Elemental lead (the metal) wouldn’t leave much residue, and it’s relatively hard to absorb when it isn’t in a compound. Yellow is precautionary for sure
Green: "Ew, but sure."
Yellow: "But why, tho?"
Red: "You might not survive, but YOLO I guess."
Purple: "I recommend doing it before you have kids so you can qualify for the Darwin Awards."
So there needs to be an addendum
A list of elements as compounds & their lickability!
Also has anyone attempted to stick their head inside the LHC & taste any really exotic particles?
Randall Munroe of xkcd fame has something similar and asks, if I wanted to collect a 1 kg sample cube of each element what would happen. The results are... uneven, ranging from it floats away up to continual nuclear explosion for many years.
It's not actually a criticality event, but spontaneous nuclear decay. They're just falling apart and releasing vast amounts of energy as heat and energetic particles. It's very little fun to be in the middle of!
Kind of. Otto Hahn won the 1944 Nobel prize in Chemistry for nuclear fission, but there never was a Physics prize awarded, although Lise Meitner probably deserved it for her work interpreting Hahn's experiments. Fermi won the 1938 Physics prize for transmutation experiments via neutron bombardment.
Also, Leo Szilard patented the concept of a neutron initiated self sustaining fission reaction for energy generation in 1934, but he immediately assigned it the British government to keep it secret because of the obvious potential use in building a bomb. He also didn't win a Nobel prize for it.
Incidentally, the fact the Szilard never won a Nobel prize is simply scandalous. Nobel prizes were awarded to several other physicists for discoveries that he had done pioneering work on, including electron microscopes, cyclotrons and nuclear fission. The man was an utter genius.
