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One of the oldest, scarcest elements in the universe has given us treatments for mental illness, ovenproof casserole dishes, and electric cars. Increasingly, our response to climate change seems to depend on it. But how much do we really know about lithium? Jacob Baynham explains…

The universe was born small, unimaginably dense and furiously hot. At first, it was all energy contained in a volume of space that exploded in size by a factor of 100 septillion in a fraction of a second. Imagine it as a single cell ballooning to the size of the Milky Way almost instantaneously. Elementary particles like quarks, photons and electrons were smashing into each other with such violence that no other matter could exist. The primordial cosmos was a white-hot smoothie in a blender.

One second after the Big Bang, the expanding universe was 10 billion degrees Kelvin. Quarks and gluons had congealed to make the first protons and neutrons, which collided over the course of a few minutes and stuck in different configurations, forming the nuclei of the first three elements: two gases and one light metal. For the next 100 million years or so, these would be the only elements in the vast, unblemished fabric of space before the first stars ignited like furnaces in the dark to forge all other matter.

Almost 14 billion years later, on the third rocky planet orbiting a young star in a distal arm of a spiral galaxy, intelligent lifeforms would give names to those first three elements. The two gases: hydrogen and helium. The metal: lithium.

This is the story of that metal, a powerful, promising and somehow still mysterious element on which those intelligent lifeforms — still alone in the universe, as far as they know — have pinned their hopes for survival on a planet warmed by their excesses…

[Baynham tells the story of this remarkable element, the development of it many uses (in psychopharmacology, in materials science, and of course in electronics– especially batteries), the rigors of extracting it for those purposes, and the challenges that its scarcity– and its potency– present…]

… Long before cell phones and climate anxiety and the Tesla Model Y, long before dinosaurs and the first creatures that climbed out of the ocean to walk on land, long before the Earth formed from swirling masses of cosmic matter heavy enough to coalesce, back, way back, to the infant universe, to the dawn of matter itself, there were just three types of atoms — three elements in the blank canvas of space. One of them was lithium. It was light, fragile and extremely reactive, its one outer electron tenuously held in place.

Everything we have done with lithium, all its wondrous applications in energy, industry and psychiatry, somehow hinges on this basic structure, a sort of magic around which we’re increasingly engineering our future. Lightness is usually associated with abundance on the periodic table — almost 99% of the mass of the universe is just the lightest two elements. Lithium, however, is the third lightest element and still mysteriously scarce…

That most elemental of elements: “The Secret, Magical Life of Lithium,” from @JacobBaynham in @noemamag.com.

* astronomer Brian Fields

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As we muse on materials, we might send densely-packed birthday greetings to Philip W. Anderson; he was born on this date in 1923. A theoretical physicist, he  shared (with John H. Van Vleck and Sir Nevill F. Mott) the 1977 Nobel Prize for Physics for his research on semiconductors, superconductivity, and magnetism. Anderson made contributions to the theories of localization, antiferromagnetism, symmetry breaking including a paper in 1962 discussing symmetry breaking in particle physics, leading to the development of the Standard Model around 10 years later), and high-temperature superconductivity, and to the philosophy of science through his writings on emergent phenomena. He was a pioneer in the field that he named: condensed matter physics, which has found applications in semiconductor and laserr technology, magnetic storage, liquid crystals, optical fibers, nanotechnology, quantum computing, and biomedicine.

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