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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'.
It stands for "piled".
this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2024
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It stands for peeps mcgoo
I assumed it was rho (ρ) of hydrogen since rho is used for density...
Isn't it Potential of Hydrogen?
Something like that. It's an incredibly weird term.
That's what I was taught back in 6th Grade.
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.
Are We Smarter Than A 5th Grader?
Same for me
The funny thing is that I intellectually knew that there were plenty of non-English speaking scientists, but that knowledge was never considered.
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)
You're missing a 4 in the alkaline line
Thank you (4 now added!)
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.
Thank you. I think the decades-old chemistry-class flashback distracted me from thoroughly absorbing the full post!
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
I think that's accurate, the exponent is what it's referring to, but the pedantic types are worried about what the p literally means.
Dutch and Danish are not the same language. So yeah, the Danish scientist published in Danish, not Dutch.
Oh shit, my bad lol.
I was taught it meant 'potential' but that was 6th Grade in the US, so I guess it was all a lie.
This one is easy. As we know from words like "photon" and "triumph", "pH" is actually pronounced "f".
I wanted to make that joke 😟
Power
Explainexplainxkcd.com when?
s0n
You need a 4 year degree to understand the wall of text in that explanation.
Exponents and Logarithms can be first taught in Middle School in many places, but sometimes get revisited during Calculus in AP High School or at University level.
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.
exactly
Thank you, Mr. Data.
Fr ong
We’ve become exceedingly efficient at it.
I was about to say "not really," but then I remembered that I have a couple of those, so yeah, probably.