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You say diplon, I say deuton

Nature Physics volume 4, page 747 (2008) Cite this article

In 1934, Ernest Rutherford published an essay in Nature reviewing experiments involving the new 'heavy hydrogen', and ending with a suggestion for its name. He and his colleagues at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, favoured the term 'diplogen' for the atom, and 'diplon' for its nucleus, taking the root from the Greek , for double. He suggested that a proposed alternative, 'deuton', might easily be confused with the neutron. A stream of subsequent papers by Cavendish physicists carried titles such as Disintegration of the diplon.

None of this sat particularly well with American physicist Harold Urey, who, with Ferdinand Brickwedde and George Murphy, had found the initial evidence for heavy hydrogen in spectroscopic measurements showing a shift of 1.79 Å in the wavelength of the hydrogen alpha line. By tradition, of course, the discoverer of some new substance earns the honour of giving it a name, and Urey preferred deuton. Diplogen, he countered, would lead to some rather confusing nomenclature: the compound N1H2H2, for example, would be called di-diplogen mono-hydrogen nitride.

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  1. Mark Buchanan
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Buchanan, M. You say diplon, I say deuton. Nature Phys 4, 747 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys1082

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