I understand what you are saying about the 40 nucleon stability line and it follows my analysis as stated. The Potassium isotope does decay into Ar40 or Ca40 with a half life of 1.248 Billion years. Decay half life is relative and even though this represents a long period of time, it is still decaying as my hypothesis suggests.
If you take Potassium 39 and add a neutron to it as with a W&L reaction you obtain Potassium 40. This isotope then will decay into either Ar40 or Ca40 according to the chart I have. On the other hand, if I take Potassium 39 and add a proton and electron then I obtain Ca40 which is totally stable. The 40 nucleon stability region comes close to violating the rule but does not quite make it. Are you aware of any violations that meet the absolute criteria? Any form of radioactivity would not qualify an element as totally stable. I appreciate your finding this close call and there are others where the suspect isotope falls inside a parallel set of vertical lines of stability with proton addition. Cl36 is located in a similar position and has a half life of 300 k years. Dave -----Original Message----- From: Jones Beene <[email protected]> To: vortex-l <[email protected]> Sent: Mon, Jun 11, 2012 10:27 pm Subject: RE: [Vo]: Nuclear Stability and Proton or Neutron Addition From: David Roberson The above rule that I found makes it impossible to have two stable isotopes of elements with the same number of nucleons that are one level apart. An example of this rule would be that since He3 is stable, then H3 cannot be The possible exception is 40 nucleons. The “impossibility” depends on how precise you wording is. Is 10 billion years “stable”? If so, there is one exception. 40Ar is 99+ of all argon. Argon is element 18. Element 19 is potassium. 40K is radioactive, but with an extremely long half-life, over one billion years, so there is still primordial potassium on earth, in the natural mineral, and there will be a diminishing amount for billions of years in the future. In fact, there should be some primordial potassium here when out sun expires. That is relatively stable. So, to that extent 40K is both stable but radioactive. Of course, you can define “stable” to be “non-radioactive” but then you must take note that some grand unification theories (including the Sheldon Glashow original) predict that even the proton will decay eventually – making all mater radioactive in a long time enough time scale so that there are no stable and non-radioactive elements. Semantics is a bitch but 40 is magic. Which is to say that 40 is a magic number for nucleons – so much so that calcium, element 20 also has a stable 40 nucleon isotope. Bottom line there are three adjoining elements in the periodic table which all have isotopes of 40 a.m.u. and all retain at least an important percentage of that magic numbered isotope - from when our solar system formed 4-5 billion years ago.
