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I’m an H⁺ denier, in that I refuse to consider loose protons to be real hydrogen, so I personally believe it stands for ‘pretend’.
You need a 4 year degree to understand the wall of text in that explanation.
I was about to say “not really,” but then I remembered that I have a couple of those, so yeah, probably.
I really hope you’re joking. It’s written with high school level vocabulary at most.
It appears that an individual’s heuristic analytical mechanism is engendering a subversion of their affective response system, resulting in epistemic determinations that lack substantiation from the linguistic parameters prevalent within the upper two quartiles of the demographic distribution.
This one is easy. As we know from words like “photon” and “triumph”, “pH” is actually pronounced “f”.
They told me at school that ‘p’ meant ‘negative log’. So ‘pH’ means ‘the negative log of the concentration of Hydrogen ions in moles/litre’.
pH 1 is 1 x 10-1 (strong acid)
pH 7 is 1 x 10-7 (neutral)
pH 14 is 1 x 10-14 (alkaline)
(Chemistry was a long time ago, though)
The xkcd breaks it down for us, basically we don’t know because the person who coined the term never specified what it was. It’s either: puissance, potens, or potenz. Which means potency in French, Dutch Danish and German, the three languages the scientists published in.
Dutch and Danish are not the same language. So yeah, the Danish scientist published in Danish, not Dutch.
Can the term potency also be used to refer to the exponent in English? Because that is what is meant by the terms in the other languages and I haven’t come across that usage of the word potency in English
Isn’t it Potential of Hydrogen?
For what it’s worth, my job is as an analytical chemist, dealing with pH readings every single day, and I’ve always thought this was correct.
I assumed it was rho (ρ) of hydrogen since rho is used for density…