Why Does Everything Decay Into Lead

Everything turning into Lead is similar to Everything turning to crabs. It all comes down to Shells 07:17

Ancient Romans didn't reduce wine in lead vessels because lead acetate was amazingly sweet. (It's about as sweet as sugar, but there's less than a gram of it per liter compared to the 200+ grams per liter of regular sugar.) Instead, it's because the other vessel they could have reduced wine in was made of copper, but copper acetate tastes awful.

I like the fact that "magic numbers" was originally a derisive term but is now the accepted nomenclature, similar to the journey taken by "big bang"

This video really feels like it needed that one extra anecdote about how Iron lies in the sweet spot between fission and fusion

The future is nothing but Lead Crabs.

Lead is the atomic version of Crabs

The fact that Tin has Ten stable isotopes is pretty hilarious

All roads lead to lead.

I love that the imagine chosen for "alchemists trying to turn lead into gold" you chose was Hennig Brand boiling urine until he discovered Phosphorus

The Island of Stability is one of my favorite scientific predictions. I hope we discover one!

And every cassette left in a car for long enough will eventually turn into the greatest hits of Queen

I am a software engineer with nearly no education in chemistry. I learned more from this 14 minute video than I did throughout my entire education. SUBSCRIBED!!!

"It's still magic even if you know how it's done" - Sir Terry Pratchett

Somebody at Scishow has gotten into a chemistry obsession recently and I’m loving it

I'm really enjoying all the chemistry videos lately! Keep them up :)

Americium 241 is the isotope used in most smoke detectors. It's part of the neptunium series (in fact, it decays into neptunium 237) so in a few million years, it will become bismuth, and a few quintillion years after that thallium (unless thallium 205 turns out to be radioactive with a half-life of quadrillions of years and we haven't discovered that yet). By the way, Indium 115 is unstable but has a very long half-life, and is actually much more common than stable indium 113..

I have a lump of bismuth on my shelf. Obviously with that half life it's not going to irradiate me any time soon.

"Now before we get to any magic we should start with some nuclear physics basics" That's some pretty hardcore magic.

Intuitively I might have expected everything to decay into iron, which has the least binding energy of any nucleus. Certainly on those grounds it would be energetically favourable for lead to do that. However it's like a pebble on a shelf: moving to the floor would be energetically favourable, but there is no route from the shelf that is open to the pebble.

It's worthwhile added why "adding more neutrons" only goes up to a point: in theory, it would work further on, but the trick is as you start adding too many neutrons, that little thing known as the "weak nuclear force" starts getting in the way and causing the excess neutrons to want to decay into protons. So you get a rock and a hard place situation between the electrostatic force on the one hand (i.e. too few neutrons) and the weak nuclear force on the other hand (i.e. too many neutrons) and eventually the two squeeze out all room left for stability.