Another afternoon at work

[redbird]

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.")

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Ahhhh, a flashback to high school chemistry, where half of what they taught us was flat-out wrong. We learned, for example, that after the first two-electron valence, all the valence shells have room for eight electrons.

My dad is a chemist, so my chemistry teacher hated me, because I kept pointing out when he was just plain wrong.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

All the valence shells? Yikes. Nothing about subshells or filling? Bang, all the transitional metals have suddenly disappeared from the periodic table.

[cynthia1960.livejournal.com]

Man, that would not be a good thing. The world would be a much poorer place for it, and I'd probably not have my day job, since bouncing X-rays off of shiny things has a lot to do with transition metals.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

We wouldn't have any hemoglobin either. Painful.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

It's always a small triumph to catch an error that's outside normal expectations for copyediting; however, doing it a few times over the course of the career tends to make one leery of pretty much everything "nonfictional" one reads, eh?

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

"There is NO Lesson Six!"

[calimac.livejournal.com]

What there is, is a strong tendency for odd-numbered elements to have fewer isotopes than even-numbered elements, where they proliferate. I'm not sure if it's known why this is so.