Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Bismuth

Episode Date: May 4, 2026

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why bismuth is secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode. Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5 Visit http://sifpod.store/ to get shirts and posters celebrating the show. Happy MaxFunDrive! Right now is the best time to start a membership to support your favorite shows. Learn more and join at https://maximumfun.org/joinsifpod

Bismith known for being an element. Famous for crystals, maybe. Otherwise, people haven't heard of it. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why Bismith is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Hey, there, Cipelopods. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode of podcast,

All About Why Being Alive is more interesting that people think it is. My name's Alec Schmidt, and I'm not alone. I'm joined by my co-host, Katie Golden, Katie. Yes. What is your relationship to or opinion of Bismuth? I have some pet Bismuth. Yeah, you just showed me. Wait a second.

I should have said, that's none of your bismuth, Alex. That's my private bismuth. See, you had so much respect for your own bismuth crystal that you needed to like acknowledge it first and then this bit. It's great. So I have bismuth. But this is, I'm holding it up for Alex. to admire. Yeah, it's so cool.

He's Myrind my Bismuth. I got it. So I was at the Washington, D.C. Natural History Museum, and my husband noticed me, Myron, some Bismuth, and then sneakily bought some behind my back. And I got a chunk of bismuth as a present, which I really love. And so now, yeah, so now I have a chunk of bismuth. Oh, some of the bismuth felt.

It does keep falling apart. It's also like a very glittery thing. try to hide, you know? I'm impressed he snuck it through. He did sneak it through. And the thing that I've noticed about it is, so this is, I mean, it's lab grown Bismuth. I thought most of it was lab grown, if not all.

I suppose I'll find out today. But yeah, it does, it is, it is kind of fragile because like, as you can see in the process of just, a little chunk of it. Yeah, a piece came off. Peace came off. And that keeps happening. More than a little. I'm not too sad about it because now I have.

two chunks of Bismuth. But then earlier, this probably looks pretty bad. But you can see the little structure. It's so cool. Yeah, it's very cool. And I can say right away, I had no relationship to Bismuth. And then when I Googled it, because of course you start researching by Googling, I was like, oh, it's this beautiful sort of quadrilateral patterns crystal that I've

seen before. Yes. And so I assume you folks who picked it, that's one of the many reasons you picked it. Thank you to the Dan for. suggesting it with support from Anna, Sandcaster, Zed Frank, U. Agent, and others. Bismuth is a medal. It's on the periodic table.

It turns out it's amazing. Thank you folks for pointing our way to it. I wouldn't have picked it. I wouldn't have thought of it. To me, it looks like a rainbow labyrinthian Aztec temple. Yeah. Yeah.

It has that vibe and energy. Yeah. Not chemical, hard science energy. You know what I mean? No. No, it's a psychedelic labyrinth Anastrian Aztec temple. Yeah.

It really, really is. So that is probably how a lot of people have heard of it in the first place. And then there's so much more to discover and explore about it. This is really an exciting topic. I'm excited because, yeah, I like my little pet business and I want to learn more about it. Yeah, it's so cool. You have one. And also, this is our fourth ever siff about an element on the periodic table.

Previously, we've done helium, which is number two. neon, which is number 10, and then copper, which is number 29. So two gases and one metal. There's another metal, Bismuth. And also, I should say this is the episode that comes out like a couple of seconds after the Max Fund Drive ended. Thank you all so much for, I'm sure, supporting us. We'll find out when we catch up to your place in the timeline how that went.

Yeah, thank you for listening and are supporting us. That's really nice. It fills my cold, hard, metal, crystallized. structured heart with joy. Being bismuth-hearted would be amazing. What if the tin man and the Wizard of Oz is like, I need a human heart, but he has a bismuth one and he doesn't appreciate it? That'd be cool.

We're getting a really nice aesthetic here for this song. Yeah, beautiful metals. It's nice. Beautiful metals. And let's talk about it. On every episode, we lead with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics this week that's in a segment called, we've got number, number, number, number, number. stats number number number stats that it was submitted by johnny davis thank you johnny we

have a new name for this segment every week please make a misleading mac in bat as possible submit through discord or to siftpot at gmail.com and yeah the this chemical element the first number is its atomic number 83 83 it's way up on the periodic table 83 a surprising amount of the episode will involve this number so if you want to flag it in your head 83 protons in an atom of bismith Whoa. That seems like a lot of protons. Yeah, it's a relatively heavy element. Also, a metal that is relatively soft and can flake off like Katie's was breaking up because it does that. Yeah. But it's also a heavy atom in terms of the nucleus of it.

So my understanding is that the heavier the atomic structure, the more fragile they are. So like maybe is that like part of the reason that the structure is a little bit flaky because it's like, You got each maybe not as strong cohesion between atoms as you would with, say, like, carbon or something. Yeah, apparently sort of. It's in a group of elements called the post-transition metals, which are known for being not that hard physically, but it's not really driven by the size of the nucleus and the atoms or anything. Okay. But it's in the same group as stuff like antimony and lead and some other metals that are not known for being mighty when you're. handle them.

Right. Instead, it's beautiful if it's a crystal. It is. Very shiny. Yeah. And also, I'm going to link what is a surprisingly sweet essay about, among other things, Bismuth, but also life. The number there is age 82.

That was Oliver Sacks's age when he passed away. And Oliver Sacks was a neurologist, an author. He was famous for very popular stories of sort of edge cases in neurology and interesting ways people's brains work. One of his books is The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. It's sort of that kind of thing where it's a story like that. He had an interesting neurological thing going on. Yes. But it turns out that Oliver Sacks revealed in a New York Times editorial shortly before his passing that his first love in science was chemistry. He like got into neurology and medicine later. He admitted basically that when his copies of journals like nature or

science arrive at his house, he flips straight to the physical sciences stuff first. Around age 81, he learned that he had terminal metastatic cancer. And he said that in his older years, he had started to ask for birthday presents where the number of age he is matches the amount of protons in the element. So like at age 81, he received a bunch of sweet gifts of thalium, which has 81 protons. And then at age 82, he got a bunch of gifts of lead. People don't really ask for lead, but he wanted it. And then in the New York Times, he wrote, quote, Bismuth is Elements 83.

