Prout's Hypothesis - Influence

Influence

Prout's hypothesis remained influential in chemistry throughout the 1820s. However, more careful measurements of the atomic weights, such as those compiled by Jöns Jakob Berzelius in 1828 or Edward Turner in 1832, disproved the hypothesis. In particular the atomic weight of chlorine, which is 35.45 times that of hydrogen, could not at the time be explained in terms of Prout's hypothesis. Some came up with the ad hoc claim that the basic unit was one-half of a hydrogen atom, but further discrepancies surfaced. This resulted in the hypothesis that one-quarter of a hydrogen atom was the common unit. Although they turned out to be wrong, these conjectures catalyzed further measurement of atomic weights, a great benefit to chemistry.

The discrepancy in the atomic weights was later understood to be the result of the natural occurrence of multiple isotopes of the same element. For example, in 1925 the problematic chlorine was found to be composed of the isotopes Cl-35 and Cl-37, in proportions such that the average weight of natural chlorine was about 35.45 times that of hydrogen. For all elements, each individual isotope (nuclide) of mass number A was eventually found to have a mass very close to A times the mass of a hydrogen atom, with an error always less than 1%. This is a near miss to Prout's law being correct. Nevertheless, the rule was not found to predict isotope masses better than this for all isotopes, due mostly to mass-defects resulting from release of binding energy in atomic nuclei, when they are formed.

Although all elements are the product of nuclear fusion of hydrogen into higher elements, it is now understood that atoms consist of both protons (hydrogen nuclei) and neutrons. The modern version of Prout's rule is that the atomic mass of an isotope of proton number (atomic number) Z and neutron number N is equal to sum of the masses of its constituent protons and neutrons, minus the mass of the nuclear binding energy, the mass defect. According to the whole number rule proposed by Francis Aston, the mass of an isotope is roughly, but not exactly, its mass number A = Z + N times an atomic mass unit (u), plus or minus binding energy discrepancy – atomic mass unit being the modern approximation for "mass of a proton, neutron, or hydrogen atom". For example iron-56 atoms (which have among the highest binding-energies) weigh only about 99.1% as much as 56 hydrogen atoms. The missing 0.9% of mass represents the energy lost when the nucleus of iron was made from hydrogen inside a star. (See stellar nucleosynthesis).