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Named for a Planet, and What That Does and Does Not Mean

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Named for a Planet, and What That Does and Does Not Mean

Martin Heinrich Klaproth, working in Berlin in 1789 on pitchblende from the Saxon mines, isolated a new substance and named it after Uranus, which William Herschel had discovered only eight years earlier in 1781. What Klaproth actually had was the oxide; Eugene-Melchior Peligot isolated the metal in 1841.

The naming set a pattern. When element 93 was made in 1940 it was called neptunium, after the next planet outward, and element 94 was called plutonium after the one beyond that. Uranium, neptunium, plutonium: three elements named in sequence for three planets.

It is worth saying clearly what this is and what it is not. It is a naming convention adopted by chemists, following the astronomical discoveries of their own time. It is not an inherited correspondence, and there is no tradition behind it. Uranus itself was unknown to antiquity; it is not usefully visible to the naked eye and no classical or medieval system includes it. There was no alchemical Uranus and there could not have been one. The same applies to Neptune and Pluto, found in 1846 and 1930.

Modern astrological practice does assign rulerships to Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, and some twentieth-century esoteric writing extends this to the elements that share the names. That is a real modern practice and can be described as such. What it is not is a continuation of alchemy, and presenting it as one requires suppressing the dates. The seven metals were tied to the seven visible planets because those were the planets there were to see. The moment the list of planets grew, the correspondence could not be extended without being invented.

Cerium and palladium, named for Ceres and Pallas in 1803 and 1802, are the same case a little earlier. Naming a new element after a newly discovered body was simply the fashion of the period.

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