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Vol. 27 No. 5
September-October 2005

Up for Discussion | A forum for members and member organizations to share ideas and concerns.
Send your comments by e-mail to [email protected]

Simples and Compounds:Another Opinion

by Tomislav Portada and Vladimir Stilinovic

Although we do agree with Giomini et al. about the necessity of making a clear-cut distinction between elements and elementary substances,1 in our opinion it is superfluous to introduce new terms for these concepts. We believe that the problem originates in the current IUPAC definition of “chemical element.”2 We suggest limiting the definition of chemical element to “A species of atoms; all atoms with the same number of protons in the atomic nucleus.”

We also suggest introducing “elementary substance” as a separate term defined as “A pure chemical substance composed of atoms of the same element.” The current problems would be circumvented by using these terms strictly according to the above-suggested definitions.

References
1 C. Giomini, M.E. Cardinali, and L. Cardellini, Chem. Int., 2005 (1), 18.
2 IUPAC: Compendium of Chemical Terminology (The Gold Book), 2nd edition, Blackwell Science, 1997.

Tomislav Portada <[email protected]> is a research assistant in the Laboratory of Supramolecular and Nucleoside Chemistry, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Ruder Boškovic Institute, in Zagreb, Croatia. Vladimir Stilinovic is a Ph. D. student from the Faculty of Science of the University of Zagreb.


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