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Old 07-06-2022, 05:14 PM   #181
Anthony
 
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Default Re: 1822 superscience

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Research notes: "It was pure when I got this thing and yet now 1.56% of it is now Nickel in only three months. I am thankful that the person that gave me a lead lined suit and box to protect from miasma given what is happening to the mice brought into contact with it.
A lead-lined suit won't do much; tenth-value thickness for Co-60 is 4 cm lead; 99% reduction on a 1cm sphere of Co-60 is a lead spheroid with a radius of 9 cm and a mass of 35 kg.
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I think 1822 is too early for atomic weight. Dalton published the idea in 1808 but had the details wrong, and I don’t think the lab techniques to accurately determine how many moles of cobalt you had in a sample existed then. Remember that isotopes weren’t discovered until 1911.
1.7% higher density might be detectable if it was possible to safely work with a sample, but they'd probably just assume a hard to detect impurity was to blame for all the weird behavior.
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Old 07-06-2022, 05:35 PM   #182
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In fact, 1822 might be too early for chemists….
Lavoisier, Dalton, Avogadro, Berzelius, Davy, and Gay-Lussac had all published by then.
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Old 07-06-2022, 05:42 PM   #183
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Lavoisier, Dalton, Avogadro, Berzelius, Davy, and Gay-Lussac had all published by then.
Yes, but they were Lavoisier, Dalton, Avogadro, Berzelius, Davy, and Gay-Lussac — controversial individuals, not “chemists”. They weren’t doing an established science, but inventing techniques as they needed then to test assertions about caloric and phlogiston from speculative natural philosophy. And their work was still controversial, not an application of established and accepted techniques. If something showed up that contradicted their theories the scientific establishment would say not “impossible!” but “I told you so”.
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Old 07-06-2022, 06:10 PM   #184
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Yes, but they were Lavoisier, Dalton, Avogadro, Berzelius, Davy, and Gay-Lussac — controversial individuals, not “chemists”. They weren’t doing an established science, but inventing techniques as they needed then to test assertions about caloric and phlogiston from speculative natural philosophy. And their work was still controversial, not an application of established and accepted techniques. If something showed up that contradicted their theories the scientific establishment would say not “impossible!” but “I told you so”.
Would you say, similarly, that Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo were not astronomers? Their work was certainly controversial!
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Old 07-06-2022, 07:38 PM   #185
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Would you say, similarly, that Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo were not astronomers? Their work was certainly controversial!
In the sense that you could take an observation to them and get a definite explanation of it that would be taken as authoritative? TGLS suggested that a chemist in 1822 given a sample of Co-60 would be able to figure out that is anomalous atomic weight was causing its other odd properties. Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo were not in a position to, for example, observe definitely that a spot in the sky represented an object that was in interplanetary space but not moving along a conic section with the Sun at [ a | its ] focus with constant angular momentum so it must therefore be being accelerated by an application of power. By the time astronomers became a fungible commodity, so that you could say "an astronomer" without specifying who, any astronomer could do that. And vice-versa. So no: Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo were not just any old astronomer.

To say "in 1665, a physicist could show that Kepler's laws implied an inverse-square law of universal gravitation" is a misleading statement, even though Newton was indeed a physicist.
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Old 07-07-2022, 02:25 PM   #186
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Default Re: 1822 superscience

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Originally Posted by Agemegos View Post
I think 1822 is too early for atomic weight. Dalton published the idea in 1808 but had the details wrong, and I don’t think the lab techniques to accurately determine how many moles of cobalt you had in a sample existed then. Remember that isotopes weren’t discovered until 1911.
Measuring atomic masses directly had to wait for the mass spectrometer. In 1822, the best that could be done was to measure relative atomic masses, by doing reactions and measuring the change in mass. The first table of relative masses was published in 1818. Since the standard atomic mass of the usual mix of cobalt isotopes is 58.9, I'd be pretty doubtful of anyone's ability to notice the difference of cobalt-60 in 1822.
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Old 07-07-2022, 08:47 PM   #187
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Measuring atomic masses directly had to wait for the mass spectrometer. In 1822, the best that could be done was to measure relative atomic masses, by doing reactions and measuring the change in mass. The first table of relative masses was published in 1818. Since the standard atomic mass of the usual mix of cobalt isotopes is 58.9, I'd be pretty doubtful of anyone's ability to notice the difference of cobalt-60 in 1822.
But either way, the observation of cobalt spontaneously transforming into nickel would represent a impossibility...by the understand of the universe that was prevailing in 1822. Daltonian theory had it that each chemical element was made up of its own, specific type of atom, and that such atoms were the fundamental building block of matter.

The transformation of cobalt into nickel would be as big an upheaval then as a confirmed example of, say, an object with measurable negative mass would be now, or a confirmed meaningful FTL signal. It would mean that the foundational theory was fundamentally flawed.
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Old 07-07-2022, 09:03 PM   #188
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Measuring atomic masses directly had to wait for the mass spectrometer. In 1822, the best that could be done was to measure relative atomic masses, by doing reactions and measuring the change in mass. The first table of relative masses was published in 1818. Since the standard atomic mass of the usual mix of cobalt isotopes is 58.9, I'd be pretty doubtful of anyone's ability to notice the difference of cobalt-60 in 1822.
Well, given how close Berzelius got, I think there's a fair shot that they'd could get close enough to identify the difference. Though I suppose you might have better luck if you give them Tritium Dioxide.
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Old 07-07-2022, 09:15 PM   #189
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Well, given how close Berzelius got, I think there's a fair shot that they'd could get close enough to identify the difference. Though I suppose you might have better luck if you give them Tritium Dioxide.
Terrestrial helium wasn't discovered until 1881, so I doubt they'd be able to detect the 3He; it would be "water that glows and disappears".
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Old 07-07-2022, 09:43 PM   #190
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Terrestrial helium wasn't discovered until 1881, so I doubt they'd be able to detect the 3He; it would be "water that glows and disappears".
How did helium get into this? Tritium's an isotope of hydrogen.
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