Petition Wants New Heavy Metal Element Named “Lemmium” In Honour Of Motörhead’s Lemmy Kilmister
A petition is calling for a newly discovered heavy metal element to be named after late Motörhead frontman Lemmy Kilmister, and has suggested the brilliant name “Lemmium”.
The petition, launched today by Change.org user John Wright from York, UK, is calling on The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC, aka the peeps who deal with these sorts of things) to give Lemmy’s name to one of the four new elements, which currently have the pretty boring temporary titles ‘ununtrium (113)’, ‘ununpentium (115)’, ‘ununseptium (117)’ and ‘ununoctium (118)’.
“Heavy rock lost its most iconic figure over Christmas with the sudden and unexpected death of Ian ‘Lemmy’ Kilminster,” says Mr Wright, before stating his very scientific case for Lemmium becoming a thing.
“Lemmy was a force of nature and the very essence of heavy metal,” he says. Geddit?
Mr Wright says a star has already been named after Lemmy so that his name meets IUPAC’s naming requirements, which state that new elements “can be named after a mythological concept, a mineral, a place or country, a property or a scientist”. Lemmy was a rock’n’roll scientist, right?
After the four new synthetic elements are given names by the scientists who helped discover them, they’ll be up for public review for five months before being confirmed and added to the periodic table.
Mr Wright’s petition, which has almost 100 signatures at the time of writing, has already seen support from Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan, who shared the petition with his Twitter followers by retweeting Mr Wright.
Like McKagan, Music Feeds reckons this is something worth getting behind. To show your support, head over to Mr Wright’s Change.org petition.
Kilmister died over a week ago, aged 70, after being diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. Since his death, Motörhead drummer Mikkey Dee has said the band is now “over”.
That said, fans are trying to get the Motörhead classic Ace Of Spades to hit number one on the British Top Ten singles chart.
