How it all started

Last year, due to the ongoing pandemic, I was thinking of picking up a hobby - preferably an outdoorsy one - to keep me active during the winter. Running was the obvious choice, since I’ve been practicing consistently for many years with an exception of a 2-year-slump during my Ph.D., but I also wanted something to keep my mind sharp and strengthen my visual skills and pattern recognition. One day during the Christmas holidays, I was on a walk with a good friend of mine (also a nuclear physicist) that has been in Darmstadt for many years and he pointed towards a parked car’s number plate saying: “Hey, this is chlorine!”

The anatomy of a German number plate

Vehicle number plates in Germany have a very distinct pattern, which allows to get letter combinations that correspond to elements in the periodic table. Below you can see the components of a typical number plate.

The structure of a number plate in Germany.

For example, the plate DA FE 8970 would be a plate from Darmstadt (DA) where iron (Fe) is shown, and all plates from Frankfurt that start with an F show fluorine! My friend told me that some colleagues of his had found almost all elements in car plates within Darmstadt. I thought that this would be a fun project for the winter/spring, to find and take a picture of all 118 (until now) elements in the periodic table.

The hunt is on!

The beginning of the ‘gotta catch’em all’ with car plates was extremely easy, and with couple of long walks I was able to gather the first 30-40 pictures. As you might imagine, at some point, finding undiscovered elements/plates was quite cumbersome, with a discovery rate of around 1-2 per week. Finally, after three months, I was able to find my last missing element (zinc) and complete the periodic table! To be honest, I was keep looking at car plates for a long time after I finished this project - maybe I still do sometimes 🤭.

Making the collage

Before making the collage, I had to blur the rest of the plate to protect the privacy of the car owners. Then, I just had to decide how to make the collage. I ended up with a simple format, but I might come up with alternatives in the future for nuclear car 2.0.

The nuclear car (2022)