I do not think I will see my 83 birthday. But I feel there is something hopeful, something encouraging about having 83 around. Moreover, I have a soft spot for Bismuth, a modest gray metal, often unregarded, ignored even by metal lovers. My feeling as a doctor for the mistreated or marginalized, extends into the inorganic world and finds a parallel in my feeling for bismuth, end quote. So he had a pile of bismuth gifts from people who were basically being nice. It was pretty clear he would pass away soon.

Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, I think that there's a lot of metal that's underappreciated, like, you know, progressive metal and bismuth and metalheads really need to have more of an expansive. But yeah, no, that's very good. When you said progressive, I was still thinking post-transition. I was like, yes, but it's a good music joke. Yeah, no, I mean, I think that's very sweet. I guess he would eventually, though, that would get pretty dangerous if he lived to be in his

hundreds because when he starts getting very dangerous elements. Yeah, and our whole bonus show this week is about radiation and Bismuth. It's very surprising. And if you have Bismuth, you're safe. Don't worry. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry.

Because I've been, Alex, I've been licking this bismuth. I like how pointy it is against my tongue. And you wash it down with WD40. Yum. Yum. Other people have mayonnaise. Other people have mayonnaise as a throat lubricant. For me, WD40 is much more effective.

And I feel like it's a lot more honest about what we're doing here. Whatever me, Katie, have a business meal. I get lead with Mayo and she gets Bismuth with L.E.D.40. I'm a trash compactor. Yeah, and Bismuth, Sacks described it as sort of modest and gray and ignored because I'm going to link one of my favorite pictures of two pieces of bismuth because there's a cube of pure bismuth, which just looks like a plain gray cube, and then a bismuth crystal, like the one Katie has. It turns out it pretty much takes human intervention to make one of those bismuth crystals. Yeah, that was my understanding is it doesn't really occur in nature. But the structures of it that look like, because it looks manufactured as in like a human, like used a laser to cut it up or something.

The formations themselves are natural as then you seed the crystal and then it forms. and it just does its thing. Yes, yeah. But the actual seating, it doesn't usually have the right conditions to actually crystallize in nature. Exactly right, yeah. And I'm going to link geophysicist Dr. Andre Mejai.

He has basically a how-to to make abysmuth crystal. His main tip is don't do it, because you're like going to have molten metal on your stovetop and that's pretty dangerous. Oh. Like if you get it from a gift shop or something, they probably did it safely. Yeah.

But he recommends, ends at least five pounds of pure bismuth. One reason this doesn't really happen in nature is totally pure bismuth laying around doesn't happen so much. But all you need is the bismuth and a source of heat. And you rapidly heat the bismuth into just a bunch of liquid bismuth and then very, very, very slowly cool it. And so if it's cooling extremely slowly, it's sort of quadrilaterals out into those crystals instead of just forming back into a cube. That's fun. That's a No other ingredients. Does Bismuth as a crystal ever form in nature?

Like, does that ever happen? Apparently not really because it's just hard to get that specific heating and then extremely slow cooling and also to a piece of pure bismith without other stuff mixing in. It could just happen if everything fell into place, but it doesn't really. I see. Got it. But it's no other ingredients. And like you said, it's natural in the sense that it's what the bismith does with that heat change. There's not other, you don't need to like throw in salt or something to get it.

The designs on them do look, they look so like, they don't look like something that would just occur on its own, right? Because it looks, it kind of looks like something like a computer part almost, right? Like if you look at like a, you know, a circuit board or something like that, it looks like a piece of a circuit board like blown up. Totally. And totally from nature too, which is shocking. Yeah, it looks like the Earth is trying to build a robot or something. It's awesome. Yeah.

Crystals in general, like, I've seen a lot of, like, natural crystals, too, that have a very, very, very geometric pattern, like perfect cubes that are not actually made in a lab, but just, like, occur naturally. And that blows my mind. I'm not a crystal mommy, but I like them. Like, if you're like, hey, check out this crystal. I'll be like, cool. I am the same.

Like, our friend had us go to the New York Natural History Museum one time because they had a gems exhibit. And I was surprisingly into it. Don't think about gems. Then I was like, whoa, these are nuts. This is great. Yeah. Yeah, the D.C.

Natural History Museum, they really put out the good stuff for you because, like, yeah, there are some really impressive gemstones there. And I, honestly, for me, because, like, I think they also have the Hope Diamond there. And, like, that interests me a lot. lot less than looking at the chunky natural stuff that just is really wild looking. Same. I want to see the really weird crystals I didn't expect. I'm not trying to see a famous diamond that, like tycoon had or something.

I would throw it into the sea if it was me. If I were an old woman. I'd forget about my husband and think only about the 19 year old I had to fling with. Imagine in real life receiving a gem or jewel from the actor Billy Zane, right? There must just be a weird vibe to it because, you know, like everyone's seen Titanic and stuff. Yeah. I would just be like asking where Billy Zane gets his mascara because I know he's supposed to be a bad guy, but come on. Maybe it's Mabelene.

Maybe it's Billy Zane. Someone please Photoshop that ad. What are we talking about? We're talking about Bismuth. I got lost in Billy Zane's eyes for a minute. Sorry. Oh, who doesn't? I brought us there. Who doesn't? So that amazing kind of crystal is one way a lot of us have seen Bismuth. And then if it's not that crystal, it truly looks essentially less interesting than lead. It's a plain gray, brittle little metal out there. But we've seen Bismuth and a lot of other applications, too, in modern life. One source this week is to, Dr. Julie Pollock, Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the University of Richmond, she says Bismuth is the main chemical in one of the main kinds of fireworks. Hmm.

