Question: Do you think it would be possible to create new elements/future materials with a greater understanding of atoms?

Simone Sturniolo answered on 20 Jun 2013:

No and yes.
New elements are created with a certain regularity. By “element” we mean a single kind of atom. Iron is an element because it’s made only of iron atoms; so are oxygen, hydrogen, copper, gold, etc. Every atom is determined by the number of protons it has, which is called “atomic number”. So you have an infinite amount of potential elements existing: just add one more proton, and you have a new element!
Scientists have been doing that for quite a while now. I think the heaviest one they managed to create is UnUnOctium, that is, the element with 118 protons. They don’t even bother with giving them original names anymore! The problem is, piling up protons is like piling up tennis balls: a few are okay, but if you put a bunch of them all together, they will start rolling away. Atoms with lots of protons are unstable: they are very radioactive and break down almost immediately into smaller atoms. This is a fact of nature and we can’t change it, no matter how much we study. New elements will be more and more unstable, and we won’t be able to build anything with them or even create an amount of them sufficient to study their properties. They will only be a scientific curiosity.
Materials are a different story. By “material” we mean anything that has certain properties when it comes in big chunks, but that at a smaller level could be built of different substances. For example, plastic is a material – but it also is a substance, usually every kind of plastic is built out of a single kind of molecule. Metal alloys (more metals mixed together) are materials. Composites (plastic with glass or carbon fibers inside to strengthen them) are materials. Concrete (cement with small stones inside to make it more resistant) is a material. And so on. So the possibilities are limitless here! Creating a new material often does not involve atomic knowledge – for example concrete was invented by ancient Romans – but atomic knowledge surely helps creating special materials. For example, these days “nanomaterials” are the new big thing: they are materials with a structure at an almost atomic level, which means they have different properties from “bulk” materials (that is, the same materials but made of atoms just bunched up all together).
Fun fact: the first nanomaterial ever was invented, unknowingly, in the Middle Ages! As you know, gold is yellow. By mixing it into glass with a special process, however, molten gold splits into droplets just a few atoms wide – “nanoparticles” – and this changes its properties, so that it becomes red. This is what they used in the Middle Ages to make red glass for the churches’ windows! Of course they didn’t know why did it work. Today we do, and we can use our knowledge of atomic properties to build the nanomaterials we need, with just the right properties.