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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’.
Alt text:
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’.
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)
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,
DutchDanish and German, the three languages the scientists published in.Dutch and Danish are not the same language. So yeah, the Danish scientist published in Danish, not Dutch.