The name people call them as Dragon Egg fireworks. I think of them as the really big set of really tiny little bursts that make a loud crackle. Like a lot of times in the show there will be one big firework with sort of long arms of color from it. And then a bunch of little whiteish just crackle, crackle, crackle, launch separately. the separate little crackle crackle is bismuth-based fireworks. Oh, little popcorn ones. So it's not, when you say dragon egg, it's not like in Lord of the Rings where Gandalf makes a big dragon come and scare all the hoppits is.

Yeah, totally different. Yeah. But yeah, like this Fourth of July or Bastille Day, you will probably see some. Bastille Day, hooray. Yeah. Bastille Day mentioned. Everyone's going crazy for that. They're saying,

wee, and things like that. And then there's a whole other even more common experience of us having Bismith, which is takeaway number one. Bismuth is hiding in plain sight in the name of Pepto-Bismol. Whoa. I couldn't believe it. The Bismal is referencing Bismuth, and the main active ingredient in it is Bismuth. Most people have had a drink of Bismuth.

Yeah, I thought that it stood for when your Tommy is feeling a Bismal. I had no theory. I had just never thought about it and drank it. I'm a mom, guys, so my joke's about to get to this level pretty consistently. Oh, boy. Well, good thing fathers are known for having excellent jokes. We'll be fine. It'll be all right.

Key sources here include the American Chemical Society, the Los Angeles Times, and The Guardian. It turns out Peptobismal is from 1901. And it was not created for like adults in digestion. I thought it was an antacid. Technically, it's a multi-simptom digestion reliever that just does some stuff that antacids do. But either way, the entire function of peptobismal is an ingredient called bismuth subsalicylate. Hmm. Bismith subcellicylate.

Yeah, wow. Good job. I just, I wanted to see if I could do it. That was amazing. Yeah, and it's a compound where especially the bismuth forms a coating in your stomach. So then if you have too much stomach acid, the coating protects you from the effects of that. That's how it works. That sounds nice.

I've been forgetting to take my proton pump inhibitor for my tummy juice. So it's been getting a little spicy. It's been getting a little spicy down there. So a nice coating of bismith sounds pretty good. I'm going to, hang on, I'm going to put some of this in my mouth and crunch it on down. Now you continue. with WD40. Yeah, so it turns out most of us have coated our stomachs with Bismuth on purpose.

Also, it's a liquid because they need to suspend the Bismuth subsalicilate in a lot of liquid. The one kind of choice in how Peptobismol looks is the pink color. That's just red dye. Because otherwise it would be gray sludge? Yeah. And I didn't say with the crystals of Bismuth, that rainbow color you can get is oxidative. is oxidation on top of it. But otherwise, Bismuth is gray with maybe a slight pink tint.

Yeah. But Peptobismol is bright pink on purpose because it was originally invented for children. Ah. And specifically to save their lives. Oh. Back in the 1900s and especially before, there was a disease that people called cholera in phantom, which was essentially just severe diarrhea in a child. Yeah, and that's dangerous.

And if you don't have enough hydration or sanitation, it can be fatal. But the solution is just all of the nice infrastructure around us. That's it. Yeah. Plenty of water, et cetera. Right. But the bismuth, colloidal bismuth would, like, help prevent the issue?

That was essentially the goal. And it's sort of helped. The big help is just drink enough water and eat things that are not unsafe. Right. But in the process of trying to give pptobismol as a cure for this children's diarrhea, they ended up creating a digestive relief liquid that's mostly for adults now. But they made it that bright pink color to make kids excited about it. And they just kept that up.

Because I guess a kid doesn't want to drink grace luge. Yeah, yeah. And who does? Like, adults also want something fun. Oh, right. Just you. I like pond scum and gray sludge. Yeah, I don't like it.

Like, I don't like it when they try to make medicines look appetizing or taste. to appetizing because that just always feels like you're putting a thin veneer over something. I take a lot of things for my tum-tom because my tum-tom has issues. But like there's like a, it's, I think it's called deosmectate. It's like a very fine earth chalky substance that helps. That actually genuinely helps with diarrhea because it goes into the intestines and helps It's like I think it's like combating kind of like if you have a bad bacteria in your digestive tract. And it also helps consolidate the poops.

But like the way that it has served because they think that most people don't want to be drinking what is essentially dirty clay water. So then they try to like flavor it with like vanilla. But the thing is for me that vanilla flavoring is really bad. And all I want is dirty clay water. want this pretense of vanilla. That's what disturbs me. So with peptobismal, I feel like if it was gray sludge, I'd actually be super into it because then I'm drinking dirty metal water.

Yeah, something about metal just feels like you're industrially tackling it in a good way. Right. Exactly. It feels honest. Like, I'm eating, I mean, like, I used to shove pennies in my mouth. There's something, I feel like this episode has gotten, like, it's just like, Kay, you just have like, you just have PICA. You're obviously doing okay.

So everyone doesn't need to worry. I'm fine and I'm good. But it is, it is true. Like they're trying to make Peptobismol as appealing as possible. And then because of the bismuth, there's also a phenomenon where Peptobismol can worry people. If you have, you know, a regular amount of it, some people develop a black color. either in their stool or on their tongue. Like a black color shows up and you say,

I was drinking a pink liquid and now are things black what's going on. That's because the bismuth can react with traces of sulfur in your stomach and form what's called bismuth sulfide, which is black but is not like a big problem or anything. Right. So it just looks scary. Yeah. Yeah, because usually black in your stool indicates that you have an upper GI bleed because by the time it gets into your poop,

The blood has sort of gone from being like bright red to like turning like mixing with the poop and turning black. So like usually black poop is like a go to your doctor, go to the ER. That's not a good thing. So I can see why that would scare people. Exactly. And it just turns out it's a very ordinary bismuth reaction. But none of us really know that petobesmal is liquid bismuth. Just bismuth as usual.

