What would happen if all the elements were combined at once?
OK, so I spruced up the sublimely boring image accompanying this interesting question over at Popular Science with a picture of the thermite reaction. I couldn’t find a picture of burning plutonium. C’mon wikimedians! What’s taking so long?
The real answer, it turns out, is something like “at first it would be very exciting, and then it would be very boring.” Here’s a characteristically droll quote from my old quantum mechanics instructor, John Stanton:
