Chemical Education Today
Letters SI for Chemists: Persistent Problems, Solid Solutions
SI for Chemists: A Modification In my original article, “SI for Chemists: Persistent Problems, Solid Solutions” (1), I made several recommendations concerning “mole” and “amount of substance”, one of which was to replace the name “amount of substance” with “posos” (from Greek meaning how much, how many). Unfortunately, and for unknown reasons, I was so much concerned about replacing n, the dimension of “amount of substance”, with a symbol that doesn't imply number, that I did not give appropriate attention to the implication of p as the symbol for the base quantity posos. pV = pRT obviously does not work very well. To correct this blunder, I recommend that the name “amount of substance” be replaced by “quant” (rather than posos). The word “quant” is in standard dictionaries and has
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Journal of Chemical Education
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a single meaning related to boating. If the word is given a proper second definition, there should be no confusion; for example, quant is a quantity of matter, or an amount of substance, described by specifying (i) the type of elementary entities which it contains, and (ii) the number of those entities. pV = qRT does not seem unreasonable; further, it contributes to the elimination of “number of moles” as the name for the quantity preceding RT. All of the other recommendations in (1) remain valid; simply change “posos” to “quant”. Literature Cited 1. Freeman, R. D. J. Chem. Educ. 2003, 80, 16–21. Robert D. Freeman Enody Unlimited 116 S. Kings St. Stillwater, OK 74074
[email protected] Vol. 81 No. 6 June 2004
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