I'm sorry. It's great. I also, apparently a few people online pronounce it Bismuth. And that really threw me because I thought, oh, am I going to say it wrong the whole episode? But it's primarily Bismuth, especially in America. Not Bismuth. We shun those people. Yeah.

So what's the, I am curious. So, like, it forms a coating on the stomach. Is there just like a specific property? to Bismuth that helps form that protective coating? Yeah, it's mainly that it turns out Bismuth is a very, very non-toxic metal. Especially as heavy metals go, it's surprisingly neutral with human biology. And so it's almost just more of a wall. I see.

And that's really all you need for this short-term stomach acid. Yeah. That's like so many of the things that are like that you take for, like tummy issues or gastric reflux it turns out it's just like yeah we don't really know how to treat this so we're just going to like have like a floating layer of junk so that stuff doesn't come up your esophagus i mean i guess because like there are some metals that are inert gold is one of them so why don't we have pepto gold mole it's partly because of special bismuth things but also just because bismuth is cheap and more available gold is valuable yeah and we'll talk more about

gold later, oddly. Because gold is 79 on the periodic table. It's in Bismuth's neighborhood. But, you know, Bismuth, again, is next to lead. Bismuth is 83. Lead is 82. And lead is highly toxic to people. Bismuth is not.

It's just these slight amazing differences in chemistry. That one proton making a big difference. It really does, yeah. And because Bismuth is so non-toxic to human biology, it has a ton of other uses in medicine and products. Apparently there's another big medical use of bismuth that we started discovering in the 1990s. A Japanese medical study learned that a compound called bismuth nitrate helps prevent kidney damage from one of the main chemotherapy drugs. Whoa.

There's a drug called cisplatin that's excellent for chemotherapy but damages your kidney. And then a compound of bismith helps offset that. That's wild because I thought there were other, like when there's like acute poisoning sometimes. there are certain things that you're supposed to ingest that is meant to like go into your kidneys and basically block or like kind of sweep up or block the the heavy metal poisoning or other type of poisoning like and prevent things from causing problems. So this sounds like it's a case of that. Yeah, yeah, they studied it in mice first, then found it also works in humans. And cisplatin, one of the main ingredients in it is platinum. That's why it's called

cisplatin. Platinum's a very heavy metal, and then this other metal bismuth kind of stops it from harming your kidneys. Sort of like peptobysmal, but in a much different context. Because eventually, I would assume eventually you can pass the bismith out. The problem with heavy metals in your organs is that they like stick in there and you can't really process them out very well. And so it's like with lead, and I assume with other heavy metals as well, like you can have a certain amount in there. And it only really starts causing problems once you reach a certain level of it because then it like, you know, it clogged, it gums up the works essentially. Exactly. And with lead specifically, apparently over the past several decades,

industrial scientists and manufacturers have gradually replaced lead with Bismuth and a bunch of products, especially when lead's part of an alloy and you wouldn't really notice it. Bismuth can do most of that job without poisoning us. They also like to use Bismuth in new ammunition for hunting. Because instead of putting lead into the animal that you're about to eat, you can put Bismuth into it and it's safer. The difference of a single proton at the atomic level, it is crazy how huge the changes are.

Like when you're that tiny, how huge the changes are when you have just that one little itty-bitty difference. Yes, it's just truly vast. It's part of why people love chemistry. And then also there's something we can't totally cover because it's very, very new technology. But especially since last year, people think there might be a lot of new uses for Bismuth in super advanced machines and computers, especially quantum computing. The gist is that in 2025, a Canadian study at McGill University figured out how to make thin flakes of bismuth and found out that it's basically impervious to changes in temperature. Ooh. The, if you make bismuth thin enough, it stays the same at heats up to around 80 Fahrenheit, you know, whatever. But then down to zero Kelvin, which is negative 270 Celsius or negative 450 Fahrenheit approximately. So that's like sweater weather.

Yeah, bismuth sweater. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and like that finding is obviously interesting, but we don't know exactly how it'll be used. It just means across all sorts of advanced tech, especially stuff that needs to usually be kept extremely cold. Maybe we don't have to do that because the Bismuth can just tolerate whatever's going on. Or we use Bismuth because it can handle the extreme cold. So there's just an expectation that as this century goes on, we'll find a bunch of further uses for Bismuth.

Right. That's very cool. I'm glad I have this chunk of Bismuth crystal because I'm sure it'll be super valuable. I know you're joking a little, and apparently most world governments are concerned that China mines most of the Bismuth. And they weren't before because it was like, okay, sure, it's kind of a lead replacement. It's just this gray, random metal, whatever. And so most of the mines that produce Bismuth are now in China. The U.S., more than two-thirds of its imports of Bismuth are just from China.

And according to both the New York Times and NPR, stuff like this 2025 study is leading governments to say, let's find other bismuth, huh? Oh, now it might be the tech for everything. Whoops. Oh, okay. Oops. Yeah. And they don't even know what it'll be for. They're just like panicking. Right.

Well, old Katie's covered. So. But Katie's all set. Yeah. I'm all set. Yeah. Especially because you can put it in the vault of your body. They can't get it in there.

That's right. I'm just going to drink a lot of peptobismol. be like, you want, you want some bismuth? I got it somewhere in here. No, I assume that it's passed through the body harmlessly when you have that typical. Pretty much, yeah. Like, apparently one of the biggest consumer products for it is the shiny kinds of fingernail polish

and lipstick. Ooh. Because the metal makes it shiny and perlessent. And then it just goes through your body. It's fine. It's fine. I probably have some of that, too. I like shiny stuff.

Yeah, a lot of people do. Yeah. We just have Bismuth stuff and even put it into our bodies without worrying. Sure. Yeah. I like to eat shiny. Are there areas in the world where natural occurring Bismuth are more common? Or is it just that China has set up Bismith mines?

