Talk:Prout's hypothesis

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Argon

I have seen it said that Rayleigh and Ramsey were attempting to see if Prout's Law applied to nitrogen. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.148.77.113 (talk) 16:58, 2 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The article on Argon in the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britanica implies that, with others,

Raleigh and Ramsey were interested in Prout's Law. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.177.55.158 (talk) 12:25, 3 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Meaning of accuracy > 99%?

What exactly is meant by an accuracy better than 99%, or an inaccuracy less than 1%? What quantity is greater than 99% (or less than 1%) of what other quantity?

I think that a much clearer statement is found in the article Mass number, which says that the isotopic mass is usually within 0.1 u of the mass number. Dirac66 (talk) 23:21, 13 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It's not terribly useful to look at u in this context, since that's 1/12th of a carbon atom and Prout was talking about hydrogen atoms. If you take a whole "mass number" of hydrogen atoms, it will have the same mass as the nuclide of that same mass number, to within an accuracy of 1%. The largest deviation is for iron-56, which has a mass 99.11% that of 56 hydrogen atoms. Helium-4 has a mass of 99.29% that of 4 hydrogen atoms, etc. They are all better than 99% accurate, or less than 1% inaccurate (i.e., lighter). S B H arris 00:36, 14 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you. Your explanation is clear and I have now tried to clarify the article accordingly. I replaced 99% accurate by 1% error which is a more common usage. (99% accuracy is better used when a task is done correctly 99% of the time, which is not relevant here.) And I specified that the comparison is with A m(H), not any integer multiple of m(H).

And I will agree that for this article the appropriate unit is m(H) because we are dealing with Prout's work. However for the article on whole number rule which is the modern version, I think it would be better to discuss the deviation from A x u. After all, the reason for having two articles is to present two viewpoints - 19th and 20th centuries. Dirac66 (talk) 01:45, 14 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]