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What's wrong with this sentence?: "For most elements, only one isotope is stable (see Lesson 6 for a discussion of isotopes)."
Simple: It's not true. I wasn't sure of that, but it looked odd. Google to the rescue, via Wikipedia's list of stable elements (and me counting on my fingers in binary as I went down the list) to the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, which assures me that, in fact, there are 21 monoisotopic elements: Be, F, Na, Al, P, Sc, Mn, Co, As, Y, Nb, Rh, I, Cs, Pr, Tb, Ho, Tm, Au, Bi, Th. (They define monoisotopic as having exactly one isotope that is either stable or has a half-life over 10 billion years, so bismuth qualifies: I learned yesterday that it was established a few years ago that bismuth-209 has a half-life approximately ten billion times the current age of the universe). Most elements have two or more stable isotopes; most of the remainder (including technetium and everything above bismuth on the periodic table) have none.
All well and good, but this is well beyond what they expect from a copy-edit. At the moment, I've left a note in the margin, with a link to IUPAC's web site, and will try to figure out a way to rewrite that paragraph. (The claim about single stable isotopes isn't key to anything, but someone thought it made a good lead-in to a subject. If it were true, or even close to true, it might: as is, it's so far wrong that I can't justify simply changing "most" to "many.")
Simple: It's not true. I wasn't sure of that, but it looked odd. Google to the rescue, via Wikipedia's list of stable elements (and me counting on my fingers in binary as I went down the list) to the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, which assures me that, in fact, there are 21 monoisotopic elements: Be, F, Na, Al, P, Sc, Mn, Co, As, Y, Nb, Rh, I, Cs, Pr, Tb, Ho, Tm, Au, Bi, Th. (They define monoisotopic as having exactly one isotope that is either stable or has a half-life over 10 billion years, so bismuth qualifies: I learned yesterday that it was established a few years ago that bismuth-209 has a half-life approximately ten billion times the current age of the universe). Most elements have two or more stable isotopes; most of the remainder (including technetium and everything above bismuth on the periodic table) have none.
All well and good, but this is well beyond what they expect from a copy-edit. At the moment, I've left a note in the margin, with a link to IUPAC's web site, and will try to figure out a way to rewrite that paragraph. (The claim about single stable isotopes isn't key to anything, but someone thought it made a good lead-in to a subject. If it were true, or even close to true, it might: as is, it's so far wrong that I can't justify simply changing "most" to "many.")
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