Great question. It's both. Yeah. Like apparently the first really big mine for Bismuth was in California set up around 1949. and because most Bismuth mining until now has been people are trying to get other heavy metals and then they find and separate out Bismuth to make a little extra money. I see. But then it turns out China has just kind of gone for it, especially ignoring the environmental ramifications of making a bunch of heavy metal mines.

And also there's a ton of deposits in like southern China. Right. So it's all the above. Yeah. I see. Okay. And until now we figured, yeah, we need like a tiny amount of bismuth for, hunting ammo and peptobismol, we can just get it from China. And then in the last like several

months, some governments said also maybe national security, let's get all the Bismuth. Let's do it. Let's get down to Bismuth. Yeah. But also one further technology story that's easier to describe is our next takeaway. Because takeaway number two, the main example of alchemy in real life is nuclear scientists who turned Bismuth into gold. Ooh. You can do it, turns out. Alchemy. Yeah.

I thought in general you can, strictly speaking, turn stuff into gold. It's just very costly, so it's not worth it. Exactly. You don't make any money doing this. No. But there are a couple of other elements that nuclear scientists in the 1900s and beyond have turned into gold. And probably the biggest amount, an example, is a Bismuth

project in the 1980s. Mm-hmm. Now they turned it into gold. You just do it. Right. What number is gold on the table of elements? Yeah. Gold is 79.

And so it's only four fewer protons than Bismuth. And the way you turn Bismuth into gold is put the Bismuth in a particle accelerator and blast protons off of it. Nice. That's it. You probably lose neutrons too. It's fine. It's fine.

Like how much gold are we talking like? I would assume probably not a big brick of gold that they made. Like it would be a few molecules of gold. Pretty much. And it costs vast amounts of energy and time and the greatest scientists in the world had to work on it. So they didn't make any money. Right. What was sort of the scientific purpose of making gold other than it being cool?

It's basically a second idea after the first idea of adding protons to elements. in order to find out what's up the periodic table from what we had discovered. Right. Then they said, we can probably go the other direction too. Because we've made elements that don't naturally occur, correct? That's right. Yeah. And the key sources for this, they all talk about the main guy doing that. Sources are a piece for Scientific American by John Matson, a feature for Mental Floss magazine by Eden, Gordon, and then a bunch of stuff about scientists Glenn Seaborg, who came up on the sift about copy.

Oh, yeah, because there's also an element called Seaborgium. Yes, Glenn Seaborg has discovered 10 new elements on the periodic table, and he discovered so many they named one after him on the upper end. It's called Seaborgium. It's extremely unstable and radioactive. The thing that he really pioneered beyond what people had done before is bombarding an element with more protons and neutrons to expand its nucleus and get the next elements.

He didn't invent the idea. Apparently, way back in 1917, another legendary physicist named Ernest Rutherford bombarded nitrogen with radiation. Nitrogen is number seven on the table. He added a proton, turned it into number eight, oxygen. And people said, whoa, this is amazing. Also, we've seen both of these elements before. So, you know. That's wild. I do want to stick it to my eighth grade science teacher. I'm not going to name any names, because I'm a good person. But yeah, so I had a question in eighth grade science class, which is like, how do we know that this is all the elements on the elementary table? Like, why couldn't there be more? And she said, like, because this is all there is in the universe.

Like, what do you mean? Are there more? And I said, like, well, right. Like, how do we know there's not more? And she's like, like, because we've, like, looked and this is all there is. And you were wrong about that. So, you know, I do invite you to s-it. I hope she's doing well.

But I also invite her to-boh it. Yeah, she was probably claiming that Glenn Seaborg ran out of rope because he just bombarded uranium with more and more protons and neutrons until he found 10 more things. Well, and because they become increasingly, like, the heavier they are, the more protons you shove on there, the more unstable they get. Yeah, and then they kind of fall apart. they can't exist for very long in nature.

Right. That's the whole kind of thing with like radioactive decay, right? Because like if you have something that has too many protons, it starts to decay and then those fly off. And then with, we're probably going to talk about this in the bonus a bit. But with the radiation, when those, when those things start flying off, they're blasting you and knocking your atoms about. And that's how you can get cancer or radiation poisoning. Exactly. Yeah, it turns out the name radiation is just a very literal name of things are radiating off of something. Right.

And yeah, it damages human tissue, but otherwise it's fine. It's not like evil or whatever, you know. That's cool. Damages human tissue, but otherwise it's fine. Yeah, I'm anti-human tissue, so I love it. But, yeah, and then apparently one Japanese physicist, Hantaro Nagahoka, he experimented with bombarding mercury with neutrons until he knocked off one proton. Mercury is number 80. And so if you knock a proton off, you get number 79 gold. But that was apparently more difficult to do, and it was not

easy to repeat. Glenn Seaborg in the 1980s got a big enough particle accelerator to knock four whole protons off of Bismuth and get gold. From 83 down to 79 gold. But again, it's not lucrative. It's just something you can do. Right. Right. Well, I would, yeah, I would assume that that's, you know, because in order to knock protons off of something, that's not, you're not just like binging them with a hammer. Right. You're running one of the biggest and most energy consuming machines ever constructed in human history. You know, one of those. Do you have, like check your garage to see if you have one. The only other Bismuth-specific thing is that apparently the extraordinary stability of Bismuth as an element makes that oddly easier to do, even though you're knocking

four whole protons off. Bismuth only has one isotope, which we'll talk about later. So just that one isotope, it's relatively easy to knock the protons off as these things go. And so this like, again, ordinary grayish metal unless you make it a fun crystal, it has this extraordinary property where if we tried to do alchemy on a large scale, we'd probably turn to Bismuth. It's so weird. Yeah. Because the medieval people thought you'd use lead, and they weren't that far off. It's only one atomic number different from Bismuth.

