Why don any elements 84 and above have any stable isotopes?
Nuclear Stability was indeed of interest to some physicists; itwould be strange if it were otherwise – the provides a partial answer. There was also some talk about the analogy of the “water droplet” for the more massive nuclei with protons’ eletromagnetic repulsion and the Strong Nuclear Interaction causing surface tension affecting stability. “Modern nuclear physics A light nucleus can contain hundreds of nucleons which means that with some approximation it can be treated as a classical system, rather than a quantum-mechanical one. In the resulting liquid-drop model, the nucleus has an energy which arises partly from surface tension and partly from electrical repulsion of the protons. The liquid-drop model is able to reproduce many features of nuclei, including the general trend of binding energy with respect to mass number, as well as the phenomenon of nuclear fission. Superimposed on this classical picture, however, are quantum-mechanical effects, which can be described using the n
