but what does it mean for our worldbuilding? Well, if we consider that the processes of synthesis and severance that we worldbuilt in our physics episode are both capable of adding or subtracting electrical energy from their environments, and we know that atoms are made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons, with a positive, neutral, and negative charge respectively, then through electrosynthesis and electroseverance we can effectively undergo transmutation.

Electrons are the least massive of these subatomic particles and are the most common subatomic particle to shift and move around. They are negatively charged and therefore one might think they would be a good target for electroseverance to take their energy. However, taking away an electrons charge presents us with a pretty serious physics problem; there is no known neutral equivalent of an electron. At least, to my non-physicist understanding. So, we can either have the electroseverance consume the electron itself, which isn’t really functionally how it works, it isn’t consuming matter just energy, or we can invent a new type of fictional subatomic particle that is the neutral equivalent of an electron. I have nowhere near the level of physics understanding to even begin to speculate on what this hypothetical neutral electron would be like, so I’m gonna leave that avenue. Instead let’s say that electrons can’t have their electric charge taken away, it’s fundamentally impossible based on the physics of the universe, just like in our real-life universe.

Protons, however, are positively charged and DO have a neutral equivalent, the neutron. Not only that, but there is real-life precedent for protons changing into neutrons, and vice versa, through a process called beta decay. In positive beta decay, a proton within an atomic nucleus turns into a neutron, while in negative beta decay, a neutron within an atomic nucleus turns into a proton. There’s more involved behind the scenes in beta decay, but for the purposes of worldbuilding what’s going on here, that’s what’s important for us to understand. Specifically, as electrosynthesis adds charge to a neutron, or as electroseverance consumes the charge of a proton, it’s reasonable to consider that it would turn one into the other, which as we determined earlier, would change the element of the atom.

This is great for moving upwards and downwards in the periodic table, and whilst most natural occurrences of this happening would just create unstable and highly radioactive isotopes, it presents the possibility for transmutation in a controlled scientific environment. However, there are a couple of problems we should quickly address here.

First is the problem with Hydrogen, which is that Hydrogen-1, which is stable, has no neutron present in its atomic nucleus, just a single proton. If this Hydrogen undergoes electroseverance we’re left with an atom that has a neutron and no proton. Which… doesn’t exist in our real-life world. However, there IS a hypothetical concept of Neutronium that has been looked at by physics communities as something that could possibly exist, so let’s say that in this universe, it does!

Neutronium would be its own chemical element with atomic number 0 and will be compared to its closest legitimate real-world isotope, the free neutron. Neutronium is not stable, making it radioactive, and has a half-life of 10 minutes after which time it decays into Hydrogen-1 through negative beta-decay. Neutronium would be exclusively a gas all the way down to absolute zero, though could be condensed into a liquid or solid with extreme pressure, though this extreme pressure would only be present in stellar objects like neutron stars.

The second problem is less of a problem and more of a giant question mark, relating to elements above Oganesson, which would have more than 118 protons. While there is precedent for what we can expect these elements to be like, its lack of real-world study allows the possibility of fictional liberties to be taken if these superheavy elements are to be explored. So long as an element fits reasonably within its group and block of the periodic table, you could easily create fictional elements like Adamantium, Etherium, Mithril, or Kryptonite. Just try and come up with names a little more creative than something like ‘Unobtainium’.

So, to recap, our fictional universe is going to have the same chemistry makeup as our real-world and follow the same periodic table, though we’ve got some science-adjacent processes in place that allow for plausible transmutation to occur, and even the creation of new fictional elements that fit before and after the existing periodic table.

Join me next time where we’ll take this blueprint for our universe and launch it into existence with its own equivalent of the big bang. And until next time… stay awesome!