But lead is just less useful than Bismuth for this. Maybe I'm not remembering correctly, but I thought that like when there were like, you know, the OG like alchemists, you know, the old, the old Victorians or pre-Victorians and of like trying to make stuff out of gold. Like, didn't they, like, use a bunch of mercury and, like, get poisoned a lot? They did. And they just didn't have the essentially nuclear physics machines they needed. So they failed.

Like, why was – because I wonder what the logic was of using mercury back then because, like, obviously they didn't know how close it was on the table of elements. It seems like part of it is just that mercury is really cool looking. Yeah. Because you're right. They had no knowledge of – atomic structure at all. Right.

They just were trying everything, and mercury is this exciting liquid metal. You think it can change into something. But you're right, they had absolutely no idea how many protons are in anything. They didn't know what those are. I love that vibes-based chemistry. It's like, I don't know, it's shiny and it's cool. That's it. They were like, I don't know, yeah.

Yeah. But yeah, so that's another thing I love about Bismuth is that it's the top alchemy metal turns out and alchemy is real. And folks, that's a ton of takeaway in numbers about this one little medal. We'll take a quick break and then dig up more Bismuth takeaways. We're back and the rest of the takeaways are Bismuth surprises. Business surprises. Business surprises.

I don't think I said that, right? I think I might have missed a few syllables there. Business. Goodness gracious. Business. What am I doing? Bismuth. Surprises. There we are. The first version had like bonus syllables. I think people should be thanking you. That's more syllables than they should have gotten, you know? Right. Cool. Yeah. But the next one is takeaway number three. Many centuries of European miners who dug up Bismuth thought they had messed up and stunted the growth of the metal.

There was like a dominant medieval and Renaissance idea with European miners that metals basically grow. in the ground and you need to leave them in there so they can turn into stuff like gold. Ah. So when they hit Bismuth, they thought I dug this up before it was ripe and I screwed up a deposit of something good. Right, right, right. Oh, that's so interesting. It's like a seed.

Yeah, it was specifically inspired by plants. They thought they were like trees and flowers and stuff. That's wild. Yeah. And the like not cool crystal, just the gray, lumpy, Smith, that was one of the most disappointing metals in that theory. I mean, that's interesting, though, because it's like they're not completely wrong about, like, when you seed a crystal, because, like, it's not so much that it grows like a plant seed into a

different metal, but you can seed something to grow a crystal, which is more like a, on the molecular level, like a domino effect rather than, like, a plant growing. It's true. There are so many ways things in nature and the universe can overlap like that. And it reminds me of the other theory about alchemy, where they almost had the idea that you can turn a metal like lead into gold. They just didn't understand any of the details or mechanics or anything. Right. And this is another thing where they were onto something and they understood plants reasonably well.

But that's not how metals are found or developed or anything. Right, right. And the key source here is a wonderful feature for J-Store Daily written by Amelia Soft. And then I'm also linking digital resources from the Royal Society of Chemistry about Bismuth and also Antimony. Antimony is element number 51. And it's in the same group as Bismuth. Groups are the vertical columns in the table. Antimony is another kind of silvery brittle metaloid that it looks like Bismuth, too, when you dig it up.

Hmm. Okay. But Antimony is a little shinier, a little more interesting. It makes me think of the concept of like fool, silver, if that was the thing. Fool silver. You're an even more foolish fool. Yeah, and Bismuth, like we were saying before, it's found a lot of places, some places have more of a deposit. But across history, a lot of cultures sort of cast it aside as like a waste product while digging for other metals. The Royal Society Chemistry says Arabic chemists probably identified Bismuth in the 1000s AD,

but Europeans took until the 1750s to identify it. It's also a little fuzzy where we got the European name for Bismuth. Allegedly it's from German. The German compound word, Wismuth, which means white mass, is probably where we got the name Bismuth. But it's like gray, though. Exactly.

This has been a very, like, poorly understood element for so many centuries. And then that fed into this European theory in a way that made miners feel very bad. J-Store Daily cites of 1540s reference text on metallurgy that was sort of one of the main building blocks of what people in the 1540s knew about mining and metals. And it claimed that metals, quote, grow and enlarge continually and draw themselves toward the sky. ever converting into their own nature the most disposed adjacent materials so that finally the tips arrive at the summit of the mountain and emerge with clear sign, sending forth in place of leaves and blossoms,

blue or green fumacities, end quote. Okay, two questions. One, what's fumosities? What's femosities? I've never seen that word before. I think it means basically a like burst or blocker. of something that's not a plant. I like that word.

I'm going to start dropping that into casual conversation. Second question. Obviously, this is wrong about how metals work, but possibly stupid question. How does metals work? I felt the same. Yeah. I felt the same. And like one answer is the big bang, right?

Like the entire universe and the formation of bigger and bigger atoms. and then also the core of the earth spins up and forms a lot of just stuff through the reactions. It's extraordinarily complicated how metals exist at all. So their theory that basically the soil gives raw material to metals to grow into bigger and more robust metals is both stupid and I can see where they got there. Right. A lot of weird early science theories are stupid because we just didn't have ways of. observing things or understanding stuff, but the kind of logic behind it makes some amount of dumb sense. Yeah.

But yeah, because it's like, yeah, I mean, it's in the earth. So, and sometimes you happen upon like big veins of it. So the idea would be that it's like propagating itself, right? Like it's like, like, because veins of stuff can be branching like tree branches. So I think it seems pretty understandable why you would think that it's like growing. sort of like a plant or a fungus or something like that. I agree. Yeah, like they didn't know about plate tectonics.

That's another thing that's distributing these metals is geology, but they didn't never say any of that. So they thought it was growing like a redwood or something. Like if you hit a big gold mine, that's like a redwood of gold. Right, because that was going to be my secret third question is like, how do veins of metals form? Yeah, it's just all geology and the movement of plates. and magma and the core of the earth and so on.

