If the codename for Plutonium on the bomb project was 'Copper' then I wouldn't be surprised if 'Pu' as an homage to 'Cu' also factored into his decision.
I remember discussing this when I was a kid doing Chemistry. We concluded it was probably to make the symbol more visually distinct from Pt and also to avoid confusion, since Pl could reasonably be expected to stand for either Plutonium or Platinum. In fact thinking about it, calling it Pl would have been an extraordinarily bad idea.
I wouldn't consider this a prank, but instead a whimsy. It's a prank only if he intentionally broke convention from using the first two letters with the sole purpose of fucking with everyone.
The comments on the story mentioned it - but my wife immediately pointed out that since they wee calling it "copper" as a code name during the war, that Cu for cuprus is easily transformed ( ha ha ) into Pu. (I love my wife)
So how should one take a prank like this to the next level? Use abbreviations like Bs and Fu, or even outright spelling out dirty words by discovering and naming a bunch of elements with consecutive element numbers?
Few of the other new ones follow the alledged standard, one other possible link, to go with the Cu one:<p>Np <i>N</i> e <i>p</i> tunium<p>Pu <i>P</i> l <i>u</i> tonium
Does anyone know what is being displayed in the background of the picture of Seaborg in the article?<p>See [1]. It looks like variations of the periodic table but arranged along something other than atomic weight. I suppose if they were still discovering/creating elements, they would align their table differently than one where there have been no changes in years.<p>[1] <a href="http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/files/2015/11/GettyImages-50863862.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/files/2015/11/GettyI...</a>
One way that scientists on the Manhattan project would refer to fissile elements indirectly was by using the last digit of their atomic number and of their atomic mass. So Pu-239 would be called 49 and U-235 would be called 25.<p>Some examples: <a href="http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/ManhattanProject/LosAlamos.shtml" rel="nofollow">http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/ManhattanProject/LosAlamos...</a>
In line with the scatological references in the periodic table, according to "The Disapearing Spoon" By Sam Kean, Berkelium was intended to have the initals Bm, but eventually Bk was decided upon.