You’ve all heard of electrons I assume. Particles within atoms that, among other things, determine the sorts of chemical reactions those atoms can take part in but more importantly without which much of modern life – and the mysteries of the world wide web and internet through which you are reading this missive – could not take place.

They are usually represented as moving in circles around an atom’s nucleus (see some of the pictures here.)

They don’t. The circles are just an easy way to picture how far away from a nucleus they are and how much energy they have.

More accurately they occupy certain volumes of space (orbitals) around the nucleus. Which is to say that the probability of their being in that volume is more than 99%.

This is an outcome of quantum mechanical calculations on electrons and their properties.

One of the ramifications of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle was that you could never know simultaneously both the position and velocity of an electron. If you knew one’s speed you did not know its position, if you determined its position you couldn’t know its speed.

One of my lecturers when I was a student thought that this was unlikely and called the Uncertainty Principle, “the Phlogiston Theory of the Twentieth Century.”

Well, it seems that physicists are now able to watch electrons moving in real time.*

Though the details are quite dense (and probably incomprehesible to anyone without a background in Chemistry or Physics) it’s a measure of how sad I am that I found this information irrationally exciting. It deals more with movement of electrons between orbitals of different energy than of electrons within their orbitals. It doesn’t violate the Uncertainty Principle.

* Thanks to Guthrie at his blog for bringing this to my attention.

I was checking my blog’s stats earlier this week.

It never fails to amaze me that a high number of visits to this blog seem to arise from my post about Mary Campbell Smith’s poem The Boy In The Train.

There are lots of hits for Art Deco too, which actually tend to predominate.

However what caught my eye this time was someone looking for the spelling of sulphur.

I accessed the search page they’d used and found this blog entry. Its last line is a beauty.

I do hope Jon Edwards from the RSC has looked at it (and at my reply to his comment on my take on the subject here.)

I note also that I was 22^nd equal in the general blog category in the Scotblog Awards and 67^th equal overall. Four votes plus a panel nomination was all that took. (I’ll need to tout for votes next year.)

For some time now The Royal Society of Chemistry, which is obviously a British organisation, has recommended the use of sulfur as the spelling for sulphur. (This has the knock on effect of also meaning using the forms sulfate and sulfite for naming compounds containing respectively the sulphate and sulphite ions; or hydrogensulfite and hydrogensulfate for what before more systematic naming came about used to be known as the bisulphite and bisulphate ions.)

I have now learned that the SQA, the Scottish Qualifications Authority, (my italics) – again domiciled within these islands – will also be taking up this egregious practice.

The imposition is of course an American usage and is I suppose being introduced on the grounds that sulphur is easier to spell this way. But is it?

I agree that Americans – and increasingly we Brits – do write fantasy for phantasy but on this side of the Atlantic we do still tend to cling on to phantasm rather than fantasm.

Yet do Americans write of fotografs or fotons? They seem to manage those all right while using ph.

What is so special about sulphur that singles it out for this treatment?

And why not go the whole hog, here, and spell it sulfer to make it more like it sounds?

I do admit some people confuse it with silver – though since silver is a greyish metal and sulphur a yellow non-metal I can’t for the life of me see why. I think the “new” spelling will only make such confusion worse, though.

But whatever next?

Will we be forced to adopt aluminum?

Can we perhaps look forward to spelling the main ingredient of carbolic soap as fenol? Or the acid-alkali indicator as fenolfthalein?

Will element number 15 be known in the future as fosforus? (No, of course not. Its symbol is P and it only ever gets confused with potassium – which for historical reasons has the symbol K. F is in any case already taken as the symbol for fluorine.)

It’s all nonsense. Stop it.

Now.

I for one will not be changing my spelling practices.

Accept no substitute. Stand up for ph.

This will probably be of most interest to any Chemists reading it but others may find it a bit mind-boggling too.

One of the blogs I look at regularly is Charles Stross’s. (Click this link or see it on my side-bar.)

Charlie used to be in my writers’ group but is now a full-time writer so can’t attend very often, if at all.

On October 28^th Charlie posted an item about someone very stupid indeed.

That’s not all. The comments section includes some incidents which frankly make you wonder how the human race got to be spread all over the planet.

I particularly appreciated comment no. 29, about selenium azide.

Time was when bottles labelled as above were rare in shops. Not so now. Just try to find any diluting juice that has sugar added to it at all (at least in my local supermarkets.)

It may not actually be the case – they may be perfectly all right – but I remember reading somewhere years ago that the tests on the stuff that’s used instead of sugar in these drinks (aspartame or E951 and acesulfame K or E950 – but not so much saccharin, which came earlier) didn’t properly pass the safety tests. Either that or the results were massaged to put them in a more positive light. Something iffy anyway. This, I find, is supported by the Wikipedia article on aspartame, which does, though, contain a warning as to its disputed content. The main article states that the latest information is that the safety of aspartame is clear cut.
Acesulfame K has also been questioned but declared safe by the FDA and its European equvalent.

Aspartame is the methyl ester of a phenylalanine-aspartic acid dipeptide. Ah, a bit of Chemistry!

Both phenylalanine and aspartic acid are essential amino acids; which is to say our bodies need a certain supply of them – along with other amino acids – to make protein for muscles and cell repair and so on. We get these amino acids normally from our food. The plain dipeptide would present no health problems as the body would hydrolyse it to the individual amino acids before utilising those. I presume the dipeptide itself is not sweet since they use the methyl ester as aspartame. This ester can potentially hydrolyse to produce methanol – which is a poison, as found in wood alcohol (wood spirit.) I can see that the quantities of methanol involved will be small unless you imbibe bucket-loads of the drinks and the body will be able to get rid of it reasonably easily – though its metabolite, methanoic acid (or formic acid,) apparently lingers and is the main problem in causing the blindness and acidosis associated with drinking methanol.

Acesulfame K has a more complicated chemical structure (see link above,) containing what is known as a heterocyclic ring and bristling with oxygen atoms. As it is relatively stable under heating it is probably reasonably safe though I suspect it will hydrolyse to form an amino sulphonic acid.

Whatever, these “no added sugar” drinks have a slimy quality to them that is extremely unpleasant. I much prefer the sugared varieties (when I drink any at all) but they’re so hard to find.

I would also take, for myself, any health risks associated with the increased sugar intake. I’m sure these risks will also be acceptable for children if their sugar consumption from elsewhere isn’t excessive.

Hannu Rajaniemi, like me a member of the East Coast Writers’ Group, is a Writers’ Bloc stalwart. He has just landed a three book publishing deal with Gollancz – on the strength of a 24 page synopsis. I didn’t know that sort of thing happened any more.

Hannu is Finnish by birth and upbringing but has been living in Edinburgh for quite a while now. His English prose puts many writers born to the language to shame.

He also has a PhD in something to do with string theory but don’t ask me what. I’m an Organic Chemist – we don’t care what goes on inside nuclei.

I’ve no doubt Hannu will make it big in the SF world.