And I'm explaining it like a dumb person because it's super complicated. Well, no, that's okay because I'm understanding it like a dumb person. And I'm a little dumb about it too. It's basically the entire science of geology. Got it. How, yeah. So it's like a croissant. Like when you're making a croissant, you fold the butter into the dough and it forms veins of

delicious butter and then you bake it. And then so the earth moves around and then you form layers and then you bake it like in the molten core and then that gets shoved around and then it makes stuff. We just want to think about croissants. Yeah. Cuisans. So this theory is false people later learned how metals work. And I just love the idea that miners would turn up Bismuth and think I ruins gold or I

ruins, gems or something. Like, they needed to bake in the ground longer. Right. And I shouldn't have dug this up. Oh, poor miners. Yeah. Like, it's like an unripe vegetable. And I messed up.

Right. Could they, would they, like, re-burry it in the hopes that it would grow into gold? Yeah, I couldn't find what they did other than feeling sad. Like, because when you catch a baby fish, you got to toss it back. So it turns into a bigger fish. But, and also the last thing about this. theory is it was not global. This was relatively specific to a post-Roman Empire Europe. And a counter example of people really, really understanding Bismuth is native South America.

Okay. Writer Scott K. Johnson covered this for Ars Technica. There was a study about 10 years ago where they got a better understanding of the entire what we call Inca culture. That's really a catch with speaking people who were ruled by a king called the Inca. But what gets commonly called the Inca's were amazing at making bronze alloys using Bismith. And we learned that from an ice core high in the Peruvian Andes. I mean, obviously the Incan and the Aztecs are different cultures. But there is a lot of the like very rigid like geometric pyramid shapes in their architecture as well as there is in.

Bismuth crystals. Is that just kind of a happy co-inkie-dink? Or do you think that they were like heating up Bismuth and like seeing some of these shapes and that could have inspired some of their art? It's probably a co-inky dink. And yeah, the Incas weren't quite doing that Aztec and Mayan pyramid thing. They were doing amazing terrorists, farming and stuff, which has some, I guess, geometry to it. But they were probably able to make the crystals because based on our understanding of how they made metal and also this study was a Swiss university team. They did an ice core, which is where you dig a cylinder out of ice that's a long-term thing, like a glacier, an ice sheet. And then you can look at chemicals in the ice and what level they're at to understand pollution and nature over time.

So they were able to pinpoint when the so-called Inca culture really blossomed because there was more Bismuth suddenly, starting in 1450 and peaking around 1480. And that means that just there in that generation, they had a lot more people. They made a lot more bronze. We can tell all that just from Bismuth in the ice. But that also means they could identify Bismuth when they dug it up. What would they use it for mostly? They made bronze alloys. Bronze alloys. Okay. Yeah. So like copper plus Bismuth plus other stuff, they would get a good bronze metal. And would they be using that for like decorations or weaponry or just pretty much everything? Everything practical, yeah. Okay. They would decorate with stuff like gold.

And then, yeah. Neat. So, like, bronze was such an everyday medal. The fact that there's more of it in the ice core means they were building new entire communities and doing stuff. Whether they knew it or not, it was non-toxic. So it was safer than something like lead. And because Spanish invaders in particular destroyed so many records of this so-called Inca civilization, this ice core abysmuth tells us a lot that we otherwise can't learn. It's really amazing.

When you say so-called Inca civilization, you're not saying that, like, like so-called civilization. You're saying that like, we don't know what they called themselves. Yeah, yeah, exactly. We think they called themselves something that roughly translates to the land of four parts. Right. And I don't know what the like daemonim is, like what you'd call yourself, like a four-parter or something. But it's just funny how you, it was just the king. It's just funny that you're just like this so-called Inca civilization. Right. Like I'm like I'm doing ESPN. rankings of cultures.

They had terraces, Alex. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's very cool. So, yeah, they were very good with Bismuth. And then meanwhile, in the same era or even about a century later, Europeans were like, I dug up gold too soon. I'm an idiot. Would you say that the Inca Empire was in the Bismith of Bismuth?

Yes, it's great. Guys, we only have a few, we only have like a few more minutes to go this episode. Just hang in there. I might be able to squeeze in a few more. Yeah, because actually our final quick takeaway is about the movie Bismuth, right? Movie business. There's not a movie called Bismuth. Alex, that's not very funny.

Our last very unscientific takeaway is takeaway number four. The movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind originated as an art project idea by the artist Pierre Bismuth. Oh, interesting. There's a guy named Pierre Bismuth. That's like, is he French? Is he French and made out of metal? He's French, yeah. Right.

And probably Ashkenazi Jewish. I didn't realize that was an Ashkenazi Jewish name. I looked so hard for is Pierre Bism. some sort of Banksy type working artist, fun name. It seems to be his actual family last name. The more common spelling is B-I-S-M-U-T, but his is with an H on the end, exactly like the elements and just in parallel for no reason. It's not driven by the medal. Yeah. So it's a rare, real last name, and Pierre Bismuth is the co-winner of the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. With Jim Carrey.

He acted at it. Yeah, yeah. Right. That's, yeah, I mean, I guess I'm one to talk because my name is Golden. And that's, you know, because I know there's a lot of like, there's a lot of like gold last names, surnames. Yeah, like Goldschmidt. Right, exactly. Goldsmith.

Yeah, exactly. I don't know where ours is spelled wrong. Like it's GOL, D, I and don't steal my identity. but like it's I don't really I've tried I keep trying to figure out like well were we like was there like some kind of like business of gold smithery or like what it's like as far as I can tell it's kind of a made up name that might have happened where it's where that was not our family name and then it was just like yeah here's a new one I don't know what if they blasted protons off of the name Bismith and then right exactly God. Blast with some protons now are the goldens. Just a particle accelerator in the old country. And it's like powered by a dokey. And yeah.

