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RichardKennaway comments on [LINK] The half-life of a fact - Less Wrong Discussion

1 Post author: David_Gerard 06 October 2012 11:25AM

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Comment author: RichardKennaway 07 October 2012 04:05:51PM 4 points [-]

That's how it was. Atomic weights were known to be not in whole number ratios, although sometimes tantalisingly close to them, and a lot of effort went into determining them precisely. There was a certain amount of chagrin when scientists realised that these numbers had no fundamental significance, but were just the average weights of the distribution of the different isotopes.