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Topic: About Atomic Radius: empircal vs. calculated  (Read 7970 times)

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Offline Winga

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About Atomic Radius: empircal vs. calculated
« on: January 06, 2006, 01:34:40 PM »
I wonder which atomic radius data is more precise to the real cases, the empircal one or calculated one?
« Last Edit: January 06, 2006, 01:47:39 PM by Mitch »

Offline Mitch

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Re:About Atomic Radius
« Reply #1 on: January 06, 2006, 01:48:16 PM »
Depends who you ask. A theorist would say the calculated one and the experimentalist would say the empirical one.
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Offline Donaldson Tan

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Re:About Atomic Radius: empircal vs. calculated
« Reply #2 on: January 09, 2006, 06:51:40 AM »
Empirical means "verifiable or provable by means of observation or experiment".

I will side with the experimentalist.  :1eye:
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Offline Winga

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Re:About Atomic Radius: empircal vs. calculated
« Reply #3 on: January 09, 2006, 10:39:15 AM »
Empirical means "verifiable or provable by means of observation or experiment".

I will side with the experimentalist.  :1eye:
So, what experiments did the scientists do?

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Re:About Atomic Radius: empircal vs. calculated
« Reply #4 on: January 10, 2006, 07:55:06 PM »
Empirical ones.  Experimental data basically means that you measured it.  Theoretical predictions are useful when there are no ways of measuring radii experiementally, or if you want to predict the radius of an element that hasn't been discovered yet, or it has too short of a half-life.  

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