Anyway, but that's, yeah, like all surnames are very fun to be, very interesting. And Pierre Bismuth is, I partly thought maybe it was a pen name or something because he's a very conceptual artist. He's born in the 1960s. Most of his most famous works are about like the art business and the commercialization of art. In 2022, he started an entire brand of chocolate just to do a conceptual piece about the value of art in the marketplace. Right. And then here is a quote from an interview with the French writer and movie director, Michelle Gondry, who apparently has been friends with Pierre Bismith for a long time. And Gondry said, quote, I've always been interested in how memories can make us feel good or really hurt us, even though they don't.

really exist. My friend, the artist Pierre Bismuth, had the concept of sending a card to people mentioning they had been erased from the memory of someone they thought they knew. Bismuth wanted to study their reaction as part of an art experiment, but he didn't end up doing it. I loved the idea so much that we started to write a story together based on the idea which Charlie Kaufman then developed into a script, end quote. Yeah. So the artist Pierre Bismuth thought of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. and he and Gondry and Kaufman co won an Oscar for the screenplay.

Wow, I had no idea that, you know, I thought Jim Curry was just improvising as he likes to do. Yeah, like he and Kate Winslet are so, he and Kate Winslet are so amazing in the movie. I pronounced it like Vismuth, just then, don't worry about it. Wow, we've got like, this is like a surprising number of Kate Winslet sort of connections in this episode. because we've got, Wow. You know. Right.

I wasn't even thinking about that when we got into Titanic. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, Bismuth is basically Hollywood, I guess. This is the story. Anyway, it's an amazing medal that I truly never thought about until you folks picked it. Thank you. It's great.

Yeah. I'd seen the crystals even and not wondered what kind of metal it is. Right. And let me, I'm going to look up what kind of powers Bismus has. bismuth crystal power let me see transformation and change helping to break

old patterns and welcome new beginnings is what I'm reading from rare earth gallery cc.com so oh it creates a shield

against negative energy Alex so if you want to shield your tummy from acids you take peptobismal but if you want to shield your soul from negative energies. I believe you can put a chunk of bismuth like on your head. I think. I'm not, I'm not ordained. I don't know that that's what you call it. Ordaid. I don't think that's what you call it with crystal healing. I don't think you call it ordained, but I'm not at any rate. Basically before we started recording, we were talking about the

pope. So I think that's how that blend in there. Yeah. Yeah, we were talking about the Pope, how he definitely doesn't know what he's talking about this Pope. Right. Any random American understands Catholic theology better than literally the Pope. What does the Pope know about Catholicism? Anyways. Get in line, buddy.

Yeah. What bismuth is it of yours, Pope? Folks, that is the main episode for this week. And I want to say one more time, thank you to absolutely everybody who participated in maximum fun drive. We'll probably have more to say about it. You know, once we're more caught up to you in the timeline, taping versus releasing. Either way, we've had a couple amazing drives so far since joining Max Fun, and I know we had a lot of excitement on Discord and so on, so far as I'm speaking. So thank you so much to everybody who's participated. And hey, welcome to the outro of this

bismuth episode. It's got fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, Bismuth is hiding in plain sight in the name of Peptobismol. Bismol. Bismuth subsalicilite is the main ingredient, the active ingredient, of stuff like Peptobismal. Takeaway number two, the main example of alchemy in real life is nuclear scientists turning bismuth into gold. Takeaway number three, many centuries of European miners who dug up bismuth thought they had messed up and stunted the growth of under-ripe better metals. And then kind of a sub-takeaway there. Meanwhile, in Native South America, they were using Bismuth in excellent bronze alloys.

Takeaway number four, the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind originated as an art project concept by the French artist Pierre Bismith, who proceeded to co-win the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. And then so many numbers in the rest of this episode, especially because it's on the periodic table. Bismuth is number 83 that really had a human resonance in the life of the neurologist Oliver Sacks. And then lots of other numbers about the mining of Bismuth, the medical uses of Bismuth, the industrial uses of Bismuth, and the history of people figuring out what this metal is. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff. available to you right now if you support this show at maximum fun.org.

Members, as we've said in the drive, members are the reason this podcast exists. Members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is why it took thousands of years for people to realize Bismuth is radioactive. And like I said, in the main show, you are safe. The radiation is so low level. There is no possibility of it impacting you. visit sifpod.fod.fund. Fun for that bonus show for a library of 24 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows and a catalog of all sorts of max fun bonus shows.

It's special audio. It's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. By the way, 24 dozen is another fun number. It is too gross. A gross is 144. Anyway, I don't know if you find that fun. Some really fun things are our research sources on this episode's page at maximum fund.org. Key sources this week include a ton of expert digital resources about chemistry. We leaned on the American Chemical Society in particular, also the Royal Society of Chemistry from the UK. I'm also linking wonderful essays and resources by geophysicist Dr. Andre Mejai, chemist Dr. Julie Pollack of the University of Richmond. Organic chemist Dr. Josh Bloom of the American Council on Science and Health. We're also linking very

scientific studies from places like McGill University in Canada and the Nippon Medical School in Tokyo, Japan. And then biographical and institutional resources about Glenn Seaborg, possibly the most impressive particle physicist and nuclear physicist in American history. Those are just some of our sources for the episode. That page also features resources such as native-land.com. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenape Hoking, the traditional land of the Muncie Lenape people and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skategook people, and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, and in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, native people are very much still here.

That feels worth doing on each episode and join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and how Hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode two. Episode two is about cattle.

Fun fact, there, almost all of the Holstein cattle in the entire United States are descended from two bowls. Just two bulls, that's it. So I recommend that episode. And for more animal information, I recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast, the creature feature about animals, science, and more. She's also my guest on that cattle episode, which was actually the first ever sift we ever taped. Came out second, but it was the first taping.

Our theme music is unbroken, unshaven by the Budo's band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Sousa for editing this episode. Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra, extra special thanks. Go to our members and thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week. with more secretly incredibly fascinating.

So how about that? Talk to you then. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network. Of artists' own shows. Supported. Directly. By you.