Goeppert Mayer and her contemporaries explained these numbers by proposing that protons and neutrons occupy discrete energy levels, or shells. This model, which is still used to interpret many nuclear physics experiments, treats each particle in the nucleus as independent, but our best quantum theories assert that particles within nuclei actually interact strongly.
Jiangming Yao at Sun Yat-sen University in China and his colleagues have now resolved this contradiction and, in the process, elucidated how magic numbers emerge from these interactions.
Yao says the shell model relies on input from experiments and doesn’t encode details of interactions between each particle. Instead, he and his team started their calculations from first principles, which means they mathematically described how particles interact with each other, how they stick together and how much energy is needed to move them apart in more detail.
It's more of being able to know why some elements can't be created. There's a large chunk of physics that we know how it works (stellar collapses or atomic collisions), and we know what to expect, but we don't really know the 'why' to large chunks of it. Meaning any predictions beyond that, are just extrapolating guesses based on what we know. Filling in solid theory on the nucleus gives us a whole new range of experimentation to find new physics.
Neat. Personally I hope RAM and hard drives will drop in price because of it.
World peace and environmental sustainability too.
Oh, yeah yeah, that one!